tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26675216018218575192024-03-05T00:42:20.869-08:00Mindbookpoetry, poetics, poesisT.R. Hummerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12113264848463596680noreply@blogger.comBlogger56125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2667521601821857519.post-76869541559402774332010-09-10T15:02:00.001-07:002010-09-10T23:19:59.702-07:00Emissary (V)<!--StartFragment--><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0hXOom04NdHcLCai_Txz4-vG0YgSi9TK5eZM05fiiBhUhk2xe8H0JFChYd2laCuUF2UqoPDfytCVsa2bxNZLyH682CeoWerxaJjfjRnXDNf1Na3far1M0Ier3WliZY6vDoVTji5oGZUtv/s1600/TextureStudy%233.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="214" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0hXOom04NdHcLCai_Txz4-vG0YgSi9TK5eZM05fiiBhUhk2xe8H0JFChYd2laCuUF2UqoPDfytCVsa2bxNZLyH682CeoWerxaJjfjRnXDNf1Na3far1M0Ier3WliZY6vDoVTji5oGZUtv/s320/TextureStudy%233.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">photo by T.R. Hummer</span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">9/10/10</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Within a few days the desert light has re-clarified itself, sloughing off storm fronts and their aftermath. What was once empty and had become full has emptied itself again. How many times in the course of a life can a consciousness rise out of its own ashes?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">*</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The emissary sits in the shade of a vast Chilean wine palm brought at unmentionable expense from a distant continent to grace the Emperor’s arboretum. He recognizes the tree from his studies, which were undertaken over decades to equip him for his journey to the Emperor, and consisted of all possible knowledge about the route to the Emperor’s palace, about the Emperor himself—insofar as knowledge about the Emperor is allowed—and about the Palace and its grounds, including the name and history of the tree in question. As he recognizes the tree, the knowledge leaves him. He has no further use for it.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">*</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Life increasingly becomes attenuated—as if the passage of time (whatever time is) through a human psyche had a caustic effect, scrubbing impurities away. Logically, the opposite would appear more likely—that one would begin life “clean” and accumulate clogs in the psychic plumbing. But the discipline of farewell enters here: the knowledge of one’s own fragmentary incompleteness presses toward the desire to live invisibly, humbly, quietly, on one’s knees in respect to the mystery that is about to swallow one up.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">*</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">A man, a woman, in the middle of life, in the middle of a relationship mellowed or decayed by time, in the middle of a fissioning universe. Precision of the atom. The poisonous glow of the lyric.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">*</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Sometime in the mid-1980s, I heard the poet Stanley Kunitz begin a public reading with the phrase “I will now read a poem I wrote fifty years ago.” At the time I was in my mid-thirties, and was stunned by the presence of such longevity. It was not that Kunitz was so old, but that he had written poems consistently and devotedly for so long: it was the continuity that amazed me. At sixty, I am still not old enough to begin a public reading of my own work with that phrase, but I do have poems I cannot remember having written. I recognize them as old friends, but where they came from is beyond me. Literally.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">*</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The emissary examines with great care all the objects he carried with him to sustain him on his journey. He wraps them in a piece of yellow silk and takes them out into the garden, where a beggar sits beside the gate. Without a word he hands the bundle to the beggar. These objects—all he owns in the world—were for the journey <i>here</i>; where he next goes, they will be of no use to him. But to the emissary’s surprise, the beggar speaks. “Everyone strives after the law,” he says, “so how is it that in these many years no one except me has requested entry?” For the first time in a very long time, the emissary smiles. “You’re from the tale by Kafka, are you not?” The beggar thinks a moment, and then nods. Bending down, the emissary kisses the beggar on the forehead. “Bless you, my opposite,” he says, “my brother.”<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">*<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Everyone who contemplates the question of death is equalized in human ignorance. No one is privileged here, not even those who have had what we call “near death experiences,” since nothing objective can be established from such accounts. Though there are virtuoso practitioners of death, we have no geniuses in the epistemology or phenomenology, or—if it is not too paradoxical a category—the ontology of death. And so? The meditation devolves at once to the crucial forking of possibilities: 1. when we die we are gone; or, 2. when we die we go on going.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">*</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">E.M. Cioran writes that “the only corpse from which we can gain some advantage is the one <i>preparing itself</i> within us.” My father, no student of Cioran, understood this. I conclude, in the absence of direct influence either way, that my father and Cioran had the same teacher. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">*</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">When I go out to visit the mailbox, I notice, without surprise, that the palm fronds are gone. The bulk collection has left nothing but clean gravel where the bundles lay. They have passed from the circle of my perception without a trace. They were expressions of something, quite literally: of the tree, of nature, of the universe, call it what you like. They were <i>expressions</i>, in the strictest sense of the word, of Being, a pressing outward. As such, they were my siblings and, for a time, my teachers. I honor the space they once occupied. The spot on the bench where the emissary sat in the garden of the Emperor is empty also. Perhaps he has simply gone inside. Perhaps, while we looked the other way, the Emperor came to him and dismissed him. Either way, he is on his way. Going in or coming out, he meets himself and only himself. This is not solipsism. It is an admission that whatever it is of which he is an expression can express only itself. </div><!--EndFragment-->T.R. Hummerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12113264848463596680noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2667521601821857519.post-71564403250600924142010-09-09T17:49:00.000-07:002010-09-09T17:52:59.461-07:00Emissary (IV)<!--StartFragment--> <br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZiHz1ihwFkqY6bMYEG7jJy5StUWOhR8qWuAQm6nz5z01G05RGW_OyxOXurkRT3vp3CG8_TWQcuuZXLPpXUEovjhogGJMDIof1fNWDDydPcOcVHn9NeB8BGMiJEGerxjn_LifGD7apE1VB/s1600/YardTexture.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="214" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZiHz1ihwFkqY6bMYEG7jJy5StUWOhR8qWuAQm6nz5z01G05RGW_OyxOXurkRT3vp3CG8_TWQcuuZXLPpXUEovjhogGJMDIof1fNWDDydPcOcVHn9NeB8BGMiJEGerxjn_LifGD7apE1VB/s320/YardTexture.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">photo by T.R. Hummer</span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">9/9/10</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The emissary is breakfasting. A rasher of bacon and a boiled egg have been brought to him on nickel plates, along with a mug of steaming tea. He eats contemplatively, the food vanishing in a slow, steady rhythm. Thus he pays homage to the food he eats. It is a sign from the Emperor that he has not been entirely forgotten. Over his head hangs a painting of the Emperor. The Emperor and the emissary have the same face. So does the woman who walks by with a jug of water balanced on her head; so does the man who comes at last to clear away the dishes.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">*</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I listen to music: Lester Young and Billie Holliday. The music vanishes as soon as it enters me. I do not consume it, nor do I memorize it, though I can replay it in my mind’s ear perfectly. It cuts a vector through the center of my being. I can listen to it again at any time—and yet it vanishes. A lover of Lester Young’s tells how, at home, the great saxophonist would play just for her, “something pretty,” as he put it, and how then “I would tell him how <i>important</i> he was, and what a <i>force</i> he was in the world, it would never be forgotten, because I don’t believe anything’s ever lost. . . . I would tell him, ‘Your sound will be going round and round and round the world . . . for an eternity.’” Listening to the recorded music, I say farewell to it, and to the music Lester Young never recorded, the music he played for his lover’s ears alone. It goes round and round and round the world: the music, and the farewell that pursues it hopelessly.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">*</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Always the ancient danger of simply falling asleep in the middle of one’s life—falling asleep and never waking up: dreaming or not dreaming, but not living one’s own reality. That danger, accompanied by the suspicion that this is precisely what one is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">supposed</i> to do.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">*</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Today the palm fronds—still in their bundles, the bundles in their piles—are obviously more desiccated, more attenuated, less present than yesterday. The desert sun burns the essences out of things. Even my limited powers of perception now can see that something is being leached away—water, yes, of course, but more than that: whatever the binding force of Form is. Their substance disappears but so does their structure. They have not moved but their journey is continuous, and multi-dimensional.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">*</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I stood beside my father’s bed while he was dying. Was I observing? Was I helping? I was not helping him die, nor was I helping him live. I was helping him get through a span of time. Did my presence comfort him? Was he even aware that I was there? For hours I sat near his head, giving him ice chips, which he seemed to want, and adjusting the oxygen mask. The moment of his dying was impossible to know. He stopped his stridorous breathing, started again, stopped again. Then in the silence that followed, I knew he was not yet dead, not yet, not yet. A moment came when, yes, he was. Impossible to know just when. Impossible to prove, but I suspect time is not at all what we experience it as being. A physicist might disagree, but the concept of Time’s Arrow makes me bristle with uncertainty. Why should we say my father was following an arrow’s course? Isn’t it equally likely that he found an alleyway to vanish down, and made a sharp right turn?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">*</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The world is the sum of its manifold resistances and our evanescent egos nothing more than the heat given off by its friction.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">*</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Farewell is an ethos. It demands patience and courtesy. To complain about the place one is leaving, or to despair of it, is simple rudeness, once one understands that one’s stay has a duration. It is not <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">my</i> place; I am a guest in it. A good guest knows how to behave even in the presence of a bad host. And a good guest knows when to leave.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">*</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I saw my father turn: turn away, turn to a corpse, turn to dust. He turned the corner at the end of the last street in the neighborhood of unconcealment. He ceased to linger. And he knew it was time to go. The doctors said he had six months; he lived four days. He said: “I’m ready to die, I just don’t know how to do it.” His last words were "I want to be a corpse." He had to find a door, like a man in a dark room groping for a handle. And he found it. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Is like</i> is the grammatical axis of simile; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is</i> is the grammatical axis both of metaphor and of Being. Metaphor is a trope; a trope is a turning. Consider the heliotrope. Consider my father, dying.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">*</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">God stood looking at the Earth from his infinite-windowed mansion. He caught sight of the emissary sitting erect in the Emperor’s garden, waiting. “This emissary,” he said to a nearby archangel, “what kind of man is he?” “Is he still a man?” replied the archangel. God pondered this question. “He looks like one,” God said. “He looks like you,” said the angel.</div><!--EndFragment-->T.R. Hummerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12113264848463596680noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2667521601821857519.post-28454805392244660282010-09-08T19:24:00.000-07:002010-09-09T11:41:16.939-07:00Emissary (III)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3ImcTrSVAnr_SjLCCXl1TXhs_XeDPvbrRch1pHXmJ5MAJ9V7FGYV5cIA0eAF6MNfikhamI-TAAUsc8tPgteQZFcyeNevIFATUWoPB1MJqqJ9jzbv7dOuUlALlCSs84NmqRr4e3rC8sIUJ/s1600/WallTexture3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="214" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3ImcTrSVAnr_SjLCCXl1TXhs_XeDPvbrRch1pHXmJ5MAJ9V7FGYV5cIA0eAF6MNfikhamI-TAAUsc8tPgteQZFcyeNevIFATUWoPB1MJqqJ9jzbv7dOuUlALlCSs84NmqRr4e3rC8sIUJ/s320/WallTexture3.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">photo by T.R. Hummer</span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">9/8/10</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">When I leave the house, I register the not-unexpected fact that the pile of bundled palm fronds is still where we left it. Bulk garbage pickup arrives when it arrives, and will be no more hurried than the gods or the weather. The fronds appear unchanged, but that is a fiction arising from the limits of my powers of perception. Expressions of the landscape, they hold their piece of ground.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">*</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">My river, when I was a boy, was called the Noxubee, a Choctaw word that means “stinking waters.” It was turgid and muddy, which may have been reason enough for its name, but the Choctaw called it that because the river had become the repository of the corpses of a rival tribe they eliminated. Our brick plant and Ford dealership grew up on the site of a genocide. Cars crowded the river bridge on holidays as people came to town to celebrate and to worship. Under the bridge, the dead flowed away, winding through fertile farmland to the Tombigbee River and the Gulf of Mexico.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">*</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I enter the flow of traffic on I-10. There is a spectacular display of clouds and morning sunlight in the broad vista of desert sky that is so often monotonously empty. The harmonious complexity of it is almost dangerously distracting. The light has the elegiac tone that follows storms. How many of us there are on the highway in this overpopulated place, each corpuscular automobile traveling too fast toward an uncertain destination. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">*</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">From the religious perspective, life is inevitably binary; time, so-called, is the visible side of an axis that rotates through two hemispheres: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">this life</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">some other</i>. In the phenomenological variant, the axis of Being rotates us toward Nonbeing. Nobody knows what these ideas actually represent. Increasingly I think and rethink such thoughts with something like nostalgia, the echo of matters already long told farewell.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">*</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The cat in my lap purrs and growls with a mellow passion. She is Siamese, and so she is vocal. Her tiny heart is a knot of absolute love where humans are concerned—unlike many cats, she makes it clear that she actually and literally worships people—though if I were a mouse, she would reveal other depths. She is what she is in the very purest sense. Whatever her consciousness consists of, it abides with her forever, as far as she is concerned. To her, there is killing, but there is no death. I might as well read Heidegger to her as say farewell; either way, in my lap she is content.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">*</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The emissary has spent an eternity waiting for the Emperor to remember he exists, though he only arrived at the palace this morning. Time for the emissary is a problem—is indeed the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">only</i> problem. Infinite resignation takes a long time. Giving up all one’s worldly possessions is a major administrative feat.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">*</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I pick up a book and read: “In the fifth century BC, according to Herodotus, the nomad Scythians ‘put all the flesh into an animal’s paunch, mix water with it, and boil it like that over the bone-fire. The bones burn very well, and the paunch easily contains all the meat once it has been stripped off. In this way an ox, or any other sacrificial beast, is ingeniously made to boil itself’” (Rea Tannahill, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Food in History</i>). I say a special farewell to my brother the ox. I am acquainted with his situation.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">*</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Thinking too long about death as a problem will unhinge a human mind. There is no solution to the problem, either pragmatic (how to avoid it) or metaphysical (how to explain it). But the problem is not death: the problem is the problem. It is not necessary to make the leap of faith, or to leap off a cliff. Death is many things--a <i>mysterium tremendum</i>, a void in consciousness, the blind spot toward which we tend--but it is not a problem, any more than the palm tree in the back yard is a problem. Once this corner is turned, it is possible to live again. It is possible to say farewell.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">*</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Determined by fate. Determined by history. Determined by gods. Determined by the body. Determined by language. Determined by silence. Determined by gender. Determined by gravity. Determined by helplessness. Determined by mastery. Determined by angels. Determined by capital. Determined by belatedness. Determined by the spine. Determined by race. Determined by light. Determined by everything. Determined by nothing. Determined. Determined. Despair is obscene. Therefore, like all obscenity it must be encoded: otherwise it is pornography. Farewell to all that, eventually, though not quite yet. It is almost—almost—time to move on.</div>T.R. Hummerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12113264848463596680noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2667521601821857519.post-27234607805027978762010-09-07T17:51:00.000-07:002010-09-08T19:28:40.435-07:00Emissary (II)<!--StartFragment--> <br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtkV-QS1yaW2uNADQy1NKAb6t-jXnPX8gR3fhnpw6u2Fup6KsMRiPQtJTbDjYXoDbXwJU5r4lhhKxW0rj15UiGCwKoqxecbfzTuWRu1g_H4FR3sa3jNHn1RDcHIJZ1S4uk8BrCBC6ba9PX/s1600/WallTexture.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="214" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtkV-QS1yaW2uNADQy1NKAb6t-jXnPX8gR3fhnpw6u2Fup6KsMRiPQtJTbDjYXoDbXwJU5r4lhhKxW0rj15UiGCwKoqxecbfzTuWRu1g_H4FR3sa3jNHn1RDcHIJZ1S4uk8BrCBC6ba9PX/s320/WallTexture.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><i>photo by T.R. Hummer</i></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">9/7/10</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">We dragged the bundled palm fronds, dusty and insubstantial, to the front of the house, for bulk garbage pickup. There was also a large, heavy old storm door, taller then I am by two feet and made of metal, that we had no use for. I took that out and put it on top of the fronds, as a sort of paperweight. Ten minutes later when I went back outside, the storm door was already gone, snagged by a junk scavenger. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Travel light, Pilgrim. The heavy ones go first.<o:p></o:p></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">*</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The emissary’s mission is complete, but he is not yet discharged. He awaits the pleasure of the Emperor, who has received the fatal ultimatum and made his reply, but has not yet dismissed the emissary. Without an assignment or any other purpose, the emissary sits in the courtyard; he watches the clouds blow past; he watches birds building a nest. He says farewell to them all, but he does not depart.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">*</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The attitude of farewell is reverent. It honors that which is passing, and is at the same time attentive to it. It is humble as long as it does not seek to name the hour of departing; it is a servant to the Mystery and a respectful fellow traveler of the rest. I am not a man of prayer; I am a man of farewells. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">*</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I say farewell to the oak that stood outside my bedroom window when I was a child; it blew down in a hurricane years ago, but remains within the aegis of my memory. I say farewell to the collie who attended me there: great heart, your bones are dust, but I carry you with me still, as you carried me then. I carry you still, but not forever: already you are smaller against the horizon of recollection, your bark less present, more redolent with echo. I say farewell to the cattle who were timeless against the landscape. Farewell to the shadow of the old farmhouse, farewell to the bees that stung me there, and the earthworms I grubbed for, and the fish I murdered, and the wind I squinted in, and the water.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">*</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I say farewell to my daughters; I will be with you for a long time yet by most reckonings, if we are lucky, but when I see you, when I speak with you, when I send you a note or sit with you in a chair, we are like trains traveling on parallel tracks at the same speed, but one is in advance of the others, so that its caboose is flanked by the engines of the other two. We speed together toward a common destination, but I want to get there first, to see whether what waits there is fit for you. I have no power to change anything about it, but at least I will know, or know that I cannot know.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">*</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The discipline of the emissary, once his ultimatum has been properly delivered, is to remain attentive in taking leave even though it takes forever for permission to be granted. This work is harder than threading through frozen passes and slipping behind enemy lines, evading snipers and land mines. He waits forgotten in the courtyard; dust gathers on his boots and pack; his beard grows to his waist, to his knees, and yet he must remain generous in his departure, he must regard whatever he meets—whether noblewoman, insect, or stone—with equal understanding. He is almost invisible in his unadorned hard chair. But the world passes through him, every moment, and is reconstituted in his vanishing.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">*</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I walk down the stone stairs to the library door; the ground is littered with pink petals from a flower which in my horizon of consciousness has no name; it grows on an old, well-tended vine in an arch above the walkway. I say farewell to the petals. Tomorrow, the next day, they will have said farewell to me. I walk down the concrete alley behind the church, where fat black super cans stand like dolmens, each crammed with refuse. They are stately in their being, and partake like standing stones in blood rituals beyond imagining. I say farewell to them. Their unconsciousness is ancient, and it feels to me vast and imperially neutral. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">*</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Heraclitus’s river flows past the grave of Heraclitus. It flows for miles beyond, through landscapes of orchards and vineyards, and then through wastelands, stones, and rapids, down to the Mediterranean, which is, as far as the river fish are concerned, a disastrous void, but to Heraclitus is the repository of all the rivers he dreamed of stepping into.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">*</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The cat who lives in the back yard killed a kangaroo mouse. S. went outside to pick up the decapitated corpse for last rites. When she hoisted it by the tail, all the mouse’s entrails spilled out onto the porch like candy from a sack. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">*</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The emissary dreams he is returning home, and meets himself on his way to deliver the necessary ultimatum. His other self does not recognize him, so intent is he on his mission, so weary with his journey, and so young. “What’s up ahead?” he asks this stranger. “Yourself,” the emissary replies. “Ah,” the younger man says. “Farewell then.” “Farewell.”</div><!--EndFragment-->T.R. Hummerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12113264848463596680noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2667521601821857519.post-56835431255633189472010-09-07T14:46:00.000-07:002010-09-07T14:55:03.453-07:00Emissary (I)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzzZotn5JWDQCUIzFIebKWfGzzvllYTUfaJUEnngVMKhG5w0A_hEI5W3dSrVvK35aOZMjujrQstug8g4FDIuZbFhC0yjaohxnRn2JNW7LKWLiHIShkI4mJVAJvZGpds8kVdOU_c-VwzjBo/s1600/Palm.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="214" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzzZotn5JWDQCUIzFIebKWfGzzvllYTUfaJUEnngVMKhG5w0A_hEI5W3dSrVvK35aOZMjujrQstug8g4FDIuZbFhC0yjaohxnRn2JNW7LKWLiHIShkI4mJVAJvZGpds8kVdOU_c-VwzjBo/s320/Palm.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Photo by T.R. Hummer</span></i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzzZotn5JWDQCUIzFIebKWfGzzvllYTUfaJUEnngVMKhG5w0A_hEI5W3dSrVvK35aOZMjujrQstug8g4FDIuZbFhC0yjaohxnRn2JNW7LKWLiHIShkI4mJVAJvZGpds8kVdOU_c-VwzjBo/s1600/Palm.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a>9/6/10</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">S. and I were cutting dying fronds from the palm in the back yard. I felt a bolt of hot empathy for the trimmings.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">*</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I am saying goodbye to everything. It will be a long, lingering goodbye, most likely. But I am going. It’s not correct to say that my going is “beginning” now; it began before I was born: like everyone’s; like everything’s. It is rather a question of time, or of timing. One month ago, I passed my 60<sup>th</sup> birthday; I must now think of myself as an old man.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">*</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">As old people go, I am only a beginner. But the learning curve promises to be steep, and graduation will come quickly.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">*</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Everything, therefore, becomes a gesture of farewell. This is not a morbid notion; it is quite simply a statement of fact. I will take leave of the world; I will take leave of myself. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">*</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Years ago—as long ago perhaps as fifteen years—I realized that the only question worth thinking about is the question of death, knowing all along that death cannot be thought about—or at least the question has no answer for us. Always firmly agnostic on this as on many subjects, I was convinced, and am convinced, that nobody knows anything about death. The system is rigged that way, so to speak. Nevertheless, I spent an enormous amount of time pushing my nose against that sheet of glass, bashing my forehead against that obdurate wall. It was an exercise in futility that recognized itself for what it was full well. It has not ended, nor will it until I end. It is not, at this point, a question of bowing to the inevitable; that has long been a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">fait accompli</i>. Long, long ago I thought of death as an enemy; now I understand the futility and foolishness of that anthropomorphization. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">*</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Heidegger, that thoroughly compromised and yet in certain ways indispensable thinker, described the phenomenon of Being (from the perspective of archaic Greek) more or less this way: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">we come from concealment into the realm of the unconcealed and we linger awhile.</i> There is concealment and I, like everything, will return there. My lingering approaches its conclusion. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">*</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">How do we say goodbye to everything? I am leaving. But everything is leaving. And in another sense it is not “I” who is leaving, as I will leave myself behind along with everything else. If I am saying goodbye to everything, everything is also saying goodbye to me. In relativistic terms, it’s interesting to think that means nothing is going anywhere, since we’re all vanishing together. If we all arrive at more or less the same time back in concealment, is concealment still concealment? The idea is attractive, and impossible to disprove, but it smells of an optimistic sophism. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">*</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Heraclitus’s river cannot be stepped into twice. My river cannot be finally bid farewell.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">*</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">What am I? An emissary I sent to myself with an ultimatum. Now, this much of my mission complete, the emissary readies himself to return with a reply.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><!--EndFragment-->T.R. Hummerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12113264848463596680noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2667521601821857519.post-55272330109338004752009-10-29T17:14:00.000-07:002010-09-07T23:47:17.137-07:00A Note To Scott Olsen, Editor of Ascent, on the Publication of the First All-Online Issue of That Magazine<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5L1DD0rIKrgBksbkFDkmMMtuesnEvHiscXqLdbnkBNTqAT3c9aMNS6eeCCYDHmfP6inD8iFEQbtJPA9d01eZ9SUo5qQRLsoONfxCgfQ0kZjG-5gRQ9Xsb_-KkL9wPXpOMidZP0SaFDxML/s1600-h/eureka.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5L1DD0rIKrgBksbkFDkmMMtuesnEvHiscXqLdbnkBNTqAT3c9aMNS6eeCCYDHmfP6inD8iFEQbtJPA9d01eZ9SUo5qQRLsoONfxCgfQ0kZjG-5gRQ9Xsb_-KkL9wPXpOMidZP0SaFDxML/s320/eureka.gif" /></a><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 14px;"><br /></span><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px; "><a href="http://physics.weber.edu/carroll/archimedes/crown.htm"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small; "><span class="Apple-style-span">http://physics.weber.edu/carroll/archimedes/crown.htm</span></span></i></a></span></span><br /></div><span style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: small; "><br /></span><br /><span style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: small; "><br /></span><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small; "><span class="Apple-style-span" >Hi, Scott, hi Ascent, bon voyage old wine in new bottles, or maybe that’s old photons in new circuit boards:</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><br /></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><br /></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" >I’m the last person who should be responding to your questions, or harmonizing with your meditations. I have spent an unconscionably large hunk of my professional life doing lit mag editing old school. At the same time, I’m the guy who weaned The Georgia Review off letterpress, and introduced computers into its hoary penetralia. (No that is NOT a veiled sexual reference.) People said: your readers will complain. I got one letter from an antiquarian who disliked the new format. One letter. ONE LETTER. If anyone else on earth even noticed, they kept it to themselves.</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><br /></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><br /></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" >And now you’ve gone and digitized a whole magazine. All I did was retool production methods: you’ve done away with paper! You’ve KILLED PAPER! Err, but I suppose you’re saving trees. Funny how that works.</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><br /></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><br /></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" >We don’t know what the future holds, of course, but presumably we have certain designs on the future. I would dislike a future without serious, committed readers of poems and literary — damn, I mean good — prose. Personally, I don’t care a whit, no sir not a fig do I care, WHERE they read such things. I don’t care if they hire a skywriter to inscribe haiku in the air above their houses; I don’t care if they have ANNA KARENINA tattooed on their butts. If they have contortionist tendencies and want to read it that way, fine. (I don’t recommend having I HEART ANNA KARENINA tattooed on one’s butt, though, surrounded by a valentine; the lady had a mixed track record in matters of love.)</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><br /></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><br /></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" >Here is a scary statistic: a reader’s poll along about a decade ago, revealed that the median age of a reader of THE GEORGIA REVIEW (I don’t want to pick on that great magazine, I just know things about it; the same no doubt would apply to many other similarly positioned lit mags) was 58 years old. 58! And that was 10 years ago! I turned 59 a couple of months back, and I have no axe to grind about people that age, but come on: the MEDIAN AGE? How, we asked ourselves, do we get younger readers? We never were able to answer the question.</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><br /></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><br /></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" >I would be willing to bet, Scott, that when the number of hits on your new site quadrupled your readership, that at the same time the median age of your readership was cut in half. At least. I can’t prove that, but it seems very likely. The young folks like the keyboards and screens, as David Letterman might say, if he weren’t, erm, preoccupied at the time. Older readers will have plenty to read; older readers will even find their way to online magazines and such. Nor do I want to pretend that digitizing literature is an instant panacea for drifting readership: it ain’t. Younger readers like older readers come in many flavors, and the majority of young people (like the majority of old people) wouldn’t read a haiku if it was printed on a beer can. They’d just switch to a dumber brand.</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><br /></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><br /></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" >I have no problem reading texts onscreen, and the technology for such reading (ereaders, e-ink, etc.) is improving all the time. I have a pretty large library of free books from the 19th century, happily downloaded from Google Books (and elsewhere) hiding in my Macintosh, and I read them happily enough. I also like three dimensional, old style, books. I like what we are now prone to call “texts,” alas for the hideous terminology. My eyes are weak, but screens and paper are pretty much all one thing to me now. (Onscreen, I can easily make the font bigger, a good thing for dimsighted geezers such as myself.) Different people have different tolerances; your mileage may vary. But surely we have at least a marginally better chance of attracting younger, and maybe just different, readers to good writing without losing too many, if any, of the ones we already had.</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><br /></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><br /></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" >Your production costs go down; your ease of production goes up; your distribution is instantaneous and ubiquitous; and your readership can respond immediately (as I am doing now) to what they read. I’m not anxious for paper to go away, and I don’t think it will; but I see nothing but upsides in the burgeoning digital literary culture.</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><br /></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><br /></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" >Go for it, with my blessing.</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><br /></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><br /></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" >That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it? My blessing?</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><br /></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><br /></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small; "><span class="Apple-style-span" >Go with Dog, my son. Your magazine is the loaves, fishes, and soup bones of literature.</span></span></span>T.R. Hummerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12113264848463596680noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2667521601821857519.post-50853893740958188132009-08-30T09:03:00.001-07:002009-08-30T23:56:52.883-07:00Available Surfaces VII: In the Palm of the Poet's Hand<div style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRphz9A0gVGPCKSfzbKH1zwocmaqcIaHqZV99UazDZ5BLwWTafvlLQWnDgtARsEvmzC8viMrpjhdmygiXvkj-jTLUXjvSO4CVFbMuKlkHvAtPXW3omoXuDGhNEXNgvSfw1eBeIfXso55tl/s1600-h/Aquinas.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRphz9A0gVGPCKSfzbKH1zwocmaqcIaHqZV99UazDZ5BLwWTafvlLQWnDgtARsEvmzC8viMrpjhdmygiXvkj-jTLUXjvSO4CVFbMuKlkHvAtPXW3omoXuDGhNEXNgvSfw1eBeIfXso55tl/s400/Aquinas.jpg" /></a> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><i><a href="http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/47/Herrera_thomas_aquinas.jpg&imgrefurl=http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Herrera_thomas_aquinas.jpg&usg=__Dwhug8iBopB43JHBGGnWraAepHE=&h=1350&w=981&sz=517&hl=en&start=18&sig2=tQWICrCoTCpdQb_LqANioQ&um=1&tbnid=ieZlg3EsH3WDPM:&tbnh=150&tbnw=109&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dthomas%2Baquinas%26gbv%3D2%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26sa%3DN%26um%3D1&ei=h3ObStOSHYW2NqXQjZ8F">St. Thomas Aquinas, by Franceso de Herrera </a></i></span></div><br />
<span style="font-size: 78%;"><a href="http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://images.npg.org.uk/790_500/1/5/mw57215.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/largerimage.php%3Fmkey%3Dmw57215%26rNo%3D&usg=__2Ag4ZSvCZVnySlp8zQs8mx4FP7Q=&h=500&w=724&sz=91&hl=en&start=4&sig2=opT079xP54HTRVts0a9VaQ&um=1&tbnid=d5GfjCclrD5iBM:&tbnh=97&tbnw=140&prev=/images%3Fq%3DJack%2BClemo%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26sa%3DN%26um%3D1&ei=C6OaSvj-DYHWNrP0lbYB" style="font-style: italic;"></a></span></div>Ron and Ruth were talking about Thomas Aquinas. As soon as we walked through the door, after Ron introduced Ruth and me very briefly, Ron had said, “Ruth, there’s a question about Aquinas I’ve been wanting to ask; let me ask before I forget.” And then the two of them were off and running into a theological thicket where I could not follow and frankly did not want to.<br />
<br />
Nothing against the Heavenly Doctor, mind you: I’ve read a pound or two of Aquinas in my time, though I’ve never found him terribly appealing (Augustine and Duns Scotus are more my speed, not that it’s a horse race). But Ron’s question was something very specific about a particular passage in the Summa Theologica. I was lost before the question was out of his mouth. Ruth, on the other hand, rode it like a surfer rides curl; she could quote chapter and verse, and pursued the problem Ron raised as adeptly as a trained theologian. As we sat down, the small room filled with the intensity of their talk. Ignored for the moment—for about twenty minutes in fact—I looked around.<br />
<br />
Out the casement window several ragged-looking palm trees were visible. Beyond them there was a brightening of the air, a sort of aura, that indicated water that I could not see from here; we were not far from the shore. This description might indicate we were in a balmy sub-tropical region, but in fact it was Weymouth in the United Kingdom; the water just out of sight below the window frame was the English Channel. As Ron and I had driven into Weymouth, I had noted the presence of palm trees along the beach with surprise: this hardly seemed the place for them; and indeed they hardly seemed to be prospering. Yet there they were—and they were just one among many surprising things about this place, and this day.<br />
<br />
We were in the living room of a modest flat, what in the UK is known as a “bedsit”: an apartment consisting of a living area/kitchen, a bedroom, and a bath. It was sparsely but comfortably furnished, and completely anonymous, except for the fact that the rectangular area in which we sat was completely lined with built-in bookshelves: cabinets below, and shelves to the ceiling, all filled with well-used books. I naturally began to scan titles. There was a heavy preponderance of theological books and related philosophical titles (one shelf sagged under thick Aquinas tomes). There was also an extensive and eclectic, but poetry heavy, collection of literary titles; Gerard Manley Hopkins was especially well represented.<br />
<br />
As Ron and Ruth talked on—he in his quiet Oxbridge/Irish accent, she in her working class London one—I fell into a sort of fugue state. It had been a fascinating day. I was near the end of an eleven-month residency in Devon, where I’d been teaching at the University of Exeter; Ron Tamplin was my colleague there, a poet who taught literature. He was an erudite man of great personal sweetness and charm, and we’d become fast friends; today, as a farewell gesture, he was taking me on a tour of places he thought I ought not to miss.<br />
<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
<br />
We’d driven first from Exeter to East Coker, and paid a visit to T.S. Eliot where his ashes are interred in the austere St. Michael’s, commemorated by a plaque on the wall (“In my beginning is my end, in my end is my beginning”). From there we made our way to Stinsford to pay homage to some of the remains of Thomas Hardy. As is well known, only his heart is buried there, in his first wife Emma’s grave and in the soil of the Dorset he loved, while the rest of him is in Poet’s Corner in London. Emma lies under a dignified white monument, on the end of which the presence of Hardy’s heart is indicated by an inscription which begins “Here lies the heart of Thomas Hardy” and ends “His ashes rest in Poets Corner, Westminster Abbey.”<br />
As this was the second churchyard we’d visited within an hour or so, neither Ron nor I was anxious to linger once we’re looked over the stone and the grounds a bit.<br />
<br />
As we walked back toward his car, Ron said, “Local legend has it that Hardy’s heart is not buried there at all.”<br />
<br />
“What do you mean?”<br />
<br />
“Well, they say that, after Hardy’s heart was brought down from London, it was placed in a pan on the kitchen table at his home nearby, and a dog ate it.”<br />
<br />
“You’re joking.”<br />
<br />
“I’m not saying it’s true, but it’s what people say.”<br />
<br />
“So, what did they do?”<br />
<br />
“The legend says they killed a sheep and buried its heart there instead.”<br />
<br />
I paused, considering this. Then I said, “You’ve just revealed a vital difference between Americans and the English, Ron.”<br />
<br />
“How so?”<br />
<br />
“An American would have killed the dog that ate the heart, and buried the dog; that way the heart would actually be there.”<br />
<br />
Ron nodded solemnly. “You’re right. And an Englishman would never kill a dog. For any reason.”<br />
<br />
Years later, I ran across this legend again, in somewhat different form. This time it was a cat that ate the heart, and a pig was killed to replace it. I reject this variant on aesthetic as well as pragmatic grounds, but the other story I fully embrace, even though it is probably altogether a fabrication.<br />
<br />
After we left Hardy, Ron drove me to see Maiden’s Castle outside Dorchester. Maiden’s Castle is a bewilderingly huge and complex Iron Age earthwork fort, complete with a maze; the only way in and out of the fort is through the maze. The highest ramparts are over twenty feet high, and the fort is built on a hill; there would have been wooden walls on top of the ramparts, so that defenders within, high above the maze entrance, could have attacked enemies easily as they stalled in the twisty passages below. Overall, in its magnitude and complexity, the forbidding strategy of its construction, Maiden’s Castle was a perfect objective correlative for Aquinas’s Summa Theologica.<br />
<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
<br />
The library in the Weymouth bedsit was not enormous, as the room was not very large, but it was splendid in its way. It contained many titles I would not, myself, have collected, but every book there was clearly weighty of content, carefully selected; furthermore, there was not a book on any shelf that did not show signs, even from where I sat, from long and careful use. This was not a casual collection, nor was anything present for show: this was a workroom, and the books were respected tools, well maintained but nonetheless worn with the work they had done. It was, in short, my favorite kind of library, one in which function—and hence thought and knowledge, not to say actual wisdom—is the only principal.<br />
<br />
Charles Spurgeon, Sören Kierkegaard, Karl Barth, T.F. Powys—Powys! I’d read a couple of his weird, occult novels, but here were his theological works—and D.H. Lawrence: lots of Lawrence. And yes, here was the local copy of the Summa Theologica: a leather-bound set in five volumes, running I suppose to over three thousand pages, the spine of each creased with repeated opening and closing, the gold leaf titles worn by the touch of hands. The effect was vastly more pleasing than the look of brand new unread volumes. Suddenly seized with an unnatural desire to read every word of Aquinas’s masterwork, I was on the verge of jumping up from my chair and making a beginning.<br />
<br />
But just then Ruth exclaimed, in her broad London accent, “But oh my, Ron, how rude we’re being! There’s Terry sitting, bored to tears with us, and we’ve forgotten why he’s come!” She leapt to her feet, stepped over to me, and took my hand. “Terry, now it’s time you met Jack!”<br />
<br />
She turned me a bit in my chair by the force of her energetic enthusiasm, and suddenly I became aware that, sitting in the corner was a tiny man. “Tiny” is perhaps an overstatement, but his posture was so imploded by—what? inanition, or just gravity?—that he seemed to take up no space at all, and I had completely failed to notice he was there. He was neatly dressed in corduroys and a brown cotton shirt; he wore a corduroy cap. His hands were folded in his lap, and his head was inclined toward them. For all the notice he gave anyone or anything in the room, he might have been asleep.<br />
<br />
“Ron!” Ruth exclaimed. Her voice was loud, with a Cockney edge that made it hard to ignore, but the main in the chair did not move a muscle nor turn a hair. “Ron, will you say hello to Jack?”<br />
<br />
“Oh, Ruth, no,” Ron said, “I couldn’t. I’m no good at it.”<br />
<br />
That response struck me as odd, but before I had time to inquire, Ruth said to me, “What about you, Terry? Will you say hello?”<br />
<br />
“Of course I will,” I said. “But how do you do it?"<br />
<br />
“It’s simple,” she said. She stepped across to the man and took his right hand in hers, holding it palm up. He allowed this gesture, which might to some have seemed an abrupt indignity, without protest or even visible awareness of it; he might as well have been a mannequin. “You take his hand like this, and then you take your finger and write whatever you want to say to him in big block letters, like so.”<br />
Holding his hand, she wrote in his palm, saying slowly and loudly, for our benefit, the words she was writing: “J-A-C-K,” she said. “R-O-N A-N-D T-E-R-R-Y A-R-E H-E-R-E.”<br />
<br />
Jack inclined his head slightly. Ron said, “Ruth, please tell him I say hello.”<br />
<br />
“R-O-N S-A-Y-S H-E-L-L-O,” Ruth wrote and intoned. Jack again inclined his head; he fluttered his right hand weakly toward the room in general, a wave to Ron.<br />
<br />
Ruth looked at me. “That's it,” she said, “easy-peasy. Fancy a try?”<br />
<br />
And so I took Jack Clemo’s hand.<br />
<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
<br />
Jack Clemo is virtually unknown in the USA; I can’t recall speaking to anyone who has known his name. In the UK, he is not exactly famous, but he has a devoted following among poets and poetry lovers, perhaps chief among them my friend Ron Tamplin, who idolized him and loved him. It was Ron who—having first gauged my interest in and passion for such poets as Gerard Manley Hopkins and Eliot--had introduced me to Jack Clemo’s work, and as I had warmed to it, he promised me a trip to meet the poet.<br />
<br />
In Clemo’s poems I discovered a gnarly, spiritual, formal sensibility akin to Hopkins in some ways and alien to it in others. Clemo’s life in no way resembled Hopkins’s; indeed it in no way resembled the life of anyone I could think of. And while Clemo’s poems are not “confessional”—indeed he often wrote dramatic monologues from the points of view of saints and others—his life, like the life of any poet, is richly implicated in his work.<br />
<br />
Born in 1916 to working class Cornish parents, Clemo lost his father early on; his parents’ marriage was not a happy one, and Clemo’s father enlisted in<br />
1917, never to be seen again. Reared among tin miners and clay-kiln workers (his father had been one), Clemo lived in the shadow of his mother’s rage toward his vanished father, and of her religious zeal. She was a “dogmatic Nonconformist,” a designation that, in early twentiety-century Cornwall, basically meant a strict fundamentalist Protestant, a Puritan of sorts, refusing to conform to the aegis of the Church of England.<br />
<br />
Clemo was a brilliant boy, but sickly. At some point in his childhood—the few biographical accounts are at variance in dating these matters—he became ill with a disease that the Cornish doctors found mysterious. He had, at this stage, bouts of blindness, of deafness, and of paralysis which came and went unpredictably and, evidently, untreatably. At the age of 13 he was taken out of the public schools, being deemed too sickly to remain; what became of his education beyond that point is hard to say, but my assumption is that he was from that point forward self educated; he never attended university. Somewhere along the way he read D.H. Lawrence, and found validation both in Lawrence’s genius and in his background. Like Lawrence, he set out to write both fiction and poetry; he published a novel, Wilding Graft, in 1948, and in 1949 a memoir, Confession of a Rebel.<br />
<br />
In the meanwhile, when he was twenty, the deafness that had sporadically plagued his boyhood became permanent. Blindness continued to come and go, but in the mid-1950s it came and stayed, so that by the age of 40 Clemo was both deaf and blind. From then on, though he published more prose, his output was primarily poetry; his bibliography lists ten volumes.<br />
<br />
For me, Clemo’s work is remarkable—beyond the fact that he was able to write it at all—for the incisiveness of its spiritual quest, for its closeness to the weird Cornish landscape and Cornwall’s working class, and for its formal beauty. Like many blind poets (think of Borges in his old age), Clemo gravitated to traditional versification and fixed forms, though likely even had he kept his sight he would have written that way: it suited him (copyright issues make it impossible to quote Clemo poems online; I refer the reader to his or her own resources to discover his powerful and fascinating corpus, but in the US it’s hard to find; my university library contains not a word of Clemo).<br />
<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
<br />
At 72, when I met him, Jack Clemo had small, even delicate hands that showed little sign of his working class background. I don’t know to what extent the young Clemo was able to engage in manual labor; if he’d been able to do it, he’s have done it, but his illness may have kept him from it. Photos of Clemo from various times in his life, paradoxically, show a robust, even elegant-looking man, but the Jack Clemo I met was neither. What the state of his health was then I don’t know, but he had only six more years to live, and seemed older and more frail than his age.<br />
<br />
Ruth said to Jack: “T-E-R-R-Y W-A-N-T-S T-O S-A-Y H-E-L-L-O.” Clemo gave his small quick nod.<br />
<br />
In the palm of his right hand, I wrote, more slowly and deliberately than Ruth had done, “Mr. Clemo: I admire your work very much, and I’m very glad to meet you.” Clemo closed his hand, took it from me, and placed it in his lap again; otherwise, he didn’t react.<br />
<br />
I said to Ruth, “I’m not certain I did that right.”<br />
<br />
“Let me see,” Ruth said. She was utterly cavalier about her handling of Clemo; she snatched his hand up again and said “T-E-R-R-Y S-A-Y-S H-E A-D-M-I . . . .”<br />
<br />
Before she’d finished, Clemo snatched his hand away again. In a firm, resonant, somewhat too loud voice, he declared, “I know what Terry said!”<br />
<br />
Of course, of course, of course: he could speak perfectly well. Up until that moment, he had simply chosen not to do so.<br />
<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
<br />
From that point until Ron and I departed a couple of hours later, the conversation became general, as they say in old novels, and animated. Clemo was a very eloquent man. Ruth pulled a chair beside him, held his hand in his, and translated at breakneck speed whatever any one of us said; likely she and Clemo had evolved a shorthand of some kind over the many decades of their marriage. Ron and I had a good many things to ask, and it was not long before I felt, as Ron so clearly had for a long time before, that I had met one of my Maestros.<br />
<br />
I had questions about his process: how he wrote. He wrote on an old manual typewriter that he’d had for ages; he pointed to where it sat on a small typing table in the corner. He didn’t want a new one; he knew the touch of this one too well for that. Did he revise? Of course! Did Ruth read drafts of his poems back to him? No, he remembered them. “He remembers them all,” Ruth said. “He can go back six drafts and pick up a variation on a line.” Did Ruth proofread his work for him? Yes, but it was hardly necessary. “He never makes a mistake,” Ruth said.<br />
<br />
His was a prodigious memory. Ron, being encyclopedically familiar with Clemo’s poems, at one point said, “Ruth, there’s a poem of Jack’s that I saw years ago in a magazine, but I don’t think it’s ever been in one of his books; I wonder if you have a copy,” and he told her the title. “I don’t know,” Ruth said, “but Jack will.” She wrote quickly in his palm, and he lit up. “Ah!” he exclaimed. “You remember that orphan, do you! I like that one as well. Yes, I have it. Just a second.”<br />
<br />
For the first time, he rose from his chair. He walked directly across the room. Beneath the bookshelves on that side, there were four double-doored cabinets, eight doors in all. He opened the fifth door from the left. The whole cabinet was filled with boxes of the sort that reams of typing paper come in, all exactly alike. He knelt down and counted, feeling as he went: three rows over, five boxes down: this one! He opened the box, which was filled with what might have been a ream of typing paper, except every sheet had a poem on it. He pulled out the ream and quickly counted his way into it. Aha! There you are; this is the one you want.<br />
<br />
“Yes,” Ron said, “that’s it.” It was like a magician’s card trick, except that for Clemo, it was just the way he was in the world. There ensued a lengthy conversation about the poem, which was about, yes, Thomas Aquinas.<br />
<br />
Hearing that name again, I looked up again at the five volumes, the three thousand pages, of the Summa, and suddenly a lightning bolt hit me. How did Ruth Clemo know so much about Thomas Aquinas? Ron had told me that Ruth was just what she seemed: a working-class Cockney woman from inner-city London. Arguably the most intelligent person in the room, Ruth had no doubt been denied, like Clemo, access to higher education; she and Clemo had married in 1968, long after the doors of Clemo’s perception had shut down for good. I have no idea what the course of their reading was like, before that date or after it, but the evidence of that edition of the Summa seemed clear enough: someone’s hands had worn that gold leaf away; and the freshness of both Jack’s and Ruth’s acquaintance with the material made it clear that the last reading of it was not so very long ago.<br />
<br />
If you write every word of every page of the three thousand pages of Aquinas’s Summa into the palm of someone’s hand, by the time you are done, you are an expert. Whether or not Jack Clemo would be able to leap up and leaf instantly to a given argument of Aquinas’s on page 2,356 of that work, I don’t know, but I’d bet my life that Ruth could.<br />
<br />
Jack and Ruth Clemo had whole libraries, whole lives, written in their hands.<br />
<br />
Here was the great lesson of this journey, the beautiful gift Ron Tamplin wanted me to take away. What Jack and Ruth held in their hands was what every poet ought to have: the world’s poetry, and—whatever you may mean by the word—God’s, written letter by letter in the skin: thus earned.<br />
<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
<br />
At a certain point, it became clear that Jack was restless. “Ah, it’s time for Jack’s walk,” Ruth said; “he has to have it every afternoon.”<br />
<br />
And as it was getting late, Ron and I agreed we would walk the Clemo’s out, then return to the car for the drive home.<br />
<br />
It was a beautiful late spring day, and the sun was low in the sky. We walked alongside the Clemos; Ruth was tucked snugly against Jack, protectively I thought, but it hardly seemed necessary; Jack clearly knew exactly where he was and where he was going. We were chatting about nothing as we walked; Jack alone was silent. Suddenly he shook himself loose from Ruth, turned at a smart right angle, and walked off the sidewalk out onto a lawn. He took four steps, paused, and then held out both hands, forming a circle with his thumbs and his middle fingers. It was for all the world as if he were about to put an invisible crown on the head of an invisible king who knelt before him.<br />
<br />
I said, “What’s he doing, Ruth?”<br />
<br />
“Ah,” she said. “There was a storm a couple of weeks ago. His favorite palm tree was right there where he’s standing. He’s saying farewell to it.”<br />
<br />
Looking down, I could see the remnant of the tree, sawed off flush with the ground. The placement of his hands was exact: if the tree were still where it once stood, his hands would encircle it perfectly.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjS1hv63pfr7umprneMiV_JvmfRXD9ckUimE5U3zzYZf88Ss8nx6UCElETGUzIJZtV0OSDoDjAiCP8JESGROsi3pBXwsBlsfKUB6WG80OWgFR5aPb-1i7HNlbniv5oN7-yv7XayFoF0sto_/s1600-h/JackClemo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjS1hv63pfr7umprneMiV_JvmfRXD9ckUimE5U3zzYZf88Ss8nx6UCElETGUzIJZtV0OSDoDjAiCP8JESGROsi3pBXwsBlsfKUB6WG80OWgFR5aPb-1i7HNlbniv5oN7-yv7XayFoF0sto_/s400/JackClemo.jpg" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"> <span style="font-size: 78%; font-style: italic;">Jack Clemo: photo by </span><span style="font-size: 78%;"><a href="http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://images.npg.org.uk/790_500/1/5/mw57215.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/largerimage.php%3Fmkey%3Dmw57215%26rNo%3D&usg=__2Ag4ZSvCZVnySlp8zQs8mx4FP7Q=&h=500&w=724&sz=91&hl=en&start=4&sig2=opT079xP54HTRVts0a9VaQ&um=1&tbnid=d5GfjCclrD5iBM:&tbnh=97&tbnw=140&prev=/images%3Fq%3DJack%2BClemo%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26sa%3DN%26um%3D1&ei=C6OaSvj-DYHWNrP0lbYB" style="font-style: italic;">Tricia Porter</a></span></div>T.R. Hummerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12113264848463596680noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2667521601821857519.post-33210368172595742962009-08-29T19:14:00.000-07:002009-08-29T19:17:22.783-07:00Available Surfaces VI: Writ in Water<div class="entry-body"> <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgT_m676ALAKJQeK_9qL7wbPC8hvWivp7ke6jZLG4KEU2kNw9NFMKIeTpFXTqaS7bJ40-7gp4feUiza1I0HoBKsUfYWSwhmiVkL9LYRo2fLRIgaffrdpiCBwxGDio0UnG5Da34T1Cc87xHQ/s1600-h/wading1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgT_m676ALAKJQeK_9qL7wbPC8hvWivp7ke6jZLG4KEU2kNw9NFMKIeTpFXTqaS7bJ40-7gp4feUiza1I0HoBKsUfYWSwhmiVkL9LYRo2fLRIgaffrdpiCBwxGDio0UnG5Da34T1Cc87xHQ/s400/wading1.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://candy.brookdale.cc.nj.us/staff/sandyhook/dgrant/field/wading1.jpg&imgrefurl=http://candy.brookdale.cc.nj.us/staff/sandyhook/dgrant/field/wading.htm&usg=__CVVt5nGwLnJjfUDPXQVlaOtkTH4=&h=836&w=872&sz=240&hl=en&start=39&sig2=qNogTziQ7vJyMpDZlJjBhQ&um=1&tbnid=ae53993kLW_vkM:&tbnh=140&tbnw=146&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dcow%2Band%2Bcattle%2Begret%2Bpond%26ndsp%3D21%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26sa%3DN%26start%3D21%26um%3D1&ei=e9-ZSuaxAovZnAeah-2vBQ"><i><span style="font-size:xx-small;">Cattle Egret</span></i></a><br /><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:Georgia;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:Georgia;">The place I spent my boyhood was landlocked; we were far from the ocean, and from any other kind of major body of water, whether significant lake or river. There were not even streams in that terrain: the water table was deep and did not break through the deep and fertile layers of soil laid down there millennia ago when our region was a shallow sea. Once those waters departed, there was nothing to replace them except what fell from the sky. The rich soil was not colonized by farmers until deep well technology made it possible to drill through thick layers of limestone to tap the aquifer there.</span></span><br /><br />In the absence of natural standing water, our countryside was dotted with artificial ponds; these had started as watering places for livestock and fulfilled that function, but the landscape rapidly adopted them as part of the ecology. Unlike in drier and less arable regions, our little lakes did not sit uneasily or anomalously where they were constructed; they did not look like constructs at all, but quickly settled in and became necessary not only for cattle but also for a large array of flora and fauna that arrived with amazing speed from sources that were not immediately apparent. They were appropriated and integrated in such a way that one could hardly imagine the area without them. From the air, one could see that they speckled the landscape like scattered flecks of mica.<o:p><br /><br /></o:p>A quarter mile from our house, on the other side of a gradual upward slope (at the top of which my father had built his barn), there was one such pond. About five acres in extent, it was of medium size by the standards of that place, and well located, with an enormous oak tree just behind the dam providing both stability and, at the right time of day, shade. That was clearly by design, as the oak was older than the pond. Other, smaller trees—willows, mostly—had sprung up in the meanwhile, but not so many as to make any area impassable or inaccessible. The water was deepest by the dam; on the other side, there were extensive shallows where our cattle came to wade out, cool themselves, and drink. This they did on a very regular schedule, in the early morning and near sunset. They were often accompanied by their bird familiars, cattle egrets, which during the summer followed the herd continually, eating insects flushed out of the grass by the movements of the cattle; sometimes they rode on cows’ backs, picking bugs off the coats of the black angus my father favored and bred. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia;"></div></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia;"> </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia;">Other times of day the pond was less obviously populated, though always populous nonetheless. During a certain period of my life—when I was between nine and fifteen years old, more or less—I spent huge hunks of my summers at the pond. One didn’t swim there: the water was clear enough, but the pond produced huge crops of algae and other water plants, the bottom was the very sticky mud our Black Prairie soil became when wet, and there were certainly snakes, water moccasins in particular, to worry about. There were also enormous snapping turtles.<br /><br />Ostensibly I went there to fish. I took my spinning rod and tackle box of artificial lures; I also took a short-handled net, which I had modified into a long-handled one. This I used not for fish but to catch baby turtles in the pond’s shallows, where they went to sun. I spent more time catching turtles than fishing, in fact. Fishing interested me vaguely, and I did catch a good many large-mouth bass, small-mouth trout, and bream from that pond over the years. Mostly, though, it was the pond itself that attracted me; as I collected its inhabitants, insofar as I did collect them, the pond collected me.<br /><br /><o:p></o:p>At this point, we might segue into recollections of a certain kind of bucolic childhood—boyhood in particular, as in that place and time the fishing rod was one of the archetypes of rural boyhood. Most of the time I left that item in the shade of the oak tree. I was after something larger even than the ten-pound bass my father had once pulled out of that water.<o:p><br /><br /></o:p>The movements of the surface of the water were for me a source of endless fascination. There was no room in that pond for large-scale turbulence. Had I grown up near an ocean, I would have absorbed a completely different dynamic. The surface of the pond was subtle. It was responsive to even the slightest movement of the air; but when the day was still, as it often enough was at noon in July, the water assumed a near-perfect pellucidity. There were rhythms of clarity and opacity, of reflection and refraction—of, you might say, opening and closing—that I never tired of observing. Those rhythms obeyed laws, obviously, but they were nevertheless thoroughly unpredictable, syncopated in ways that I understood deep in my body, but which defeated my mind’s ability to comprehend. Along the fixed margin of the dam, there was one kind of clarity; along the mutable ragged edge of the shallows there was another. I could glimpse the life beneath the water: turtle, crawfish, bream, snake; I could also witness the life of the sky, both through reflections and through the visitation of the sky’s representatives, particularly the tall herons I often surprised (as they surprised me) wading the shallows, hunting. Simultaneously a mirror and a lens, the water revealed its own world, and the world outside itself. It was infinitely various, but its scale was, for me, manageable. I fit there; I belonged.<o:p><br /><br /></o:p>I am convinced that every poet carries within him or herself a cluster of process models which govern the nature and rhythm of how poems are created and why. In myself, I can recognize three. One comes from the life of the farm where I spent my childhood: in that model, one prepares the soil, one scatters the seed, and then one waits, dependent on the vagaries of the weather to make things happen. The second is musical (and obvious): the improvisatory lessons learned from years of delving into performance within the flexible but endlessly instructive parameters of the cluster of American musical forms that have been a lifelong passion for me. The third model—and I have only recently recognized its much more subtle operation in my psyche and in my poetic practice—comes from the life of that small pond: its fixed margin, its flexible ragged right, its simultaneous revelation of a life within and a life without, its subtle alteration of the spectrum of the clear and the opaque, reflection and refraction, opening and closing.<o:p><br /><br /></o:p>Once I caught a smallish bream. I ran my stringer through its gill and tossed it back into the water, tethering it to the bank. Then I lost it: half forgot about it, and couldn’t locate where I’d affixed it to the ground. Distracted by my own meditations, I left it there. Six months later, in the height of winter, I found it again. It had died, of course, and so had the big snake that had swallowed it. When I pulled my stringer in from the water, I found the two skeletons attached, one inside the other, an elaborate sculpture, perfectly familiar and yet completely strange, a natural supernaturalism, or, as Stevens called it, the motive for metaphor,<br /></div><blockquote><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia;"></div><span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span> the sharp flash,<br /> The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.</span></blockquote><span></span>T.R. Hummerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12113264848463596680noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2667521601821857519.post-34948246230365526492009-08-28T09:44:00.000-07:002009-08-28T09:44:52.313-07:00Available Surfaces V: Can Teaching be Written?<blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjGbeoePt7nBslT3D8UsfCgD-jH1tVp7DBAuxBVMjCEdQL4RwgoeWt3Rfgb6VBLRA_aso8VqA3Gqx4WRSXd0jDPsAisasbSsnZLjHnJlufPLA5ceVmWqXgee4Y3kO0o5w_d1MaAbtVyMO5/s1600-h/lecture.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjGbeoePt7nBslT3D8UsfCgD-jH1tVp7DBAuxBVMjCEdQL4RwgoeWt3Rfgb6VBLRA_aso8VqA3Gqx4WRSXd0jDPsAisasbSsnZLjHnJlufPLA5ceVmWqXgee4Y3kO0o5w_d1MaAbtVyMO5/s400/lecture.jpg" /></a></div></blockquote><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.geocities.com/rwe1844/images/lecture.jpg"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><i>Emerson Lecturing</i></span></a> </div><blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><blockquote>“I hear and sometimes share some fundamental objections. Creative-writing programs and workshops are a commodification of the art. They attempt to express or enact something that is finally and importantly solitary. They water down our sensibilities, as they corrupt the notion of individual style. You simply can’t teach vision, so you can’t teach creative writing.</blockquote><blockquote>Well, can you?</blockquote><blockquote>What happens in a creative writing classroom?”</blockquote><blockquote><i><span style="font-size: x-small;"> --David Baker, <a href="http://poemsoutloud.net/columns/archive/in_defense_of_teaching/">http://poemsoutloud.net/columns/archive/in_defense_of_teaching/</a></span></i></blockquote></blockquote><br />
I stand before a new class, Introduction to Poetry Writing. There are, believe it or not, 55 students present. Where I teach, the introductory courses are big, with breakout sections led by TAs. My responsibility is, theoretically, to orient and inform the students about matters of craft, and to begin to give them a road map to the wilderness that is the past and present—not to mention the future—of poetry. I also am responsible for supervising and mentoring the TAs, who, while still doing time in the salt mines of teaching composition, are about to take the wheel of their first writing workshop.<br />
<br />
If the workshop model for teaching creative writing is often questioned and even reviled, what about this approach? I am lecturing about creative writing. What possible good can that do?<br />
<br />
For years I resisted this kind of pedagogy, not only in the teaching of writing but also in literary studies. Small must be better, always, I thought. And I still think small group study is absolutely essential, in creative writing and elsewhere. But my recent experiences with large group study convinces me that there is a place in the curriculum for this approach as well. Call me old fashioned (all together now. . .), but the suspicion has grown increasingly strong in me that undergraduates suffer from a lack of broad survey literary courses: not that such courses must be taught as lecture courses, but they generally used to be taught that way, and their disappearance coincides with the decline in lecture-style teaching. Student knowledge has deepened in certain areas, but is spotty: they don’t have an aerial view, or a good topographical map of the territory. In creative writing as in other fields, such a vision can be indispensible.<br />
<br />
Furthermore, teaching in this context has revealed to me a certain vocation: I enjoy working with these large groups partly because I have discovered that I can do it. I have certain valuable nuggets to impart to students that, it appears, can best be communicated in this kind of forum. I have uncovered a vein of something like eloquence that is rarely called forth in small group discussion but which is laid bare before the large group, a dimension of my own character that my students allow me to explore, and seem to enjoy observing from a relatively safe distance, also not permitted in the seminar room or workshop where everything is up close and personal all the time. Perspective is important; distance can be useful. Every artist knows this; teachers may know it too.<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
Any actor of broad experience will tell you that, from the point of view of craft, the big difference between working in theater and working in front of a camera is one of scale. Camera work is intimate; a whisper can resonate. On film, Brando mumbles, and his mumbling is devastating. On stage, you cannot mumble, even if your character is a mumbler; there you must project, even while projecting the illusion that you are mumbling, if that is what is called for. In the theater everything is writ large: voice and gesture, and ultimately character. On stage, you play a different game—not a better or a worse one, but one that has different parameters.<br />
<br />
The craft of seminar teaching is more like working with a camera: everything is close; silences, whispers, mumbles are part of the game. One makes an observation or asks a question and waits, observing the lift of an eyebrow here, a shifted gaze there, a sigh, a sudden gleam in someone’s eyes. The moment can’t be pushed; however much you may, by constitution, like or dislike those dead spots in seminar discourse (the Pregnant Silence) when everyone is digesting something, when responses are taking form, you have to ride them, wait them out, step aside like a bullfighter executing a veronica (alas poor Veronica: how many times has she died for our sins?). In the big classroom, the dynamic is different, and so is the expectation. And yet the issue of relatedness is still the center: all of this is for the audience, not for you.<br />
<br />
In either case, we teachers are there to present and to represent. In Heidegger-speak, we are there to bring something out of concealment into the realm of unconcealment and allow it to linger. We present the subject matter and it becomes present; we are its representative.<br />
<br />
The “de-centered” pedagogy of the seminar or the small class, regardless of its strengths and weaknesses (which ought, it seems to me, to be debated in a more balanced way from time to time), has become the desired academic norm, and has even attained a certain aura of political correctness, as though any other way of teaching is inadequate, mechanical, or—worst of all—a theater for the parading of the ego. All these things may sometimes be true; I note in particular the rise of the PowerPoint lecture as particularly insidious: some professors used to let their decades-old notes lecture to their students; now those notes have been automated. But the fact that a method can be misused does not mean that it has to be.<br />
<br />
It’s possible, in a small seminar setting, for the reticence of the instructor to be overdone as well. I have seen teachers, in the interest of “de-centering,” spend a whole term allowing students to go round and round in circles, unable to break the Möbius strip of their own limited knowledge. I have seen lazy teachers dump their workload onto the students, fading into the woodwork and doing essentially nothing, leaving the students responsible for finding their own way out of the wilderness. These abuses are at least as insidious as those that can insinuate their way into the lecture hall.<br />
<br />
When, years ago at a writers conference, I saw a famous poet, having sat silent through ten minutes of students’ discussion of a student poem, suddenly arouse himself and intone “I believe this poem should be divided into two halves”—suddenly ripping the page in half—“and both halves should be deposited in the garbage," I knew I was in the presence of a bully. The oldest style of creative writing pedagogy, in fact, seems to have involved a good deal of this kind of behavior, and I am certain that it still happens. That kind of bullying, and ego mongering, is more possible and more dangerous in small classrooms than in large. One can place one’s ego on display in front of a large room full of people, but to actually use it as a weapon is arguably more difficult. “Conscience is a thousand witnesses,” says Hobbes, meaning something negative by his remark, but I take it as a positive: light dissolves the vampire.<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
What I have learned about large group teaching is that there one balances what one presents and what one represents on a different scale than in the small class. One’s role at the seminar table is to be one more guest at the feast, yes, but in a properly hostly way, which means a balancing of courtesy with leadership. In the large class, it’s more a matter of dealing with baskets of loaves and fishes; the multitude is hungry for sustenance, table manners be damned. Miracles of multiplication are called for, and in that equation there is no room for ego: the one who holds the basket represents a higher power.<br />
<br />
This is not Alcoholics Anonymous, friends: nothing mystical is involved. The “higher power” is simply the subject that the group has convened around. In the small group, one tends at best to present and then get out of the way; in the large group, one must present and then immediately represent. By which I mean simply this: if I am talking about poetry in the theater of the large classroom I must become poetry. When I speak to my students about a poem, I must speak to them as the poem would speak if it could hold forth not about its content but about its Being. I must allow the poem to be written, quite completely, in and on me: I become the medium of the poem’s presence. The poem walks into the room and delivers itself to students as it would if it were capable of getting up off the page, embodying itself in three dimensions (or four or five) and revealing itself in that incarnation. For the poem this is not difficult, since poems live and move and have their being in receptive readers everywhere; for the teacher, though, it is rather a challenge. There is not room in me for both my ego and the poem. If my ego pushes the poem out, then the moment fails, just as if an actor insists on playing himself and not the character, the play fails.<br />
<br />
Admittedly, there is a certain amount of smoke and mirrors in this contract. There is also an illusory dimension to small seminar teaching—to pretend otherwise is to be disingenuous. There is always a role to play, a costume to wear, a dialect to assume. That’s not a bad thing; it’s part of the territory. And territory is really the issue: one presents a map, so to say, to a country of which the student knows little; the student is preparing for an expedition, and there is much he or she needs to know in advance. The teacher presents the map, and then acts as a representative of the territory: having been there, the teacher knows the way in, the way around, and the way out again. But if this transaction becomes at any point territorial—if I am determined to defend my little hunk of knowledge, my seminar table or my lectern, from the student rather than make it available to the student, then I commit malpractice.<br />
<br />
Teaching small groups is a joy and a privilege; so is teaching large groups. A few decades of practice in the small class setting has taught me an enormous amount about human and textual dynamics on a small scale, and I would not exchange that knowledge for anything; I still happily teach seminars and small workshops and am rewarded by doing so.<br />
<br />
But walking out into the large theater has been a revealing and liberating experience for me these past few years—as if one had spent decades in small, though lovely, rooms and suddenly found a doorway that led out into an enormous panorama, a sublime landscape, its map already written in my mind and on my body, and that somehow, miraculously, speaks when I speak.T.R. Hummerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12113264848463596680noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2667521601821857519.post-71624630540237975812009-08-27T11:57:00.000-07:002009-08-27T15:41:15.691-07:00Available Surfaces IV: Earth Angel<div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIcHYbuKv4o16-1MlMxqKlB9osSM4BAiXELLh-08_sln8OAvqR_x7D9t4vFztLXzwyxGnlAKWN0yNPMMkpyX7Olzp9eQET1nrcf8SE5iDeBmxrzJjM4K1YODVa0UkAdZxY4-oHR8mgT8zc/s1600-h/Serpent_Mound.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5374719991072905522" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIcHYbuKv4o16-1MlMxqKlB9osSM4BAiXELLh-08_sln8OAvqR_x7D9t4vFztLXzwyxGnlAKWN0yNPMMkpyX7Olzp9eQET1nrcf8SE5iDeBmxrzJjM4K1YODVa0UkAdZxY4-oHR8mgT8zc/s400/Serpent_Mound.jpg" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 265px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" border="0" /></a><a href="http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.sylviamajewska.com/images/Serpent_Mound.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.sylviamajewska.com/gallery2.html&h=405&w=611&sz=86&tbnid=GIwPqj-WjqanFM:&tbnh=90&tbnw=136&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dohio%2Bserpent%2Bmound&usg=__bEjiPp773L-KZVQeIRG2QTiagOM=&ei=1taWSrbOMJCoNrqI-fgN&sa=X&oi=image_result&resnum=7&ct=image"><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Ohio Serpent Mound</span><br /></span></a></div><br /><br /><div class="entry-content"><div class="entry-body"><blockquote><span style="font-size:x-small;">". . . .for beauty is God's handwriting." --Ralph Waldo Emerson<o:p></o:p></span><br /><o:p></o:p></blockquote><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p><br /></o:p>The first time I flew to England, I woke up from a troubled airplane sleep and looked out the plane’s porthole. We were over Ireland, the pilot announced, still pretty high but beginning to descend. I was struck immediately by the clarity of definition of the fields below. I don’t mean that they were in some way better focused then what I was accustomed to seeing from the air in the USA; I mean that their edges were sharp and definite. Ireland—and England too, once we reached it—was a mosaic, or an opaque green stained glass window, its leading starkly apparent from the air. I realized that what I could see was a long history of ownership, of human occupancy. The outlines of a narrative were deeply incised, and long maintained, on this earth. Later, when I walked there, I could see the details of it, but not the underlying form, the skeleton. All of it was symptomatic of a social and a physical history, one that had been written and rewritten time out of mind, so many times it would be an archeologist’s lifework to resurrect even a fragment of the rough drafts.<o:p><br /><br /></o:p>An aerial view of a typical landscape in the USA—no matter how complex the natural features may be—has softer margins; parts of the midwest and south appear almost Impressionistic when seen from the sky. This is partly because we, the fence-building Anglos, have occupied these surfaces for a far shorter time than our ancestors across the pond have lived on theirs. We have fought plenty of battles over ownership, but have had less time to build stark monuments to what we have won, or stolen, and held onto. Stone fences may or may not make good neighbors, but in any case we employ them less than our counterparts in the UK. Our technologies of demarcation are more fluid than theirs; we expect, I suppose, to live on our land for a shorter time, generationally speaking. A barbed wire fence is effective, but impermanent, as any rancher will testify. And a barbed wire fence is almost invisible from the air.<o:p><br /><br /></o:p>Nevertheless, we have written, and are writing, our story on the landscape too. The perception that our story is newer than England’s or Ireland’s is an illusion precisely to the extent that it is an extension of theirs, a continuation of it, and so it continues to occlude and deny other narratives that American earth has recorded from millennia of the stories of societies, technologies, demarcations that were here long before us. But the story that we read from the air is undeniable: field, rangeland, circular track of a wheeled irrigation system, yes; but also mounded earth of another people’s epos.<br /><br /><o:p></o:p>In the agricultural region where I grew up, there were farms whose fields had of necessity to accommodate remnants of so-called “Mound Builder” culture: mysterious hillocks on flat floodplains where no such hillocks should be. From the air, these mounds appear as nodes around which the poem of the plow divides itself. The effort to bulldoze them away would be great, but I never heard anyone even speculate about that possibility. Though the mounds were not burial barrows, they were monuments to the dead. We were capable of razing monuments to the dead: our history is full of such razing. But why go out of your way to do it? Better to plow around it. The history that is written in the earth belongs more to the dead than it belongs to us.<br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p> </div></div><div class="entry-more"><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />About a mile from our house, on the adjoining farm, there was a knoll in the middle of a large field; an ancient pine grew from its center, and that tree was surrounded by a dense grove of smaller trees and brush. The explorer brave enough to penetrate that hedge would find, at the foot of the pine, an old graveyard; long untended, its stones were in every possible stage of disorder and decay, but it remained untouched by generations of farmers who doubtless “needed” the land. When I was in my teens, I hiked there two or three times a year. There was an atmosphere of sacred places there, which presented itself even to the firm agnostic I was in the process of becoming. That aura did not belong to the gravestones, or not to them only: it arose from the whole conjunction of the human and natural alphabets that collided there: eroded stone, decaying pine, plowed field with furrows that swerved around the place where I stood. It would, I suppose, have made an orderly and beautiful effect from the air, a juxtaposition of textures what would draw a hawk’s eye immediately toward the grove’s central tree. I was often greeted by red-tailed hawks as I approached the graveyard; they roosted in the ancient pine, and would rise up at my approach resentfully, drawing their hawk mandalas in the sky around me as I plunged into the grove.<br /><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">In Ohio I once visited an effigy mound made in the shape of a hawk, broadcasting its imperious form skyward. There are many such mounds in the Ohio Valley, including an enormous effigy mound in the shape of a snake, holding an egg in its mouth. The mound builders, whoever they were, had intentions of which we know nothing, but the earth retains the stories they wrote. Hawk, snake, alligator: these characters inhabited a people’s spirit—their minds, their wishes, their dreams, their nightmares. Were they writing messages to their gods, or to aliens in fiery spaceships circling in the sky? Nobody knows. I prefer to think that the story they wrote in earth is simply that: their story, incised in the most permanent medium they knew, written for no sky tourists but for themselves and for the generations to come.</div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqodbEFqS45oCjtrGVjWvKtFIAf7wussGGHnU3ztDDYyQKeyO1Sq67U4oJCgf7SWdDVOpX0VcUpJycwzjpUjc9k7OWbiazR3TkAtt6Qt4MYPeP-D-7terxa5onPq98xjepfvbzRzQ5iWNJ/s1600-h/Serpent_Mound.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal">Mostly what we write on the earth we write by accident, by which I mean that, intent on a mundane task we contribute something without thinking about it to the narrative: the script of a plowed field, the tracery of a highway system, hole dug in the back field for a septic tank. No matter: the story is written, intended or not. The future will read it, and will judge it for what it is. All the circles I made decades ago, riding my uncle’s old John Deere, dragging a harrow behind me, are still there in the earth I moved, however occluded by the circles made before and after me by others. The mark remains, like a giant fingerprint. And everywhere we turn, the earth is marked, its poem still being written.<br /><br /><br /><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:14px;" >[*Reposted from <a href="http://thebestamericanpoetry.typepad.com/the_best_american_poetry/2009/08/available-surfaces-i-uncle-ernests-tattoos-by-t-r-hummer-1.html">The Best American Poetry Blog<span style="color: rgb(68, 68, 68);">]</span></a></span> </div></div></div>T.R. Hummerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12113264848463596680noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2667521601821857519.post-46177762610037036772009-08-25T18:05:00.000-07:002009-08-27T15:43:12.103-07:00Available Surfaces III: Mrs. Quack and Miss Cuckoo<blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgN5VWllXUMo3d5K2ASk48VgRRceMnTkubsY0GZ9QfcuUYhFOobqrTAOnzO77YFjVVlJ8U2sZRzEPNLpe83vwfo9zfAP7s9xXlU6LPd6_KnTqR4dH3I5w_vK0uCm-Ik8WodE2k6Kjikzpgn/s1600-h/Ladder.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgN5VWllXUMo3d5K2ASk48VgRRceMnTkubsY0GZ9QfcuUYhFOobqrTAOnzO77YFjVVlJ8U2sZRzEPNLpe83vwfo9zfAP7s9xXlU6LPd6_KnTqR4dH3I5w_vK0uCm-Ik8WodE2k6Kjikzpgn/s400/Ladder.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:10pt;" >Lay on, Macduff,/ <o:p></o:p>And damn'd be him that first cries, "Hold, enough!" </span><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:10pt;" >--</span><a class="" href="http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/William_Shakespeare/" style="font-family: Georgia;"><b><span style="font-size:10pt;">William Shakespeare</span></b></a><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:10pt;" >, <i>Macbeth, Act 5 scene 8</i></span><span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:10pt;" ><o:p></o:p></span><o:p></o:p> </blockquote><br />Mrs. Quack sat at her desk in front of the class, striking a classic Quack pose of cynical boredom. From a perspective of many decades on, I realize that she was a relatively unusual specimen: a country cynic. Real cynicism is rare among country people, who generally can’t afford the luxury of denial.<br /><br /><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">But Mrs. Quack had, so to say, come in from the cold. She still lived in the country, but she did not work on the farm where she lived; every day she got in her old Ford and drove to town to teach sixth graders. How she came to such a pass I haven’t a clue, but the situation was unfortunate for everyone involved.<o:p> </o:p><br /><o:p><br /></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">Any sixth grader in her class could have quickly told you one thing about Mrs. Quack: she did not care, at all, for sixth graders. Sixth graders, to her, were ridiculous creatures, too close to childhood to be taken seriously, but too close to puberty to be idealized and adored.</div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />To be fair, we were, like all captive groups of eleven year olds, a tough room. Adolescence has its horrors, and those are well known; in the coming years we would all turn into monsters of one kind or another. Preadolescence is less obvious, but it has its profound discomforts. At eleven, one is an adolescent of adolescence. An adolescent ignorantly desires to die and be reborn as an adult; a preadolescent abysmally wants to die and be reborn as an adolescent. O to be thirteen! To attend a prom! To have <i>real</i> pimples!<o:p> </o:p> </div><div class="entry-more"><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />Mrs. Quack observed all that, daily, for many years. By the time I came to her class, her hair was white (pinkish rather than bluish white, an important distinction in those days) and her soul darkened from overexposure to the peculiar hormone-scented sixth grade classroom. Whether her cynicism was natural to her or had been adopted as the only defense mechanism she could muster in her circumstances I can’t say. I can see, though, that to have been a failure for so long at a job that would never call your hand could lead to a cynical outlook. Her failure had begun on the first day she stepped into a sixth grade classroom, for teaching sixth graders is <i>hard</i>, and Mrs. Quack was deeply, even fundamentally lazy.<br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">Later on, in junior high and high school, I had teachers who, under similar conditions, had turned vicious. Mrs. Quack was too indolent to muster meanness; instead, she cultivated an amused mien that ill concealed the fact that, really, she couldn’t be bothered to give a good goddamn about much of anything.<br /><br />*<o:p><br /></o:p><br />Our backwater little school had, in an effort to innovate, decided that from fifth grade on, students should work with more than one teacher, to prepare the way for junior high, wherein one had one teacher for each subject. Accustoming students to moving from room to room, from aegis to aegis, would toughen us up for what was to come.</div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />Our school had two classrooms for every grade. My class was comprised of about 40 students, like most other classes before and after, so this system worked reasonably well. For the first four grades, then, I was installed with 19 of my peers in one room with one teacher (Mrs. Honey, first grade; Mrs. Bright, second grade; Mrs. Dim, third grade; Mrs. Nobody, fourth grade) but in fifth grade, I had two teachers, Mrs. Goodcop and Mrs. Badcop. Likewise in sixth grade, my time was divided between Mrs. Quack and Miss Cuckoo. </div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />Like Mrs. Quack, Miss Cuckoo had white hair, but it was neither pinkish nor bluish: it was simply white, and straight, cut in a sort of pageboy style. Mrs. Quack clearly enjoyed the blandishments of the beauty parlor, and came forth clipped and curled and colored. Miss Cuckoo’s style was more <i>au natural</i>. She verged, in fact, on the unkempt, and likely it was only peer pressure (intense in our little community with regard to matters of personal appearance and hygiene) that kept her from a witchy disreputability. </div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />Where Mrs. Quack was completely transparent, Miss Cuckoo was a mystery. I find nothing at all in my memory banks about her background or her circumstances, beyond the fact that, unlike every other teacher in my elementary school, all of whom were female, her title was “Miss,” not “Mrs.” That alone was suggestive of many gradients of difference, but what it meant none of us were capable, at the age of eleven, of penetrating; nor, frankly, did we try. We were not being schooled in empathy, and therefore we possessed none. All we knew about Miss Cuckoo was that she was crazy, and that seemed to be all we needed to know.<br /><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p> </div><div class="MsoNormal">*<br /><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">Miss Cuckoo’s insanity, if that is what it was, took so benevolent a form that she expended an entire adulthood as a public school teacher. If her professional superiors or peers ever discussed her strangeness with her, I am not aware of it, though of course I wouldn’t be. When I started first grade, Miss Cuckoo’s assignment was as a teacher of first graders, but I landed in the classroom of the kindly Mrs. Honey, and so did not encounter Miss Cuckoo at close range except on the playground, where from time to time she exhibited forms of exuberance that later on might have seemed peculiar, but to a first grader was simply part of the scenery.<br /><br />By the time I entered sixth grade—why I do not know--Miss Cuckoo had been reassigned. She and Mrs. Quack shared responsibility for the sixth graders. Mrs. Quack was in charge of reading and math, Miss Cuckoo of social studies and anything that fell into the category of the arts.</div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />Had Miss Cuckoo been my own age, she would have grown, I think, into a very happy hippie girl, smoking weed, listening to forbidden music, and dancing naked in meadows at rock concerts. Had she been born in late nineteenth-century England, she would have been a free spirit and consorted with Pre-Raphaelites, Decadents, and Symbolists; she would have inhaled opium, sipped laudanum and absinthe, and posed in the nude for Rossetti, who would have rendered her as a medieval maiden garlanded in wildflowers. </div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />Unfortunately for Miss Cuckoo, she had been born in the wrong place and time. She had an affinity with Duse and Isadora Duncan, I believe, but she was stuck in remote small town America, and by now, as she was beginning to fade, in the 1950s and early 1960s. To us she, like Mrs. Quack, seemed impossibly old—both of them were in their sixties, as old as our grandparents!—and yet she also seemed the youngest child in the room. Most of the time, in fact, she gave every appearance of being terrified of us, as if a five year old had been put in charge of a group of children six years older. Sometimes all that fell away, and then, as she became more manic, she became eccentric and incomprehensible, like a child on a sugar high.<br /><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p> </div><div class="MsoNormal">Of the general run of her pedagogy, I have absolutely no memory. This is remarkable, since I can remember, for better or worse, particulars of both style and substance from every other elementary school teacher I studied under. Mrs. Cuckoo, however, has left no trace in my recollection in those terms, and I can only conclude that this is true because she had absolutely nothing to impart. Some alcoholics are maintenance drinkers; Mrs. Cuckoo was a maintenance teacher. She spoke to us, read to us, lectured at us, to pass the time merely. This was done not in a spirit of boredom but under the lash of fear: she must pass the day in order to escape us. </div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />On the other hand, I well remember that from time to time she would suddenly, and for no discernible reason, burst into song. Her voice was that of an aging woman, but it was not unbeautiful for that. The songs she sang she made up, to all appearances, on the spot. Sometimes they would come from some chance phrase encountered in a book, or uttered by her, or (horror of horrors to the child so afflicted) by one of us, but her song would quickly lose its relation to any external thing. She would dance up and down the aisles of the classroom singing, an expression of ecstasy transfiguring her otherwise tortured face; if she happened to be wearing a scarf, as she was prone to do, she would unwind it from her neck and wave it gracefully around her head in an expressionist dance that I now understand had its origin in the 1920s. </div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />She also had a few set pieces, one of which quickly became famous, or notorious, among all the children of the school. She would have us clear the center of the room of desks, forming a circle around the edges of the room; she would drag out of some closet a tall wooden folding ladder. Then she would perform a musical skit of her own devising. Based on the old gospel song “Jacob’s Ladder,” it consisted of twelve verses, one for each year of our school experience, and a chorus. Her ladder had twelve steps, and for each verse she would ascend one step. </div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />I have forgotten the substance of the verses, but the chorus is burned into my memory, as we children were required to sing along. It went<o:p> </o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p><br /></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal">We are climbing the educational ladder<br />We are climbing the educational ladder<br />We are climbing the educational ladder<br />Every day of our lives<br /><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p>I did learn lessons in prosody from this composition. “We are climbing Jacob’s ladder” flows along quite well, but substituting “the educational” for “Jacob’s” causes an elocutionary train wreck—six syllables where two should go--that even Miss Cuckoo negotiated very poorly. And by the twelfth verse, Miss Cuckoo would be perched at the very top of the ladder, doing her best simultaneously to stay balanced there, to maintain some semblance of modesty (she was, thank goodness, enamored of long skirts), and to sing at the top of her lungs. By this time we children would be exhausted with laughing at her, and would simply hum along with her in a kind of comatose disgust, for this performance was repeated erratically but regularly every two weeks or so.</div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">The Educational Ladder was the blueprint of our education; we were on rung six of twelve, and we were so sick of it already that we thought jumping off a bridge might be preferable.</div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />And so we passed our year, shuttled back and forth daily between the Country of Cuckoo and the Queendom of Quack.</div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />*</div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />Fox, my “best friend,” was vigilant. I put “best friend” in quotes here, because we were not really so much best friends as a pair of drowning people thrown together in a maelstrom and trying to survive. He was without a doubt the most intelligent person in the room, but he was also the most tortured; he was the victim of an atrocious family, abused by a drunken violent father. His response to that abuse was to embrace it as an excuse for every kind of failure, but it made his senses keen. He gravitated to me because I was also intelligent, and because he envied me the relative stability of my family life. In return he tortured me, psychologically, in every way he could devise, which, as he was very bright, were many. He was determined, for one thing, to cure me of my innocence, especially where grownups were concerned.<br /><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">“Psst,” he said, “hey, Turtle,” meaning me: “Watch. She’s about to do it again.”<br /><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">We were supposed to be working on a writing exercise. Fox and I had already finished; we were both quick studies. Most of the other students were still struggling on, gripping their pencils white-knuckled, and sweating. I was, as usual, using my spare time daydreaming. Fox, as usual, spent his keeping watch.<br /><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">“Do what?” I said.<br /><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">“Just look.”<br /><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">Mrs. Quack was grading our arithmetic homework. We had handed in our papers folded once vertically, as she required, with our names written on the outside. She had her grade book out, and was checking off names, consulting each paper by glancing at it without opening it. From time to time she looked out at us, smirking. “Not done yet, Kitten?” she’d say to one slow girl. “Christmas is coming.” Once she got up and crept over to a child who had his head down on her desk; she gave the boy a light tap with her ruler. “Sleep on, Macbeth,” she said to him when he looked up, confused. “That’s Shakespeare, you know. Have you read Shakespeare? No? Then finish your work.” Years later, when I read <i>Macbeth</i> and found the line she was misquoting, I just shook my head and thought: <i>typical.<br /><br /></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">“I first caught her doing it last week,” Fox said, as Mrs. Quack sat back down and resumed her marking. </div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">“I’ve watched her every day since. She does it every time. <i>Every time.</i>”<br /><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">“Does what?” I said. Fox irritated the hell out of me most of the time, but very often if I paid attention to him I learned something important beyond the garbage he tended to spew. And just then I saw what he meant.</div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">Having finished tallying who had turned in a homework paper—but without ever having opened a single one to check the work—Mrs. Quack tossed the bundle of assignments into the waste can.<br /><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">“Does <i>that,</i>” Fox said. He was on the verge of exploding with laughter; he hissed like a manic teakettle. </div><div class="MsoNormal">“You saw what she did? You saw?”<br /><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">I had seen. Her act felt like a blow to the side of the head. It was a gross, flagrant act of malpractice, but worse, it was a betrayal. I had spent perhaps an hour on my math homework, getting it right, recopying it neatly. All that had counted was my name on the outside of the paper.<br /><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">Fox was jubilant. “You see what this means?”<br /><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">I saw it meant Mrs. Quack was a terrible teacher, perhaps even evil in her own stunted way. But that’s not all Fox understood.<br /><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">“Look here, Turtle. Check my writing assignment.”<br /><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">I looked over his shoulder. His paper was blank: he had done nothing. He pulled the blank paper out of his notebook, folded it, and wrote his name on it.<br /><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">“She’ll be taking up the papers any minute,” he said. “This is all she gets from me.”<br /><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">I looked down at my own notebook. I was, that year, favoring a certain brand of notebook paper. It was lined in green instead of the standard blue, and it was also edged in emerald green; I liked it because I was going through a phase of obsession with Frank Baum’s Oz books. I had read every one of them, and was heartbroken that there were no more, so every afternoon when I got home from school, I got the notebook down and added a few pages to my own addition to the series. I loved my notebook, I loved its Emerald City edges. I even liked doing my homework, because it meant I got to write. It didn’t matter to me so much <i>what</i> I wrote. Words, numbers, it didn’t matter: I loved the work I did, and I took pride in it.<br /><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">But now something had changed. A contract was broken. The notebook was compromised, the act of writing betrayed. I had written a page of proper sentences, as assigned. Now I turned that page; I pulled out a blank one; I folded it over and signed it. Never again, that school year, would I do it any other way, nor would Fox, and our delinquency would never once be detected.<br /><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">Across the hall, Miss Cuckoo was singing: <i>We are climbing the Educational ladder.</i> We were up to the sixth rung of the ladder. Miss Cuckoo’s voice danced over the prosodic error that was the word “educational.” Mrs. Quack sighed at her desk in her boredom.<br /><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">I sat in my chair, all that day, in stunned and sullen disillusionment. In some ways, I am sitting there still. Sleep on, Macbeth. Your sentence is written, but your page is blank. Sleep on.<br /><br /><br /><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:14px;" >[*Reposted from <a href="http://thebestamericanpoetry.typepad.com/the_best_american_poetry/2009/08/available-surfaces-i-uncle-ernests-tattoos-by-t-r-hummer-1.html">The Best American Poetry Blog<span style="color: rgb(68, 68, 68);">]</span></a></span> </div></div>T.R. Hummerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12113264848463596680noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2667521601821857519.post-52655074736812365392009-08-24T23:11:00.000-07:002009-08-27T15:44:41.890-07:00Available Surfaces II: The Gravitas of Paper<blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1zjRJeEX9v2DwKhzFVTLF2S9fLBOCdTZJUYiNpxGnqOUJFrCkyVJza-oqOkjHf_9pHqGWBiuo_8WfIsWcm3BKXqmbxFrO2421X2EFgT28ND63Hu2JsFVX1QXbkYUeJULdwsY7XA6ER6Em/s1600-h/BookMountain.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1zjRJeEX9v2DwKhzFVTLF2S9fLBOCdTZJUYiNpxGnqOUJFrCkyVJza-oqOkjHf_9pHqGWBiuo_8WfIsWcm3BKXqmbxFrO2421X2EFgT28ND63Hu2JsFVX1QXbkYUeJULdwsY7XA6ER6Em/s400/BookMountain.gif" border="0" /></a></div><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:12px;" >"Another damned, thick, square book. Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr Gibbon?" --William Henry, First Duke of Gloucester</span></blockquote><br /><div class="MsoNormal"></div><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:14px;" >In the late spring of 2001, the boxes began arriving. Buoyant gentlemen in brown uniforms brought them four afternoons in a row, stacking them on the old wooden porch in the Church Hill neighborhood of Richmond, Virginia, where I then lived, though I would not be living there for long. </span><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:14px;" >Inside the house, other boxes were accruing, because we were preparing to move. </span><br /><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:14px;" ><br /></span><br /><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:14px;" >In particular, I had just finished packing up all my books. In the dining room, there was a virtual levee of boxes identical to the ones that were arriving on the porch: one hundred (more or less) cartons bought at the U-Haul store full of the tools of my vocation. It would have been easy, if I’d had the corpse of an author on hand, to make a funeral cairn of books, to contain the body of a poet entirely within a tomb of boxes marked <i>Poetry</i> in appropriately black Sharpie to prevent confusion; likely I had enough <i>Fiction</i> boxes to encompass a trio of novelists; and the <i>Criticism</i> could have stashed the cremains of a panel of deconstructionists in a tidy mausoleum.</span><br /><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:14px;" > </span><br /><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:14px;" >I was, in short, myself entombed inside my own collection of books. And yet, on the front porch, more boxes were arriving. And, perverse as it may appear, as I packed box after box with household goods, the incoming boxes were unpacked, their contents scrutinized. </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">*</div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:14px;" >Writers are apt to be all too well acquainted with the weight of paper. Those sheets that flutter so lightly in the wind when we don’t want them to, that crumble so easily into balls under the force of our writerly frustration, have a way of accruing into groupings—packets, bundles, parcels, walls, mountains—of enormous density. I was told a story once that the library at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale got around a cut in their book acquisition budget by claiming—and in fact proving—that books are an efficient insulating material. That slim volume of poems that almost levitates off your desk can, when joined with sufficient others of its ilk, crush the child who tries to climb a freestanding bookshelf. The cousins of those buoyant gentlemen and -women of UPS--I mean professional movers—quickly lose their cheerfulness when confronted by a personal library, especially one packed in cartons deemed by the movers “too big,” i.e. too heavy. Weight has consequences. Mass accrues. A spine, not to say a heart, can only bear so much. I could, as easily as that clambering monkey-child alluded to above, be killed by my books. So could a mover. So could a moving van.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:14px;" > </span><o:p></o:p> </div><div class="entry-more"><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:14px;" >That copy of <i>Ulysses</i> you use for a doorstop is one thing, literally; multiply it by a few thousand and you have my personal library; multiply it by millions and you have the unsupportable weight of your university’s research facility. How much do the books at the Library of Congress weigh? At some point we approach the density of a dwarf star.</span> <br /><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">*</div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:14px;" >The old house where we lived in Richmond—built in 1885—had the original oak flooring. As I piled my boxes of books in the downstairs dining room, I imagined the effect of the weight. Was the floor sagging there? (Who could tell? In that lovely old house, nothing was plumb, level, or square.) Then again, maybe the trees from which the flooring came were relatives of the trees from which the paper in the books were made: maybe there was a reunion going on from which I was excluded. </span><br /><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:14px;" ><br /></span><br /><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:14px;" >All these things passed through my mind, but I was perhaps a tad unhinged. I was not at a crossroad, but I was just beyond a myriad of them, in the sense that a lot of complex decisions had recently been made and many consequences were beginning to appear.<br /><br />That was the spring of my fiftieth year, and yet, upstairs resting (as she should), my wife of two years was pregnant, and we were about to set off to parts unknown, more or less, because I had taken a new job. It was mid-April; on July 1 I would become the editor of one of America’s best literary quarterlies, <i>The Georgia Review</i>. I was doing almost all of the things that psychologists list as the most stressful human activities, and I was doing them all at once. </span><br /><br /><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:14px;" >The boxes that were arriving on my porch were, in fact, arriving from Athens, Georgia. Their contents: the first 15 years of <i>The Georgia Review</i>. I was not yet in the employ of The University of Georgia, but I was already beginning the work, because I had taken on a task that needed all the time I could give it. I would be editing the magazine, yes; but I had also agreed to take on a larger than normal hunk of editorial work, suggested to me by the magazine’s staff: I would spearhead the completion of a special anthology issue, <i>Best Essays from The Georgia Review</i>. </span></div><div class="entry-more"><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:14px;" > </span> <span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:14px;" ><br />This task was, I began quickly to realize, Herculean in several senses. <i>The Georgia Review</i> had been chugging along since 1948, always publishing a hefty percentage of nonfiction material. My predecessor, the late Stanley W. Lindberg, had, along with the staff, done <i>Best Poetry</i> and <i>Best Fiction</i> issues of the <i>Review</i> ten years earlier; a <i>Best Essays</i> had always been part of the plan, but it was never brought to completion. Exactly why this was the case I have never been sure. Partly it was the consequence of a long illness that in the end was fatal for Stan; partly it was the consequence of having many other things to do. But it was also, I think, partly the more or less inchoate nature of the task. Poetry and fiction have rather precise borders; nonfiction, including the essay, rather less so. Stan had made notes about his plans for the essay issue, including responses to his reading of the early issues, edited (of course) by his own predecessors. Reading these, it seemed to me, with all due respect, that Stan was dithering. And I could see why: the earliest issues of <i>The Georgia Review</i> were particularly Augean Stable-ish. The task was huge, the terrain very messy, and the stakes high.</span><br /><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:14px;" ><br /></span><br /><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:14px;" >What were the stakes? I had the distinct impression that I was being tested. <i>The Georgia Review</i> is a proud old institution; one doesn’t just walk through the door to be the editor without having to run the gantlet. I was being tested; indeed, I was being hazed; and I was determined to pass with flying colors.</span><br /><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">*</div><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:14px;" >If writers know the weight of paper well, editors not only know that weight, they are one with it. I was not walking into an editorship without understanding what I was getting into; I had already been editor-in-chief of <i>Quarterly West,</i> of <i>The Kenyon Review,</i> of <i>The New England Review</i>, and poetry editor of <i>The Cimarron Review</i>. I had done, then, more or less equivalent jobs before, and understood that I would be breathing, eating, and excreting paper. Day by day it would arrive and demand attention; it would be carried about and handled; it would be read; decisions would be made; most of it would be returned to its sender, but not without having first thrown its weight around. </span><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:14px;" ></span><br /><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:14px;" ><br /></span><br /><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:14px;" >There is hardly a literary quarterly anywhere that has office space as commodious as <i>The Georgia Review</i>; and that space is crammed, every nook and cranny and available surface of it, with paper. Some of it is more or less permanently installed on bookshelves; much of it circulates like turgid blood in a peculiar alien circulatory system. The editors are its custodians, and also its tenants. I would come to live in the offices of <i>The Georgia Review</i>, as I had other places, as a kind of symbiote, simultaneously responsible for and dependent on a body of paper, and not a lean fit body either: the body would be bloated, slow of metabolism, and gassy. This is not a description of <i>The Georgia Review</i> per se but of all such publications, maybe of all publications period. A journal of the traditional kind is made of paper, and it eats paper: too much paper enters it, and so—like an obese person living in a donut shop—it grows.</span><br /><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">*</div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:14px;" >In Virginia—it was a lovely spring; flowers of many kinds were blooming, and the weather was luminous and perfect—I opened my boxes and began to examine their contents.</span> <span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:14px;" ></span><br /><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:14px;" ><br /></span><br /><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:14px;" >I discovered a minor mass of apparently identical objects, all the same shape and size, and all alas the same color, a species of khaki, or, as you might say, something on the pale end of a spectrum of shit brown. They arrived from an era in the history of literary magazines when publications were visually Spartan, to put it nicely. It was as though editors—and not only the editors of this publication, but virtually all editors of all similar publications—made a virtue of ugliness, as if to say: this is serious business, friends, like cod liver oil. To do them justice, color, in those days, was expensive; and furthermore, these editors, virtually to a man (and they were virtually all men) were, in the best sense, amateurs of publication. They dealt with content, and put forward content <i>as</i> content, rather the way a cereal company concerned entirely with matters of nutritional virtue might put forward oatmeal <i>as</i></span> <span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:14px;" >oatmeal, in a thoroughly unappetizing oatmeal colored box. This was all well and good for the mission, and for the bottom line, but did not go far toward making the children want to eat. </span><br /><br /><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:14px;" ></span><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:14px;" >I ate it. I ate it all. I read every word of every nonfiction piece (essays and otherwise, for there are distinctions to be made here) ever published in <i>The Georgia Review.</i> Beyond a certain point, the material was wonderful, and the choices difficult only because they were to be made between better and best. From the early years, however, there was not much nutrition in an acre of pine trees. And, of necessity, I read chronologically, from start to finish, so that, there in my dining room in Richmond, my meals were heavy, friends, and joyless: pieces on peach farming in Georgia, and how the “Negro” might be “improved” (for, yes, the <i>Review</i> began as Agrarian and Fugitive outreach, and adopted a “genteel” segregationism grounded in “The Briar Patch”).</span> <span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:14px;" ></span><br /><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:14px;" ><br /></span><br /><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:14px;" >Upstairs, my wife grew, as we say, heavy with child. Downstairs, I grew heavy with paper. Furthermore, I became clogged with dust. These issues were oddly new—most of them, like most issues of most literary magazines everywhere, had never been opened—and at the same time old. They had spent decades untouched by human hands but moldering in a Georgia storeroom, and they harbored peculiar allergens, to which I proved susceptible. They wicked all the moisture from the skin of my hands as I held them, and as I sneezed, my skin cracked; I went through a small swimming pool full of hand lotion. </span><br /><br /><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:14px;" >Ah, friends, the act of reading is, for all we might say about the readerly imagination, thoroughly physical, and editors are the weightlifters of readers. There are joys in the profession, moments of electric discovery, illumination; but there are perils too, hernias and ruptured discs of readership, cracked hands and blurred vision, and susceptibility to whatever dusty invisibles cling to the page and plan their insidious invasions.<br /></span><br /><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:14px;" ></span><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:14px;" >I read my old issues, I made my notes, and when I was done, I packed them all back in their boxes and piled them up with my other books. When the time came, I saw them off in a moving van; they were going home, and I was following, sucked along behind them by an irresistible if not altogether appealing field of gravity.</span><br /><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">*</div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:14px;" >There is something to be said for the internet.</span><o:p> </o:p><br /><o:p> </o:p><br /><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:14px;" >I have heard out the grouchy purists, those in love with paper. I am even one of them; I love paper too. I love books, and would never want to see them go away. I love literary magazines, broadsides, chapbooks, pamphlets. I love beautiful type, thick rich pages, the marvels wrought by ink. By and large, by now I am largely <i>made</i> of paper. You are what you eat, and I have eaten my oatmeal. My loyalty here is real.<br /></span><br /><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:14px;" ><o:p> </o:p> </span><br /><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:14px;" >But I also love the library inside my computer. I love the brilliance of the screen, its pure luminosity. Light! I love lightness! It’s not for nothing that I’m a poet: the lyric lifts, it floats, it flies. </span><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:14px;" ></span><br /><br /><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:14px;" >Let there be beautiful books forever. Let them be read forever in bathtubs, a place where computers should never go. But let there also be digitization, let there be hard drives containing, almost weightlessly, libraries dwarfing Alexandria. And let all ugly back issues of literary magazines, bound in shit-colored cheap cover stock, be turned into electrons that never make us sneeze. </span><br /><br /><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:14px;" >Along with the excellent staff at <i>The Georgia Review</i>, I finished editing the special essay issue, and a fine strong issue it is too, not because of me but because of the editorial excellence of my predecessors there. </span><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:14px;" ><br /></span><br /><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:14px;" >It is, however, an especially thick, weighty issue, and that is mostly my doing. And in some future, a new editor-to-be will, at the <i>Review’</i>s two hundredth anniversary, have to edit a mega-meta-Best-Of issue. I imagine the boxes arriving on his or her futuristic porch. I imagine that unfortunate—attenuated into noodle-like physical wimphood by another hundred and forty years of machine-aided human evolution—struggling to lift them. I imagine his or her dining room floor—made of polymer-uranium reinforced Styrofoam materials—collapsing under the weight, the whole structure of the house imploding, the editor and all back issues vanishing down a robotically engineered safety sinkhole put there precisely in case of such an eventuality.</span><br /><br /><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:14px;" >I will look down, or up, from whatever afterlife I then inhabit, and I will say to myself: there is my legacy.</span><br /><br /><br /><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:14px;" >[*Reposted from <a href="http://thebestamericanpoetry.typepad.com/the_best_american_poetry/2009/08/available-surfaces-i-uncle-ernests-tattoos-by-t-r-hummer-1.html">The Best American Poetry Blog<span style="color: rgb(68, 68, 68);">]</span></a></span><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:14px;" > </span> </div>T.R. Hummerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12113264848463596680noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2667521601821857519.post-27005282523485187042009-08-24T11:52:00.000-07:002009-08-24T11:52:07.264-07:00Available Surfaces I: Uncle Ernest’s Tattoos*<blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhT24wtxS7c7Q2lXhWyxvqYZ7cPtJrm-D5wU1nNTh0p6aH4tf9_XqHWSoy5JHS2xLbouz_WcN84R7AfnxhfgxiyvRNvrTZdCT9mo6eJS8fSH5Kgwoh-yi7E00NHhByXLUDNhyphenhyphenR-tWnvQhFZ/s1600-h/Anchor.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhT24wtxS7c7Q2lXhWyxvqYZ7cPtJrm-D5wU1nNTh0p6aH4tf9_XqHWSoy5JHS2xLbouz_WcN84R7AfnxhfgxiyvRNvrTZdCT9mo6eJS8fSH5Kgwoh-yi7E00NHhByXLUDNhyphenhyphenR-tWnvQhFZ/s400/Anchor.jpg" /></a></div><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-size: 14px;"><a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=character"><em><span style="font-size: 12px;">character</span></em></a><span style="font-size: 12px;"><span style="font-size: 12px;"> c.1315, from O.Fr. caractere, from L. character, from Gk. kharakter "engraved mark," from kharassein "to engrave," from kharax "pointed stake." Meaning extended by metaphor to "a defining quality."<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: 12px;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12px;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span><span style="font-size: 12px;"> </span> <span style="font-size: 13px;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></span></blockquote><br />
<span style="font-size: 14px;"></span><br />
<div style="font-family: Georgia;"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 14px;"></span><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 14px;">I grew up in a place and time wherein the art of tattooing was virtually unknown—or, to be more accurate, was beyond the pale. A map of local businesses would not have included a tattoo parlor, any more than a list of the local houses of worship (and that would have been a lengthy list) would have included a Church of Elvis, however many Elvis worshipers might actually have lurked among us.</span></span></div><div style="font-family: Georgia;"><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 14px;"> <o:p> </o:p></span> <span style="font-size: 13px;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="font-family: Georgia;"><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-size: 13px;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">The only member of my family who had tattoos was my Uncle Ernest, who we rarely saw, because he lived Elsewhere. Furthermore, he came from Elsewhere, as he was “only” an uncle by marriage anyway, having courted and won Aunt Eunice after the Great War; and Aunt Eunice was not “really” an aunt in any case, as she was adopted (though she was in fact Family, being the daughter of another aunt and uncle, both of whom perished in the Great Train Wreck, but that, children, is another story).</span></span></span></div><div style="font-family: Georgia;"><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-size: 13px;"><span style="font-size: 14px;"> </span><o:p></o:p> </span></span></div><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 14px;">As if that weren’t enough, Uncle Ernest obtained his tattoos in an even more distant Elsewhere. During the Great War he had been a marine, serving in the Pacific Theater, where, I gather, he saw a good deal of combat on islands whose names, when I was a child, were utterly strange to me. I remember hearing him tell a story about lying on his belly firing his rifle (from under a jeep? Or have I imagined that detail?) while the bullets of an unseen enemy inscribed furrows in the sand to the left and right of him. <o:p> </o:p>From there, I understood, it was somehow a natural step to the tattoo parlor. <br />
</span> <br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 14px;">Uncle Ernest had an anchor on his shoulder and a naked woman on his forearm. Both were tattoos of the crudest kind available from a professional--utterly stereotypical hack work executed in one color: mimeograph blue. Uncle Ernest was deeply ashamed of them, and always wore long-sleeved shirts. He would display them only rarely, under a combination of duress and the influence of a drink or three. <o:p> </o:p> My connection to my Uncle (actually Cousin-By-Marriage) Ernest, therefore, was both complicated and distant. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 14px;"> </span> <br />
<div class="entry-more"> <span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 14px;">When I was a small boy, he was, in my mind, indistinguishable from his tattoos, though the tattoos were almost always hidden. From my point of view, they were the secret inscriptions that defined him, and by virtue of their existence—and beyond them, the marks in the sand written there by the guns of an invisible enemy, which were somehow both the cause and the underlying meaning of those crude pictures he carried on his skin—made Uncle Ernest “Interesting.” <o:p> </o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 14px;"><o:p> </o:p> <br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 14px;">I feel reasonably certain that this assessment would surprise Uncle Ernest to no end, if he knew of it. His life was, I suspect, reasonably ordinary, full of the usual difficulty and quiet desperation, and generally devoid of adventure. He had three children, and spent his life providing for his family by working at the usual sort of job: he did something or other (sales, I think) for Kraft Foods (they of the utterly bland cheeses). </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 14px;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 14px;">His tattoos were hidden away under the long sleeves of his closet full of shirts—hidden from his employers, from his customers, from his friends, and mostly from his family, except during such moments as we children importuned him into compliance and he revealed them. When he did, a momentous history, fraught with enormous possibility and full of danger, came into view. Somewhere there was another kind of life; somewhere there were tattooists and jeeps and sand; somewhere there were people who would shoot you. <o:p> </o:p> <o:p> </o:p> <br />
</span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 14px;">*</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 14px;"><br />
</span></div><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 14px;">I was a very small boy when it became obvious to me that I was a writer. As soon as I understood that books were not facts of nature like trees, dogs, and cabbages, but were made by people, I also understood that I wanted to be one of those people who made books. I came to this knowledge before I even knew how to write (though I had begun to know how to read). </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 14px;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 14px;">Concerning what it actually meant to be a writer, of course, I was clueless, and untroubled by being clueless because I was ignorant even of my own ignorance. I carried this sense of vocation lightly, and denied it often when someone would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up: when adults asked this question it always seemed unserious to me, and so I gave frivolous answers (cowboy, spaceman, doctor, fox). My writer-self I kept close by but hidden away, like a smooth stone in my pocket. <o:p> </o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 14px;"><o:p> </o:p> <br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 14px;"> When I was five and not yet in school (this was before the invention of kindergarten, gentle reader, for I grew up before not one but several floods) my brother, four years older and hardwired for levels of practicality forever unavailable to me, asked me that archetypal question, but when he asked it, I took it as a serious thing. <em>What will you do when you are grown?</em> I will be a writer, I said. <em>Oh, no,</em> he said, <em>you mustn’t do that.</em> Why? <em>What if no one wants to read what you write? How will you make a living?</em> <o:p> </o:p> <br />
</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 14px;">Tattooists, I suppose, have an advantage over writers, especially poets: they have shops, in front of which they put out signs; people see the signs, go inside, and buy tattoos. If a poet put out a sign, who would turn up? Who would buy? Perhaps I should have told my brother I wanted to be a tattooist when I grew up, but it would never have occurred to me to say that, any more than it occurred to me to say I would be a poet. <o:p> </o:p> <br />
</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 14px;">I didn’t say “poet” to my brother; I said “writer.” I doubt whether the word <em>poet</em> was included in my vocabulary when I was five. The vocation of poetry would arrive, for me, much later. In the meanwhile it was necessary for me to learn to hold a pencil; it was necessary for me to form a certain relationship with paper, which in those days seemed to me an exotic commodity, and for my purposes looked different from the paper in books, which never had blue lines to keep the writing straight, or holes punched in the margin. I had, in short, a very long way to go. <o:p> </o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 14px;"><o:p> </o:p> <br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 14px;">But: there were stories, and in the stories were characters; and there were books, which were filled with ranked rows of characters. The work of learning lay in the seam between character and character: between the alphabet and the cast of actors who could be invoked by the proper marshalling of marks on a page. The extent to which the act of writing was a balancing of character against character within character was as yet unknown to me; and how it became extended—by metaphor, as the dictionary tells us—to central facts about myself, I had not even the glimmering of a hint. <o:p> </o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 14px;"><o:p> </o:p> <br />
</span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 14px;"> * <o:p> </o:p></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 14px;"><o:p> </o:p> <br />
</span></div><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 14px;">Nowhere could a determined seeker have found a less likely literary paradigm than my Uncle Ernest, and yet to me he was a walking book. He had a cover, and inside there were surprising things fraught with meaning. <o:p> </o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 14px;"><o:p> </o:p> <br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 14px;">It was typical of him, in this sense, that on the day of my grandmother’s ninetieth birthday—the same grandmother who had adopted the infant Aunt Eunice out of the Great Train Wreck—as the family was gathering for a gigantic celebration-cum-reunion, Uncle Ernest died. As he journeyed to Here from the Elsewhere he so insistently and perversely inhabited, driving the car with his family in it toward our distant point of reunion—his heart exploded. Or perhaps it imploded—my uncle had become massively obese in his middle age, generating more and more personal gravity; I can easily imagine that his heart collapsed like a dying star, into a black hole through which he vanished, taking his tattoos and the deepest secrets of his existence with him. <o:p> </o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 14px;"><o:p> </o:p> <br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 14px;">In any case—though his dying transformed our celebration into a funeral—I never saw him again. I never even saw his grave; as he had lived Elsewhere and died Elsewhere, so he was buried in an Elsewhere I have never to this day visited. Rest in peace, Old Soldier; hail and farewell. The end. <o:p> </o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 14px;"><o:p> </o:p> <br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 14px;">But not quite. I never saw his grave, but I did see a photograph of it: a typical piece of granite, almost but not quite white, inscribed by the unswerving hand of a journeyman carver holding his imperious chisel: <em>Ernest McCollum.</em> <em>Kharakter, kharassein, kharax: </em>In those letters everything was present, even through the grainy scalloped black and white snapshot Aunt Eunice sent. Here was a complex regression that felt to me as weighty as <em>The Wasteland</em> would one day feel: the photo revealing the carved stone revealing the name revealing the life that hid the images of a hidden world that was his and his alone, but that through him was also mine.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 14px;">[*Reposted from <a href="http://thebestamericanpoetry.typepad.com/the_best_american_poetry/2009/08/available-surfaces-i-uncle-ernests-tattoos-by-t-r-hummer-1.html">The Best American Poetry Blog<span style="color: #444444;">]</span></a><br />
</span><br />
</div>T.R. Hummerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12113264848463596680noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2667521601821857519.post-48015934623219103312009-07-20T01:30:00.001-07:002009-08-06T20:49:15.195-07:00Re-Runs of the Apocalypse<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidE-7CJnxhoVcIsqb8AHV3DS4NhQnp70qoJNok-o9ZFhgZ7ns1MdAML5iOnxTNSC95MP7W6mDd5W_ikAKSo-zVmxMtB8WJRBPWtNJT8Td2ngI9HlNonsl0HUh2NWetm78PJvjZfRHTub74/s1600-h/city_pict14a.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidE-7CJnxhoVcIsqb8AHV3DS4NhQnp70qoJNok-o9ZFhgZ7ns1MdAML5iOnxTNSC95MP7W6mDd5W_ikAKSo-zVmxMtB8WJRBPWtNJT8Td2ngI9HlNonsl0HUh2NWetm78PJvjZfRHTub74/s320/city_pict14a.jpg" /></a></div><div style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 78%;"><a href="http://www.alexeytitarenko.com/city14.html" style="font-style: italic;">Alexy Titarenko</a></span></div><div style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 78%;"><a href="http://www.alexeytitarenko.com/city14.html" style="font-style: italic;"><br />
</a></span></div><blockquote style="clear: both;">It was theirs. They stood by the water at dusk, lovers scarred by the violence of their alchemy, transmuting the darkness at the skyline.<br />
<br />
</blockquote><blockquote style="clear: both;">*</blockquote><blockquote style="clear: both;"><br />
<br />
It was not theirs. The boundaries betrayed them. Out of the core of their argument a shape arose, arsenical whirlwind, last word.</blockquote><blockquote style="clear: both;"><br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
</blockquote><blockquote style="clear: both;">It was no one's. A destroying wave passed through Being, positron to pulsar, invisible, unknown to them as they removed each other's skin.<br />
</blockquote><blockquote style="clear: both;"><br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
</blockquote><blockquote style="clear: both;">It was human. A double knot in the double helix hardwired them not to fate but inevitable accident: one molecule awry, everything collapses.<br />
</blockquote><blockquote style="clear: both;"><br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
</blockquote><blockquote style="clear: both;">It was not human. The bridges into the city were empty at midnight, the trains were silenced, bars dark: one great godflash, and lights out.<br />
</blockquote><blockquote style="clear: both;"><br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
</blockquote><blockquote style="clear: both;">It was natural. Rivers divorced seas under the aegis of ending, tectonic plates shattered against apartment walls, all evolving closure.<br />
</blockquote><blockquote style="clear: both;"><br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
</blockquote><blockquote style="clear: both;">It was never natural, not cosmic rays unspooling, epic failure of photosynthesis. The lovers were fuse and timer, thrusting seconds home.<br />
</blockquote><blockquote style="clear: both;"><br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
</blockquote><blockquote style="clear: both;">One last morning under the pergola we discussed what had happened in the godhead's crucible, but the berries distracted us, we lost the thread, you touched my hand, and we were smoke.<br />
</blockquote><div style="clear: both;"></div><div style="clear: both;"></div>T.R. Hummerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12113264848463596680noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2667521601821857519.post-8904755321669658272009-07-17T23:55:00.001-07:002009-08-06T20:51:18.535-07:00Biography of Eros<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8zPSjR-F89BzAg4eIg7FXe3byQal691P8M6PnVT65XKvQFZoKfcJyWlthAMWQR91UTlDhQGZqpYHwhwt_aT6ZW3R3boCtMc9T-alQEP7NZMv6UxyVaEhsHrMtxQDBAeDasfnGTRNK3Wdv/s1600-h/schildt.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 313px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8zPSjR-F89BzAg4eIg7FXe3byQal691P8M6PnVT65XKvQFZoKfcJyWlthAMWQR91UTlDhQGZqpYHwhwt_aT6ZW3R3boCtMc9T-alQEP7NZMv6UxyVaEhsHrMtxQDBAeDasfnGTRNK3Wdv/s400/schildt.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5367064453522616050" border="0" /></a><br /><p style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Emil Schildt</span></span><br /></p><p style="clear: both;"><br /></p><p style="clear: both;">The witnessing of things in the mind. But what mind? The lovers lay on the bed, handcuffed, saying <span style="font-style: italic;">please</span>, and just for a moment one of them knew.<br /><br /></p><p style="clear: both;">*<br /><br /></p><p style="clear: both;">Sleeping, one of them moaned. It was the dream of the interpenetration of souls. Death is in everything, crystalline arsenic dissolved in alcohol.<br /><br /></p><p style="clear: both;">*<br /><br /></p><p style="clear: both;">They wore raptor masks. One used a small flexible whip. Its marks were radiant traces of ichor. Thus the walls of the sanctum were broken.<br /><br /></p><p style="clear: both;">*<br /><br /></p><p style="clear: both;">They knew it was insanity, and accepted it, but differently. One thought: madness, endlessly. The other thought: madness, finally.<br /><br /></p><p style="clear: both;">*<br /><br /></p><p style="clear: both;">In the dream words were absence. An empty book had contained all truth but for one false letter. He, or was it she, read the other's shadow.<br /><br /></p><p style="clear: both;">*<br /><br /></p><p style="clear: both;">Inside the penumbra there was no dying--death, yes, always, but no motion except the back and forth of the body, the thrust, and the scream.<br /><br /></p><p style="clear: both;">*<br /></p><p style="clear: both;"><br />Entropy, etiolation, emptiness: Nothing left but the bed, and the lovers on the bed, and the galaxy surrounding them, dark matter ascendant.<br /><br /><br /></p>T.R. Hummerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12113264848463596680noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2667521601821857519.post-65107297746754051222009-06-28T15:43:00.001-07:002009-06-28T15:57:39.471-07:00Assimilation<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'Goudy Old Style', -webkit-fantasy;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTSxPpEOxRLhjP7ZqexCjSxP6rbd-fF1TxPCKRGAdz2_gO7MfHFi4dUDapSN4YAil4e0gfepMNfmgMb_L9pJG_C-OxrLcfv-yqSWW6bI3yHxwVIK0fDB14Uw0Ha0GIETAxe3jnmT7_e3p6/s1600-h/discarded.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTSxPpEOxRLhjP7ZqexCjSxP6rbd-fF1TxPCKRGAdz2_gO7MfHFi4dUDapSN4YAil4e0gfepMNfmgMb_L9pJG_C-OxrLcfv-yqSWW6bI3yHxwVIK0fDB14Uw0Ha0GIETAxe3jnmT7_e3p6/s400/discarded.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5352515905654039970" /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); "></span></a><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTSxPpEOxRLhjP7ZqexCjSxP6rbd-fF1TxPCKRGAdz2_gO7MfHFi4dUDapSN4YAil4e0gfepMNfmgMb_L9pJG_C-OxrLcfv-yqSWW6bI3yHxwVIK0fDB14Uw0Ha0GIETAxe3jnmT7_e3p6/s1600-h/discarded.jpg"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; font-family:georgia, fantasy;"><i></i></span></a><i><a href="http://www.jeffbrouws.com/series/nowhere_F21.html"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Jeff Brouws</span></a></i></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'Goudy Old Style', -webkit-fantasy;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:'Goudy Old Style', fantasy;"><a href="http://www.jeffbrouws.com/" onfocus="if(this.blur)this.blur()"></a></span><br /></span></span><div>Even his fingerprints vanished. His skin smoothed like river stone; his grip on the world diminished. He was sliding someplace frictionless.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>*</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Lovers had become landscape--the woman he knew that ancient summer was lost in a hedgerow, flowering, leaving, framing what could be seen.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>*</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>What he touched penetrated skin and clung, but he did not want to release the pen, sofa, wallet: they defined him as the boundaries faded.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>*</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>The walls of the house have thickened, the rooms grown smaller; the foyer is just the size of a mailbox, and he gropes there for his bills.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>*</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Part of him was lost,two fingers from the right hand. His music suffered. When he played the piano, there was a shadow in the treble, a deadness.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>*</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Human emotion reduced him; every passion wore off a layer of skin, every rage took a subsection of organ. Eroded, he walked through walls.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>*</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>He now remembers the path forgotten all his life: it leads to a ruined door through which everything vanishes, even the key that opens it.</div></div>T.R. Hummerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12113264848463596680noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2667521601821857519.post-57930926576101815562009-06-25T12:07:00.001-07:002009-06-25T12:18:44.417-07:00Observatory<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJdf6uo1h5xMj3IxDDQ2jKM6o0lwEpPvr3qgc69KDzRU7oZ4jESogPxGs_rm05C_0T0WnhZI51MqEYnCzVQHclLSCoG57P7db9Ri0b_FAW60VcAPw2ehGFxxhqEqC_xNBrMzXgjMi6ieJj/s1600-h/vermeer_astro.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 356px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJdf6uo1h5xMj3IxDDQ2jKM6o0lwEpPvr3qgc69KDzRU7oZ4jESogPxGs_rm05C_0T0WnhZI51MqEYnCzVQHclLSCoG57P7db9Ri0b_FAW60VcAPw2ehGFxxhqEqC_xNBrMzXgjMi6ieJj/s400/vermeer_astro.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5351346678751514098" /></a><i><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small; "><a href="http://www.astro.cornell.edu/~ryamada/projects/images/vermeer_astro.jpg">Vermeer</a></span></div></i><p style="clear: both"></p><p style="clear: both"><br /><br />Clear night sky scribbled to the margin with stars--that's the problem: everything is written, no room even for a black hole. And God reads.</p><p></p><p style="clear: both"><br />*</p><p style="clear: both"><br />A bountiful harvest season, everything ripening at the decisive moment, whole galaxies tipped like so many apples beyond the event horizon.</p><p style="clear: both"><br />*</p><p style="clear: both"><br />We lifted the brass tube: moons came into being, planetary rings, such distances that our bodies faded to shadows in the obliterating lens.</p><p style="clear: both"><br />*</p><p style="clear: both"><br />Tiny figure against the expanse of firmament, seen through the magnifying gaze of something godlike with a cross-hair and an ounce of lead.</p><p style="clear: both"><br />*</p><p style="clear: both"><br />Safe in the great dome, at the end of the tube, she watched her lover at a great distance enter the black hole, and the universe imploding.</p><p style="clear: both"><br />*</p><p style="clear: both"><br />Two lenses moved randomly in her mind until they fell into the right relation. She saw him clearly then, and cursed the perfection of focus.</p><p style="clear: both"><br />*</p><p style="clear: both"><br />Light gathers in the perfect lens. Its restlessness is such that it cannot remain there, even in perfection: it moves to clarify or destroy.</p><p style="clear: both"><br />*</p><p style="clear: both"><br />Over great distance, the mechanism flattens what it reveals: dark matter, an arc of stars, under an arch of oak limbs the lovers, made one.</p><p style="clear: both"></p>T.R. Hummerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12113264848463596680noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2667521601821857519.post-48732580215162002702009-06-08T12:02:00.000-07:002009-06-08T12:04:59.124-07:00Abandon<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1um8g4ihKe5hirHCIp_xPZxcVd9U3_07iCbpx3lp5xoWjhiyBhwT9t-TUCv_dAyoSekN1-ZJEI4qhyzmnxVJyAk1dyhSKImxPXOqNuEh3vYlQNJc3Yp532nGEfhj4Yvt8qmG42JJrQKR8/s1600-h/Stump+House.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1um8g4ihKe5hirHCIp_xPZxcVd9U3_07iCbpx3lp5xoWjhiyBhwT9t-TUCv_dAyoSekN1-ZJEI4qhyzmnxVJyAk1dyhSKImxPXOqNuEh3vYlQNJc3Yp532nGEfhj4Yvt8qmG42JJrQKR8/s400/Stump+House.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5345034609434204610" /></a><i><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 10px; "><a href="http://www.bethdow.com/">Beth Dow</a></span></div></i><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /><div>Silence in the house, people gone out, cats sleeping, leafblowers put away, the half life of the crawl space ticking down toward zero.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>*</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>A wind in the desolation of the closet, incremental movement like the shifting of tectonic plates, while in the wall a mouse skull settles.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>*</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>In a bathroom drawer there are artifacts: molecules of talcum, dried smear of cat's blood, a lingering odor of unidentifiable ointment.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>*</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>After the journey, months of wandering through landscapes of bone and salt, we came at last to prairie, a rotting expanse of Persian carpet.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>*</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>The cleaning finally ended. If there were beds, they would never be made; dishes would stay stained in eternity, and gravity be abolished.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>*</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>A crack at the center, where even the intelligence of cockroaches was tested: rain eroded the foundation and a simple domesticity entered.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>*</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>That characteristic turbulence, elemental disturbance in the aether, the tureen vibrating on the sideboard invisibly in the vacant hallway.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>*</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Soon, but not yet, the incremental creaking of hinges, the end of molecular bonding, release of form: shapelessness in the door frame, soon.</div><div><br /></div></div>T.R. Hummerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12113264848463596680noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2667521601821857519.post-23979862024850957342009-06-02T11:22:00.000-07:002009-06-02T22:51:31.671-07:00The "Education" of This Poet (5): Impermanent Earth<span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:'Goudy Old Style';"><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; background-image: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; -webkit-background-clip: initial; -webkit-background-origin: initial; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font: normal normal normal 13px/19px Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; padding-top: 0.6em; padding-right: 0.6em; padding-bottom: 0.6em; padding-left: 0.6em; background-position: initial initial; "><div class="mceTemp mceIEcenter" style="text-align: center; "><dl id="attachment_988" class="wp-caption aligncenter" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; border-top-width: 1px; border-right-width: 1px; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-left-width: 1px; border-top-style: solid; border-right-style: solid; border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-style: solid; border-top-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-right-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-bottom-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-left-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); text-align: center; background-color: rgb(243, 243, 243); padding-top: 4px; margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px; -webkit-border-top-right-radius: 3px 3px; -webkit-border-top-left-radius: 3px 3px; -webkit-border-bottom-left-radius: 3px 3px; -webkit-border-bottom-right-radius: 3px 3px; width: 434px; "><dt class="wp-caption-dt"><a rel="attachment wp-att-988" href="http://linebreak.org/blog/2009/05/30/the-education-of-this-poet-5-impermanent-earth/markbryan-thetornadoman1/" mce_href="http://linebreak.org/blog/2009/05/30/the-education-of-this-poet-5-impermanent-earth/markbryan-thetornadoman1/"><img class="size-full wp-image-988" src="http://linebreak.org/blog/wp-content/uploads//2009/05/markbryan-thetornadoman1.jpg" mce_src="http://linebreak.org/blog/wp-content/uploads//2009/05/markbryan-thetornadoman1.jpg" alt="Mark Bryan - The Tornado Man" width="424" height="550" style="border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-color: initial; " /></a></dt><dd class="wp-caption-dd" style="font-size: 11px; line-height: 17px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 4px; padding-bottom: 5px; padding-left: 4px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Mark Bryan - The Tornado Man</dd></dl></div><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-size:11px;"><i><blockquote style="line-height: 1.3em; margin-top: 1em; margin-right: 20px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 20px; "><p class="MsoNormal" mce_style="text-align: right;" style="margin-top: 0.75em; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0.75em; margin-left: 0px; text-align: left; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-size:9px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-size:10px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 16px; font-size:13px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-size:small;">For the past few days, at the invitation of the editors of the online journal </span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-size:small;">Linebreak</span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-size:small;">, I've been a guest blogger; the work I did for that very welcome gig was inevitably connected with writing I've been doing for </span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-size:small;">Mindbook </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-size:small;">for the past several months. Theref</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-size:small;">ore, with the permission of </span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-size:small;">Linebreak,</span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-size:small;">I'm reproducing those entries. Be sure to visit </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; "><a href="http://www.linebreak.org/" style="color: rgb(153, 153, 153); text-decoration: none; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-size:small;">Linebreak</span></a></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-size:small;"> to see the excellent work they're publishing.</span></span></i></span></i></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" mce_style="text-align: right;" style="margin-top: 0.75em; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0.75em; margin-left: 0px; text-align: left; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:100%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 16px;font-size:13px;"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" mce_style="text-align: right;" style="margin-top: 0.75em; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0.75em; margin-left: 0px; text-align: left; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:100%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 16px;font-size:13px;"><br /></span></span></p></blockquote></i></span><p></p><p>Dirt mattered. It made a difference that my family owned land, and that it was good fertile land; it supported crops, it supported grassland for cattle, it supported trees of many kinds. It supported everything that we were about. When I was small, I realized that the land supported our house, held it up from—what? What would happen to the house if the soil beneath it suddenly melted away? What was underneath it?</p><p>In the little Methodist church we went to every Sunday, I heard the word <span mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; ">firmament</span>, I learned the importance of a good foundation: <span mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; ">You have built your house upon the sand.</span> I could imagine the consequences: one good rain and the sand would wash away; the house would fall down, an idea inevitably invoking images of wolves and pigs. <span mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; ">Build your house upon a rock.</span> And build it of brick, lest there be a storm of wolf breath.</p><p>I had dreams, when I was a small boy, of tornadoes. They came near us sometimes in reality, and those black storm-cones invaded my sleep. Sometimes our old farmhouse, which usually felt so safe and permanent to me, seemed built of straw. When the oak trees in our yard were storm-whipped, and hail pounded the windows, I could imagine it all coming unstuck, blowing in a cloud of dust (including all my toys and the family dog) into the unknown horizon. <span mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; ">The Wizard of Oz</span> was an ordeal for me the first time I saw it (on our old black and white television on which the famous transformation into color never happened); I identified too strongly with the people in Kansas, who, for all their flatness, were like us. We, too, were flat characters compared with witches, wizards, and munchkins; we were simple and stupid, we trusted the walls of our house, we presented our two-dimensional sail-like surfaces to any fierce wind.</p><p class="MsoNormal">In that same church, I heard of the Apocalypse, the End of Time. How would it happen? By fire, some said, since there was a promise it would not be by flood. The world had already been virtually erased once that way. We children loved the story of Noah’s Ark. Why? It was a horrifying tale, but the Bible’s account did not dwell on so many deaths. While the animals made their way up Noah’s ramp, I imagined what it would be like to be one of those not chosen, which was just about everyone. If I had been alive then, doubtless I would have been left to drown. 40 days of rain and the water rising: your mother, your father, your brothers and sisters and neighbors one by one going down. At the End of Time it would happen again some other way, we were told. Worlds could be destroyed again and again. Everything could be swept away. And yet, it seemed, there was always something else.</p><p class="MsoNormal">My father was a gardener. The distinction between a farmer and a gardener is one of degree, not kind, and yet there <span mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; ">is</span> a distinction. The gardener has his eye out for every plant, and worries differently about the quality of his soil. The farmer, generally, applies chemistry en masse; the gardener scavenges manure, crafts his tilth, turns over individual leaves looking for blight and pests. My father lived in both those roles, and they often contradicted one another in his thinking about crops and land, but he was untroubled by such considerations, understanding that he had different jobs and those jobs had distinct parameters.</p><p class="MsoNormal">Once, while he was breaking up land for a new vegetable annex, my father’s plow turned up several objects that first appeared to be round white stones, but on closer inspection proved to be fossils of seashells. He brought them home and lined them up on the porch.</p><p class="MsoNormal">“Where did they come from?” I said.</p><p class="MsoNormal">“Out of the ground.”</p><p class="MsoNormal">“But before that. How’d they get into our dirt?”</p><p class="MsoNormal">“From when this was an ocean.”</p><p class="MsoNormal">“This was an ocean?”</p><p class="MsoNormal">“Yes; everything here was under water long ago.”</p><p class="MsoNormal">“Was that Noah’s flood?”</p><p class="MsoNormal">My father, no great churchgoer, paused. “No,” he said. “I don’t think so.”</p><p class="MsoNormal">So the water had come more than once. The promise meant nothing. I was five years old; I felt the earth I was standing on turn to water, felt everything familiar, everything I loved, everything I was, flow away. The limestone fossils lay quietly on the porch, witness to the fact that something else, something utterly different, had been in this place once. If I squint through the warped lens of my memory, they look like a row of skulls: memento mori, not for me or for any human individual, but for all worlds destroyed in any past and for all future worlds and their destruction.</p></div></span>T.R. Hummerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12113264848463596680noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2667521601821857519.post-72535407623101199922009-06-02T10:45:00.000-07:002009-06-03T06:35:27.762-07:00The "Education" of This Poet (4): Brain Wave and the End of Science Fiction<div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:'Goudy Old Style';"><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; background-image: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; -webkit-background-clip: initial; -webkit-background-origin: initial; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font: normal normal normal 13px/19px Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; padding-top: 0.6em; padding-right: 0.6em; padding-bottom: 0.6em; padding-left: 0.6em; background-position: initial initial; "><p class="MsoNormal"><img class="size-medium wp-image-971 aligncenter" src="http://linebreak.org/blog/wp-content/uploads//2009/05/bar-450x337.jpg" mce_src="http://linebreak.org/blog/wp-content/uploads//2009/05/bar-450x337.jpg" alt="bar" width="450" height="337" style="border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; " /></p><p class="MsoNormal" mce_style="text-align: right;" style="text-align: center;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;">http://striplight.org/clean.aspx</span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" mce_style="text-align: right;" style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:85%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:10px;"><i><br /></i></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" mce_style="text-align: right;" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:85%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:10px;"><i></i></span></span></p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:85%;"><i><blockquote><p class="MsoNormal" mce_style="text-align: right;" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:85%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:10px;"><i><br /></i></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" mce_style="text-align: right;" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:85%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:10px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 16px; font-size:13px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">For the past few days, at the invitation of the editors of the online journal </span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Linebreak</span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">, I've been a guest blogger; the work I did for that very welcome gig was inevitably connected with writing I've been doing for </span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Mindbook </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">for the past several months. Theref</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">ore, with the permission of </span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Linebreak, </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">I'm reproducing those entries. Be sure to visit </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; "><a href="http://www.linebreak.org/" style="color: rgb(153, 153, 153); text-decoration: none; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Linebreak</span></a></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> to see the excellent work they're publishing.</span></span></i></span></i></span></span></p></blockquote></i></span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" mce_style="text-align: right;" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:7;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 16px;font-size:48px;"><i><br /></i></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" mce_style="text-align: left;" style="text-align: left; ">Mr. G. handed out an assignment: something mimeographed. The odor of fresh mimeograph ink is still a tangible presence in my memory, indelible. The assignment had that reek, part chemical and part sexual. But we were juniors in high school; everything was sexual.</p><p class="MsoNormal">In a school full of abysmally bad teachers, Mr. G. stood out. It was not that he was a better teacher than any of the others; he wasn’t. He was lazy and often ill-informed. But he was younger than the others. He had just turned 30 a couple of months before, and that had been a shocking day; it was 1966 and our trust, rumor had it, was not to extend to anyone over 30 years of age. Not trust Mr. G.? Not trust him to do <span mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; ">what</span>? The truth is that, having turned 30, Mr. G. suddenly seemed unspeakably ancient, like all his colleagues. Before that, he had been ours somehow; now he was theirs.</p><p class="MsoNormal">What Mr. G. had that the others lacked was an element of hipness. He was blandly handsome, slightly moon-faced but clear-eyed, with a sort of transparency about him: very white skin, blond hair kept close-clipped but not buzz cut like a coach’s. He cultivated a blasé irony that eleventh graders recognized and appreciated. He wore his own mediocrity lightly and forgave mediocrity in others, but he abhorred outright stupidity and was merciless in hostile pursuit of it. He was, in short, a sort of meta-highschooler himself, a big man on a small campus who has outlived his time.</p><p class="MsoNormal">About the high school I attended, I want here to say as little as possible. It was wretched in and of itself, and its wretchedness compound by the fact that during the eon I attended it (1964-1968) it was completely and adamantly segregated—was, in effect, locked down where African Americans were concerned. In Mississippi, there was a war going on. Nobody said so, but that is the truth. Our school was a citadel in the conflict; we had our battlements and our cannonade. Enormous mental and spiritual energy that might otherwise have been expended on our education went to the war effort. Enormous resources also went to the maintenance of two “separate but equal” school systems in a community that could scarcely support one. It is not surprising that the school was, as I have said, abysmally bad. For me, though, in ways I would spend years coming to comprehend, it was a disaster.</p><p class="MsoNormal">The science fiction writer Poul Anderson wrote a novel called <span mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; ">Brain Wave</span>, which I somehow encountered in the tenth grade, in the course of living through a serious obsession with science fiction novels that was thoroughly and nakedly escapist. The thesis of <span mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; ">Brain Wave</span> (I recently re-read the novel out of curiosity, and it holds up reasonably well) is that millennia ago the earth drifted into a region of space where a huge force field was located. The force field was fundamentally harmless, but it turned out to affect all earthly intelligence. As life evolved, intelligence was damped down by the action of the force field: every brain was 1/3 as intelligent as it might have been otherwise. None of this caused any noticeable effect on the planet, of course, as every intelligence was equally reduced, and no mind had experienced any other condition. But then one night in the early 1960s the planet finally exited the force field, and in seconds the intelligence of every remotely thinking entity on Earth—human, animal, bird, fish, insect—was tripled.</p><p class="MsoNormal">The majority of the novel is given over to the consequences of this radical alteration in mentality. Anderson cleverly and densely imagines how the world changes for people as well as, oh, say, pigs (pigs become very smart and very dangerous). Looking back on my teenaged self, I realize that what I was obsessed by (I probably read this little book half a dozen times) was the unconscious sadness of things before the change. I identified with the characters whose intelligences had a governor on. The world inside the force field: that was my world; indeed, that was the school I attended. Later on, through my 20s, I would live the other part of the book, the lifting of the inhibitor. But that was in the future, and I had no way of knowing that liberation would ever arrive.</p><p class="MsoNormal">Science fiction was a good secret of mine in those years; some of the books I read in order to feel I was someone else in another universe or dimension actually addressed my condition, as Anderson’s did; others exercised, or exorcised, my stultified and stunted intelligence, like much of Asimov. But, truth to tell, sci fi was a dead end for me. Much as I enjoyed a certain implicit and possibly unintended satire in the depiction of the dampened souls in<span mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; ">Brain Wave</span>, the fact is my problem was not stupidity but depression. The force field that enveloped me from the time I was 11 until I was 22 or so—half a 22-year-old’s lifetime—was a situational depression produced by the place and time in which I was living. The only salvation for me was the one I finally chose for myself—removing myself physically and mentally from the source of the problem. But when I was in the eleventh grade, that removal was still nearly a decade in the future, and I could not even begin to imagine it. For me, science fiction was self-medication, the way alcohol may be for depressed adults. It was insufficient, but it helped me get by from day to day.</p><p class="MsoNormal">Mr. G. was hip to sci fi; he read it himself (he also had, I learned years later, a rather serious drinking problem). It was from him that I first heard the fatal title <span mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; ">Lord of the Rings</span>—Mr. G. was writing a master’s thesis on it. In retrospect, that fact alone reveals the quality and range of his mind, but for me at that time the thought of such work was astonishing. On Mr. G’s recommendation I ordered Tolkien from the only real bookstore in the area, a tiny establishment in the next town 30 miles up the highway; my order was weeks being filled. It’s hard to imagine, now, a universe before Borders and the internet, when there were still arcane tomes (not to mention musical recordings) one virtually had to scour the earth to locate and obtain. The town I lived in was a mental black hole, the epicenter of Anderson’s force field. I gathered my little trove of secrets and built a life raft of them.</p><p class="MsoNormal">*</p><p class="MsoNormal">Mr. G. faced the class. It was 11:45 on a Friday, almost the end of the period, late in the school year. The high school principal had just completed 10 minutes of “announcements” on the school’s new intercom system, a device that allowed Mr. K., the principal, not only to speak his mind to all of us at will, but at the flip of a switch to listen in to any classroom any time he chose. Mr. K. had at his disposal a calendar of famous events in history, and every day we would be treated to at least one historic event that had occurred on the date at which we were cursed to have arrived. “Chirren,” he would intone in his deep rural southern drawl, an accent so intense that even though all of us had similar accents, Mr. K.’s was unusual, “today is the birthday of Sir Thomas More. Now, as you know, chirren, Sir Thomas More was a great American statesman. . . .”</p><p class="MsoNormal">Mr. G.’s eyes rolled back in his head as if he were having an epileptic seizure. He shook himself all over like a dog shaking water off its back. We all laughed and the intercom finally went silent.</p><p class="MsoNormal">“<span mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; ">Chirren</span>,” said Mr. G. in a crass and accurate imitation of the principal, “I have something for you.” He began passing out the mimeographed material; the incense of mimeo ink suffused the room.</p><p class="MsoNormal">“I’m giving you this to read,” he said as he passed the thin stapled packet around, “because I trust you, OK? But you have to promise me something.” He paused and gave us a melodramatic Steve McQueen stare. “You have to promise not to tell anyone—<span mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; ">anyone</span>—by which I mean your parents, your minister, or your other teachers—that I gave you this. If you can’t promise me that, give the material back to me immediately.” He waited; nobody moved. “Good. I take your silence as acceptance of my terms. You must not tell, because if you do—“ another pause, this one with a more serious tone—“if you do, I will get in seriously deep doo-doo. OK? Seriously. So read this, but keep it to yourself. Do not, repeat, do not let it fall into enemy hands! Return with it tomorrow; I will take it up again; if you do not return it tomorrow, I will give you an F not only in this class but for your entire miserable life! Do I make myself clear, peons? Return it, and we will discuss it tomorrow. You have 24 hours to live with this secret document. Class dismissed!”</p><p class="MsoNormal">Lunch time. We began to gather our notebooks.</p><p class="MsoNormal">“Oh, wait!” Mr. G. shouted, as he had to in order to make himself heard above the din. “Wait wait wait.<span> </span>One other thing you need to know: the word<span mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; ">nada</span>—n-a-d-a—is a Spanish word. It means <span mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; ">nothing.</span> By which I do not mean it means nothing. I mean it is the Spanish word for <span mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; ">nothing.</span> Now begone with you, you orcs!”</p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><p class="MsoNormal">*</p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><p class="MsoNormal">I do not know how the others in the class felt; I never discussed it with any of them. I, however, was riveted, so much so that I skipped lunch (not so unusual for me, since eating lunch in our school cafeteria was an ordeal scarcely to be contemplated). I went as quickly as I could to my usual refuge: the band hall, a place that, by virtue of my so-called musicianship, was virtually my personal fiefdom. There were a few other students there; a fierce game of ping-pong was in progress and several students were watching. (A ping-pong table in the band hall, you ask? Yes: there was a ping-pong table in our band hall. But that is another story, chirren.) I circumvented them, entered an empty practice room, and took out my mimeographed sheets.</p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><blockquote><p class="MsoNormal"><span>A Clean, Well-Lighted Place</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span>Ernest Hemingway</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span>It was very late and everyone had left the cafe except an old man who sat in the shadow the leaves of the tree made against the electric light. In the day time the street was dusty, but at night the dew settled the dust and the old man liked to sit late because he was deaf and now at night it was quiet and he felt the difference. The two waiters inside the cafe knew that the old man was a little drunk, and while he was a good client they knew that if he became too drunk he would leave without paying, so they kept watch on him.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span>"Last week he tried to commit suicide," one waiter said.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span>"Why?"<span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span>"He was in despair."</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span>"What about?"</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span>"Nothing."</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span>"How do you know it was nothing?"</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span>"He has plenty of money."</span></p></blockquote><p class="MsoNormal"></p><p class="MsoNormal">Feeling a little drunk on mimeograph ink, I read these words. What had I expected? What could be so dangerous that Mr. G. swore us all to secrecy? This? I read on, all the way through the 3 sheets; it took hardly any time at all.</p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><blockquote><p class="MsoNormal"><span>Turning off the electric light he continued the conversation with himself. It was the light of course but it is necessary that the place be clean and pleasant. You do not want music. Certainly you do not want music. Nor can you stand before a bar with dignity although that is all that is provided for these hours. What did he fear? It was not a fear or dread, It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and a man was a nothing too. It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order. Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada. Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee. He smiled and stood before a bar with a shining steam pressure coffee machine.</span></p></blockquote><p class="MsoNormal"><span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span>The next day, in Mr. G.’s class, there was a discussion. Of that, I have absolutely no shred of a memory. Nothing was said there that made a difference to me, to my understanding (or lack thereof) of Hemingway’s great story. What I remember was my naked encounter with the forbidden document, the sheer strangeness of it. I did not have the equipment to understand it. I had never stood before a bar—a bar of any kind—with dignity or without. But there was a tone here that spoke to me, there was a black hole at the heart of the story that I knew and that terrified me, familiar though it may be: “It was all a nothing and a man was a nothing too . . . Some lived in it and never felt it, but he knew it was all nada. . . .” This was it. This was the problem, the force field, the heart of darkness. Alien though it was, this was my life.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span>I gave back Mr. G.’s copy of the story at the end of class, like everyone else. If anyone else in the class felt anything unusual had happened, they didn’t show it. But on my way out of the room, I paused by Mr. G.’s desk.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span>“Mr. G.,” I said, and stopped.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span>Mr. G. assumed his faux priesthood. “Yes, my son.”</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span>“This prayer to nothing. . . .”</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span>“Speak.”</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span>“What does it mean?”</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span>He signed and dropped his act for a moment. “I can’t tell you that,” he said.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span>I paused at that. It seemed like a teacher trick, like telling someone <span mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; ">if you can't spell it go look it up.</span> "You want me to figure it out on my own?"</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span>He laughed. “No,” he said. “I can’t tell you because I don’t know.”</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span>I didn’t know what to say. If he didn’t know what the story meant, why had he given it to us?</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span>He paused a moment, looking bemused. Then he snapped his fingers and nodded. “Let me give you something else,” he said. “But you have to promise to be careful with it.”</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span>“Why,” I said, taking on some of his irony. “Because it’ll get you into trouble?”</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span>“No,” he said, “because it’s a library book, and if you lose it you’ll have to pay for it.”</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span>Out of his briefcase he brought a slender book. “You won’t understand this either,” he said, “any more than I do. But read it anyway.”</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span>I picked it up and looked at the spine.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span>“<span mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; ">Hamlet?" </span>I said.</span></p></div></span></div>T.R. Hummerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12113264848463596680noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2667521601821857519.post-38717585037353921302009-06-02T07:24:00.001-07:002009-06-03T09:14:48.116-07:00The "Education" of This Poet (3): The Hive<div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:'Goudy Old Style';"><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; background-image: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; -webkit-background-clip: initial; -webkit-background-origin: initial; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font: normal normal normal 13px/19px Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; padding-top: 0.6em; padding-right: 0.6em; padding-bottom: 0.6em; padding-left: 0.6em; background-position: initial initial; "><p><a href="http://livxuponxhope.deviantart.com/art/Zeus-visits-Danae-91514315?moodonly=1" mce_href="http://livxuponxhope.deviantart.com/art/Zeus-visits-Danae-91514315?moodonly=1"><img class="size-full wp-image-957 aligncenter" src="http://linebreak.org/blog/wp-content/uploads//2009/05/zeus_visits_danae_by_livxuponxhope.png" mce_src="http://linebreak.org/blog/wp-content/uploads//2009/05/zeus_visits_danae_by_livxuponxhope.png" alt="zeus_visits_danae_by_livxuponxhope" width="420" height="309" style="border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; " /></a><br /></p><div style="text-align: right;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><a class="u" href="http://livxuponxhope.deviantart.com/" mce_href="http://livxuponxhope.deviantart.com/">livxuponxhope</a></span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: right;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: right;"><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; "><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-size:small;"><blockquote><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-size:small;">For the past few days, at the invitation of the editors of the online journal </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-size:small;">Linebreak</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-size:small;">, I've been a guest blogger; the work I did for that very welcome gig was inevitably connected with writing I've been doing for </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-size:small;">Mindbook </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-size:small;">for the past several months. Therefore, with the permission of </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-size:small;">Linebreak,</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-size:small;">I'm reproducing those entries. Be sure to visit <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; "><a href="http://www.linebreak.org/" style="color: rgb(153, 153, 153); text-decoration: none; ">Linebreak</a></span> to see the excellent work they're publishing.</span></i></blockquote></span></i><br /></span></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; "><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 16px;"><br /></span></div></span></div><p></p><p>They put the big gloves on my hands. They covered my head with the veil. They lit the necessary incense, and the aura of pine surrounded me.</p><p>Everything we needed was abandoned there, like theater props left backstage after the play’s run ends. It was as though the Rapture had come, and the inhabitants of a world had suddenly disappeared, leaving behind not less than everything:</p><p><span mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; ">I saw an arbour with a drooping roof<br />Of trellis vines, and bells, and larger blooms,<br />Like floral censers swinging light in air;<br />Before its wreathed doorway, on a mound<br />Of moss, was spread a feast of summer fruits,<br />Which, nearer seen, seem'd refuse of a meal<br />By angel tasted or our Mother Eve;<br />For empty shells were scattered on the grass,<br />And grape stalks but half bare, and remnants more,<br />Sweet smelling, whose pure kinds I could not know.<br />Still was more plenty than the fabled horn<br />Thrice emptied could pour forth, at banqueting<br />For Proserpine return'd to her own fields,<br />Where the white heifers low.</span></p><p>Years later, when I read these lines from Keats’s “The Fall of Hyperion,” the scene was familiar to me, curiously homelike for all its alien imagery and antiquated diction.</p><p>But that was in the future. Now, my brother and my cousin were arraying me for the quest they had conceived for me. We were in an old shed on the family farm; it was full of the smell of dust and rotted wood, and another, overpoweringly sweet smell which was not new to me but which I could not identify; shortly it would be forever etched in my olfactory brain: the perfume of beeswax.“He’s ready,” my cousin said to my brother, and then to me, “Out.”</p><p>We left the dark shed and entered a perfect day in early June, late morning, sunlight filtered by the leaves of ancient oaks. The armor I was wearing smelled strange to me: mildew and dust and beeswax mixed. The canvas of the bee veil was stiff with disuse; I was wearing blinders. My cousin, from behind me, steered me by the shoulders.</p><p>“Which one?” my brother said.</p><p>“It don’t matter,” said my cousin. “This one here: the first one.”</p><p>The old beehives stood abandoned in the grove, like neglected tenements, a failed housing project in an inner city that Homer would have understood. Some of the hives were empty. Some had abandoned boxes, whole floors of the high-rise gone dark. Others were fully occupied, almost as if they had been tended for the six or seven years that had passed since anyone had paid attention to them. It was toward one of these that my cousin steered me.</p><p>“That’s the one right there,” he said, suddenly at some distance behind me. “Do it.”</p><p>The hive in question was illuminated by a single shaft of sunlight that slipped in through the canopy of leaves high above me (a perfect cinematic set-up, O Muse of Memory). Its old white paint seemed suddenly blinding. I stood before it utterly strange to myself, like an image of a diver from my Classics Comics version of <span mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; ">Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea</span>. The decrepit smoker in my hand leaked a little pine-fog. “Pump the smoker,” my brother said. He seemed to be a thousand miles away.</p><p>This adventure was my cousin’s idea. He was, stated bluntly, a bully, and I was the primary target of his aggression, being young enough for him to dominate but old enough to be a challenge, unlike his own younger siblings. My brother was not a bully, but he was the B Male in this particular pack; he did not generally oppose my cousin’s will. Furthermore, the Teutonic genes in him, which were leading him toward a career as an engineer even as they were nudging me to become a poet, made him interested in the inner workings of things. Just what was inside a beehive? How did the whole deal work?</p><p>It had begun as a dare, which I took because I was defiant, obstinate, and stupid in the face of a challenge, especially from a bully. But as I stood there at the bottom of the grove’s ocean of shadow and light, all of that dropped away. The hive hummed, a mystery. It was my job to take off the lid.</p><p>Beyond that, there was really no goal. We knew there was honey in the hive, but none of us had even the glimmering of a clue how to extract it. There were also bees in the hive, and all of us knew what that meant. “You’ll be OK,” my brother said. “These are the things beekeepers use to keep the bees from stinging them. And when you smoke the hive they’ll all go to sleep anyway.”</p><p>That was the dare: just take the lid off a three-foot-tall skyscraper full of bees. It was a dare and not a wager; if I did this thing, I gained nothing except the doing. Obstinate and stupid: at least I could have wagered a month’s free passage from bullying. But it never crossed my mind. Did anything cross my mind, ever, in those years? I was seven years old; my brother and my cousin were eleven. What were we even doing in the world? Why did we exist?</p><p>I pumped the bellows of the smoker; the smoldering pine straw inside flared and released a dense aromatic fog.</p><p>The day receded. I stepped across a boundary between worlds.</p><p>When the smoke entered the hive, its pitch and volume changed, but it did not fall silent. I pumped for what seemed hours, until a voice from outside the cloud commanded me: Enough. Open the hive.</p><p><span mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; ">I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,<br />And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;<br />Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,<br />And live alone in the bee-loud glade.<br />And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,<br />Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;<br />There midnight's all a-glimmer, and noon a purple glow,<br />And evening full of the linnet's wings.<br />I will arise and go now, for always night and day<br />I hear the water lapping with low sounds by the shore;<br />While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,<br />I hear it in the deep heart's core.</span></p><p>Years later I found my way to Yeats. There was much in poetry that I was slow to understand when I first encountered it, but this poem of Yeats’s, like so much in Keats, revealed itself immediately. He spoke not so much of a life I knew as of one that I had glimpsed between the lines of the clumsy poem that was the life I was trying to live. There was a power in certain poems that I intuited long before I grasped its sources; it was the golden lightning not of the gods but of the world, the force that lived, for instance, in the core of a beehive. It could hurt you; it could even kill you. But if you were lucky, if you stood still enough, if you wore the veil, it was a gnosis, a pure illumination.</p><p>I did not know that the lid of the hive would be sealed shut from within by beeswax. I expected it to open like an unlocked treasure chest, or a Christmas present. When I pulled on the edge it resisted; I tugged and the rotten wood gave way; the whole hive began to disintegrate. As it fell apart, the lid skewed off in my hands.</p><p>They revealed themselves in the hundreds, clustered on their comb. I had not known there would be so many, or that they would be so golden there in the light of that summer morning. I had not known how the music of the hive would modulate in the light, how the swarm would undulate as I watched them through the cloud that rose from my hand. I had not known that lightning lived in the darkness, or what it meant when it came into the light.</p></div></span></div>T.R. Hummerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12113264848463596680noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2667521601821857519.post-24512470254082300912009-06-01T17:28:00.000-07:002009-06-01T18:27:25.868-07:00The "Education" of This Poet (2): A Length of Hemp Rope<div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:'Goudy Old Style';"><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; background-image: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; -webkit-background-clip: initial; -webkit-background-origin: initial; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font: normal normal normal 13px/19px Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; padding-top: 0.6em; padding-right: 0.6em; padding-bottom: 0.6em; padding-left: 0.6em; background-position: initial initial; "><p class="MsoNormal" mce_style="text-align: center;" style="text-align: center; "><img class="size-full wp-image-938 aligncenter" src="http://linebreak.org/blog/wp-content/uploads//2009/05/man_on_mule_2007.jpg" mce_src="http://linebreak.org/blog/wp-content/uploads//2009/05/man_on_mule_2007.jpg" alt="man_on_mule_2007" width="461" height="350" style="border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; " /></p><p class="MsoNormal" mce_style="text-align: right;" style="text-align: right; "><span mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; ">Nathan Simpson</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" mce_style="text-align: right;" style="text-align: right; "><i><br /></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" mce_style="text-align: right;" style="text-align: right; "><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" font-style: normal; line-height: 25px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-size:16px;"></span></i></p><i><div style="text-align: left; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px; "><i><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-size:small;"><blockquote><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-size:small;">For the past few days, at the invitation of the editors of the online journal </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-size:small;">Linebreak</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-size:small;">, I've been a guest blogger; the work I did for that very welcome gig was inevitably connected with writing I've been doing for </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-size:small;">Mindbook </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-size:small;">for the past several months. Therefore, with the permission of </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-size:small;">Linebreak,</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-size:small;"> I'm reproducing those entries. Be sure to visit <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; "><a href="http://www.linebreak.org/" style="color: rgb(153, 153, 153); text-decoration: none; ">Linebreak</a></span> to see the excellent work they're publishing.</span></i></blockquote><blockquote><br /></blockquote><blockquote><br /></blockquote></span></i><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-size:small;"></span></i></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-size:small;"><i></i></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px; font-size:13px;"></span></div></i><p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Begin with a human figure—a silhouette of a human figure, for the moment, backlit by sunset—a human figure walking down a road. The road is a dirt road, hard-packed reddish-beige earth. Down its center a pair of bare ruts run, where passing cars and trucks and tractors have flattened, hardened, and buffed it to a kind of ceramic sheen. The person in view, however, does not walk in the rutted center of the road, but in the gravel on its narrow shoulder. One’s first interpretation of this fact might be that he—for let us now deploy the masculine pronoun—walks as he does for safety’s sake; but any traffic in a place as remote as this would be obvious even from a great distance, and if he so chose, he could walk the center of the road without danger either to himself or to the animal he leads on a length of hemp rope. It is more likely that his position is a concession to the animal than to any merely human consideration. The old brown mule follows the man at a distance of about six feet, walking entirely off the road, from where it stops often to snatch a mouthful; when the mule stops, the man stops, in a sort of enforced symbiosis of which the mule most often appears the dominant component. Still, the rope is long enough that the man could, if he chose, walk the center, and let the mule still graze the shoulder. Surely it would be easier to walk along one of the ruts, flat and hard as a sidewalk, than in the gravel along the road’s edge; yet surely walking as he does is a choice—dictated perhaps by a deference that precludes his seizing the center.</p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><p class="MsoNormal">Though more than fifty years have passed since the time of which I write, if you stood today in the place where I locate the lens of my memory, the scene would be remarkably similar. Both man and mule are decades dead, the road remains still unpaved and fundamentally unaltered though likely now it is in worse repair than it was then.</p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><p class="MsoNormal">About the length of hemp rope, who knows?</p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><p class="MsoNormal">*</p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><p class="MsoNormal">There are questions about everything I have described here. About the road, for instance, it is worth wondering when it came to be here, and how, and especially why. It is a rural road maintained—however intermittently and poorly—by the county board of supervisors, and yet is serves, almost entirely, a single farm. The road is an ovoid loop appended to a slightly wider main road that runs several miles before terminating in a blacktop road that extends another fifteen miles to the nearest (tiny) town. The loop was a three-mile detour, so to speak, through the farm, and was used by almost no one other than those who lived there—all members of one extended family plus their employees. Is it usual for county governments to build and maintain roads for such constituencies and narrow purposes?</p><p class="MsoNormal">And the mule: how old is it? In my memory the mule is about as old, in mule years, as the man in human ones; but is that an accurate recollection or an embellishment? And, objectively, just what <span mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; ">is</span> the ratio of mule to human years? The mule could be a sort of litmus test of memory if it were possible, now, to retrieve any real information concerning this particular animal. What is the story of a mule’s life? Has it known the work of the plow? Can I see, through my well-placed lens, bare patches on its shoulders where years of a rubbing harness would have worn the hair away? Or is that one of memory’s appended footnotes, phrased in the subjunctive?</p><p class="MsoNormal">This particular animal, in truth, is generations dead. And what is done with a mule, on this particular farm, when it dies? Most likely it is left in the field where it falls—or if it collapses near a house, it is dragged to some more remote spot—and becomes client to the good undertaking of the earth and its assistants, the beetle and the buzzard. The pastures of this farm are littered with bones—bones of cattle, or horses, the delicate bones of cattle egrets, the once quick bones of rabbit, squirrel, fox. Bones from fresh deaths are found all together, waiting for a naturalist to wire them back together; older, dryer bones are scattered—rib here, skull there. Nobody bothers to bury animals here, not even the “noble” species. I once found, in a grove a mile behind a house, the skull of a dog with a clean bullet-hole in its skull, and understood that here lay our English pointer Daisy; she had grown old and infirm and was assisted to her end. Another day, walking a farther field, I found the body of a black Angus heifer, dead of unknown causes, swollen to half again her normal size. Approaching her from the back, I noticed armies of insects coming and going, those leaving burdened with imponderable bits of matter. I circled her at some distance and saw a gaping cavity in her belly, out of which stepped, as I stood there, one of the lords of the underworld at his leisure: a huge turkey vulture who had been entirely hidden inside her and came forth now to my view like the issue of a Caesarian birth: grand and otherworldly, as Elizabeth Bishop writes of her hierophant moose, one of the royal family of Otherness.</p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><p class="MsoNormal">And the hemp rope? Long gone to dust, one might be tempted to think, thrown on some trash heap, dropped in a ditch, exposed to the action of water and light, the moral equivalent of vultures to a piece of rope. But in other circumstances—left in a barn, or even the ruin of an abandoned house—it might well endure, might still exist, unknown, unused, unrecognized, an Ariadne’s thread for memory if memory could only locate it.</p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><p class="MsoNormal">*</p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><p class="MsoNormal">But now the children are coming. From the west side of the road, invoked from pecan tree shade by the figure of the man and mule, two come; from the east side of the road, drawn from oak shade, two others, all of them running. The western two are blond, the eastern two dark-haired, and if one could trust to the evidence of narrative juxtaposition, one would conclude that the influence of pecan trees generates blondness, that of oak the opposite—a train of reasoning that does not trouble the man or the mule. The man sees them coming as he rounds the bend in the road, or more likely hears them coming—for all are shouting his name—and he stops for them.</p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><p class="MsoNormal">The first child to reach him is the oldest of the four, the taller of the blond pair, a boy who is on this particular afternoon nine years old, a boy thin as bee-wire, almost painfully thin, each of his ribs clearly etched on his torso. He is not thin from any scarcity of food in his parents’ tiny house, which always smells overpoweringly of something cooking—it is from pure disposition. There is a tension in him, an energy apparent usually as some degree of anger, which propels his every step, every gesture, every expression. So driven, he reaches the man with the mule well in advance of the other three children. He stops, wordless and scowling. The others, still yards away and charging, are shouting the man’s name, but this boy stands silent, wearing nothing but a pair of dirty shorts, staring up with his clear blue eyes, his anger hovering like an aura, his very being a silent demand: an order.</p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><p class="MsoNormal">And the man obeys. He stoops and scoops the boy up, his hands under the boy’s armpits; he swings him up and sets him squarely on the mule’s back. By the time the other three children arrive, this boy’s mule ride is already half over.</p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><p class="MsoNormal">*</p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><p class="MsoNormal">I wrote of the lens of memory, the lens of <span mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; ">my</span> memory, creating a simultaneous lapse and overlay of time. Placing the lens on its tripod of ganglia, I observe what it reveals and I record it, one might assume. It would be pretty to think so. So much is swept away in fifty years, not only from the world but from memory as well—and there is so little correspondence between what is swept away from the world on the one hand and from memory on the other—that the relationship between what I remember and anything we might call “fact” is profoundly problematic. The problem, of course, is both commonplace and insoluble, and I do not propose to solve it or even more than glancingly address it here. Better minds than mine have foundered on this issue, and I have nothing original or incisive to add to the account that has run at least from Augustine’s <span mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; ">Confessions</span> through Wordsworth, Freud, and Proust down to our own moment, whatever a moment may be. Memory is not my subject, but it is inevitably my medium. Just as a filmmaker cannot escape the fact that—do what he or she may to disguise it—the camera is always and forever a filmmaker’s point of view, so mine is the lens of memory. Each has its power, its virtue, its flaws, its fatal limit. The camera is relentlessly external; however much it may “desire” to penetrate a consciousness, it is by definition left outside. For memory, obviously, the situation is the opposite. Facts are no more the business of memory than they are the business of poetry. Memory, indeed, is the original poetry.</p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><p class="MsoNormal">As to fact: there are certain sources that might verify or deny some aspects of the poem of the past I embody: research that could still be done, interviews that could be carried out. The “facts” I might discover thereby would in reality be nothing more than the contents of other peoples’ memories, compounding my own illusions with the illusion of corroboration or correction.</p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><p class="MsoNormal">The shameful truth is that I am not interested in facts. What concerns me is the traces left in me at the remove of half a century of the world in which I then lived, a world which now—no matter how similar it may appear to a carefully framing, squinting observer seeking out the appearance of identity and just as carefully screening out difference—is completely and irrevocably vanished.</p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><p class="MsoNormal">What to make of this disappearance—and not its causes but its effects—is my true subject. Czeslaw Milosz has written repeatedly of his native Lithuania, which, when he was born there in 1911, was still, he says, medieval, and which he saw destroyed several times over in the course of his lifetime by successive invasions, both military and ideological. For him, the destruction of this “native realm” was a disaster, or a series of disasters, and an irrevocable loss. There is a considerable portion of his vast canon given over to a passionate and thoroughly convincing nostalgia for that destroyed place, that inundated time. It is a nostalgia which is utterly unsentimental, charged with emotion though it may be. The condition is imperative, and it carries a vital duty. Milosz serves it encyclopedically. He is required, like a sort of anti-Adam, to name all the creatures of a vanished Eden—or, a better metaphor, he unpacks himself like the ark of Noah, disgorging everything that has survived the Flood by being inside him. It is a monumental exercise, dependent on an impervious being and an infallible faith in his own memory—for if memory is suspect here, then the exercise is useless. The vessel must be perfect, numinous, in a sense divine. However earthly, twisted, and corrupt the materials of which it is made—and Milosz takes a certain delight in recording this side of himself—the vessel as such must float, upheld by a transcendent spirit. Otherwise, when they come down off the ramp onto dry land—these landscapes, these villas, these rivers, these beautiful young women and eccentric brilliant men, these lapdogs, these peasants, these mountains, these victims—they will have been merely made up, not saved.</p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><p class="MsoNormal">My situation is different from the one with which Milosz was fated to contend—is, in many respects, its polar opposite—and the nature of selfhood therein, and hence the nature and role of memory, while equally crucial, is likewise wholly other. I evoke a world whose disappearance I must not merely approve but celebrate: it is gone, it needed and deserved to go, good riddance to it, to every human shred of it good riddance. It was a world that was corrupted by its fundamental principles, and that corruption extended to all its creation, including its children: including the child I was. I am not the safe miraculous vehicle that rescues the things of that world; I am rather, in a sense more than metaphorical, their destroyer.</p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><p class="MsoNormal">*</p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><p class="MsoNormal">That man with a mule was a black man. He was a tenant farmer who had given his entire life to working for a family of white people, being rewarded for his labor with very little money and less respect. Or so I assume. The truth of the matter is that I know almost nothing about him. All I have at first hand is this memory of his apparently endless circuit of the farm, and his encounters with us children. Even his appearance is lost to me: when I try to see him, I see a blur, not really a face.</p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><p class="MsoNormal">Even the day that I have evoked here is not really a singular memory but a composite: it must have been more or less so because it was more or less so many times in those years. How many times? I haven’t a clue. The man with the mule would walk past our house; we would run out expecting—indeed demanding, albeit little demanding was needed—to be given a ride. Each of us would be lifted up, would ride the mule perhaps ten yards, and be set down, replaced by another child until everyone had been given a turn. Then the man and the mule would walk on, disappearing around the next bend in the road; but by then we children would have forgotten them.</p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><p class="MsoNormal">Forgotten?</p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><p class="MsoNormal">How often did I ride that mule? I have absolutely no idea. All such instances have been compressed in my recollection, by the sedimentary weight of 50 years, into a single fossil. I rode the mule once. That can’t be true: I must have ridden it many times. But I can reconstitute only one ride, undoubtedly a composite of—how many? Six, a dozen, twenty, a hundred? On the day I have invented, I was five years old, the youngest of the four boys who ran out. I was the smallest of the dark-haired, oak-stained ones. The oldest, the blond boy, was my cousin from across the road. He lived in a pecan tree. No, he lived in a tiny cinderblock house full of jealousies and angers which he internalized seemingly at birth, and continues to embody to this day. No, he died in Vietnam. No, he died of polio. No. No. No.</p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><p class="MsoNormal">And who was I? What house did I live in? Did I go to a war? Was I ill? Did I live or die?</p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><p class="MsoNormal">The mule is generations dead: mule generations certainly. The black man with whom he walked is dead; his bones no doubt lie in some graveyard, unlike those of the mule, though what graveyard I have no idea. Even his name is lost to me—his real name. I remember the name by which he was known: we called him Stump. Everyone did. Old Stump and his mule. Not Mr. Stump. Stump. We children came shouting, <span mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; ">Stump, Stump!</span> Our shouts were a presumption and a demand. Did we ever ask politely for a ride? Did we ever say <span mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; ">thank you</span> when he set us down? I don’t remember, but I doubt it. We were white children. We were the children of Mr. Glenn and Cap, one of the names by which my father was known: not cap as in hat, but cap as in Captain. Did we want a ride on the black man’s mule? The black man would give us a ride. My cousin was our leader; I did not have the courage or the presumption or the angers that drove him, but I followed. I followed in his demand, and I, as Whitman put it, assumed what he assumed. This is who you are: you are a white boy.</p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><p class="MsoNormal">The man with the mule never hurried. He never seemed either out of sorts or happy; he never seemed either glad or angry to see us. Such, in any case, is the memory I make of him. Is that true? I don’t know. It is the trace of him that survives in me: patience, at least the appearance of a disinterested kindness, regularity. In fact, his life was obviously complicated, full of trouble and joy, pain and need and passion, everything. I knew, and know, nothing of that. He was Stump. He lived on our farm. He walked with a mule. Whose mule? Did he own the mule, or was he its caretaker or simply its companion? He did not own the fabled forty acres; did he at least own the mule? And what about the piece of rope: did he at least own that?</p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><p class="MsoNormal">I do not know who he was. Not knowing who he was, I do not know myself. I am forever destabilized by that ignorance, which was willed. He was there to be used, not known. He was there to be a flat character in the narrative of the round characters. The world that used him that way no longer exists except in the memories of those of us who were there and who want to remember. For the most part, in my experience, the people who were there have no stomach for remembering it—or they are incapable of it. But then, who is capable? Certainly I am not. What remains most true for me from that time is the culpability I first inherited, and then the ideas I embraced, at least for awhile. We were the masters of a world other people built on our behalf. Our happiness was based on their sweat. We know that. Our knowledge of that has become one of the clichés of Southernness. But it is important not to let it sink entirely to the level of the cliché. What we did because of who we thought we were had real consequences, however difficult they may be to recover.</p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><p class="MsoNormal">A piece of rope. It’s something: something concrete. Used properly, a piece of rope is a little length of power: it can control, it can possess, it can capture, torture, kill. Rope is the weapon of the lynch mob. In the Japanese art of rope bondage, <span mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; ">kinbaru</span>, rope is an aesthetic medium and a tool for ecstasy. Rope connects things. It holds things. It can sustain and it can destroy.</p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><p class="MsoNormal">I am not an ark. I am a piece of hemp rope, one end tied to what I know of myself, the other end lost in a cloud of ignorance.</p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><p class="MsoNormal">The piper plays; the rope uncoils and rises into the air; the piper climbs the rope and vanishes. That vanishing is my destiny.</p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><p class="MsoNormal">Hence, my friends, poetry.<br /></p></div></span></div>T.R. Hummerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12113264848463596680noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2667521601821857519.post-69226030777622474822009-06-01T15:55:00.000-07:002009-06-01T16:06:24.027-07:00The "Education" of This Poet (1): Primer<div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 19px; font-size:13px;"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-923" src="http://linebreak.org/blog/wp-content/uploads//2009/05/corporalpunishment.jpg" mce_src="http://linebreak.org/blog/wp-content/uploads//2009/05/corporalpunishment.jpg" alt="corporalpunishment" width="380" height="349" style="border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; " /></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 19px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 19px;"><i><blockquote><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">For the past few days, at the invitation of the editors of the online journal </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Linebreak</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">, I've been a guest blogger; the work I did for that very welcome gig was inevitably connected with writing I've been doing for </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Mindbook </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">for the past several months. Therefore, with the permission of </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Linebreak,</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> I'm reproducing those entries. Be sure to visit <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.linebreak.org">Linebreak</a></span> to see the excellent work they're publishing.</span></i></blockquote></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><i></i></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 19px; font-size:13px;"><p class="MsoNormal"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Certain kinds of introspection are less like meditative journeys and more like putting one’s hand into an ant colony. For me, thinking about my early experiences with the official educational process is an exercise in ant excavation: painful, revelatory of ugly inhuman things, and generally uncanny. To revisit there, for me, is to reenter a narrative that has the dark numinousity of a primal scene, simultaneously repellant and fascinating.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">It’s impossible for me to know how I would be different had I grown up in another place (for present purposes I leave out of account the possibilities in growing up in other times)—or whether I would be different, in any fundamental way, at all. I have grown, over subsequent decades, into a selfhood that I experience less as a unitary thing (like a potato or a stone) than as a semi-random composite, like a coral reef. This composite has turned out to be a reasonably fertile medium for poetry and other kinds of writing. To what extent poetry is its necessary product I can’t say; whether I would be a poet had I not undergone the education that was given me I can’t know. All I know is how it was and how it is. For other writers, the “education of the poet” as a subject has been mostly either prescriptive or descriptive; in my own case, it takes the form of a cautionary tale, and the majority of the caution is directed at me and me alone.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">*</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">I have written elsewhere, at some length, in poems as well as prose, about the place that was my jumping-off point from nonbeing: eastern Mississippi, a farming community, from 1950 onward. My family was sufficiently typical there to be virtually invisible by reason of protective coloring—literally coloring, given the state of race relations in that place and in those days. Basic facts: 1. we were white folk; 2. white people owned, and controlled, just about everything there was in that place; 3. white people were a distinct minority of the population, which was approximately 70-30 black to white. These three simple facts give rise to wide-reaching and, to say the least, unpleasant social dynamics.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">For present purposes it is not necessary to rehearse the whole history of race relations in America. Suffice it to say that I lived through a vital transition point in our history—the Civil Rights Movement—beginning on the wrong side of it, and I lived through it first in my nerves and muscles and belly and bowels more than in my mind. Institutional education, never completely disinterested or impersonal in the good sense, never “objective,” was complicit in the maintenance of the status quo. This too I have written about elsewhere, limning out the basic principle of education in the context of institutional racism from the side of the racists: that the process centers on mentally blinding one’s children. If African Americans were, in that particular version of the weird old America, invisible, they were only so by reason of the blindness of white people. Therefore it was the “God-given duty,” as it was perceived in that place, to pluck out one’s children’s eyes.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span><img src="http://linebreak.org/blog/wp-includes/js/tinymce/plugins/wordpress/img/trans.gif" mce_src="http://linebreak.org/blog/wp-includes/js/tinymce/plugins/wordpress/img/trans.gif" alt="" class="mceWPmore mceItemNoResize" title="More..." style="border-top-width: 1px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-top-style: dotted; border-top-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); display: block; width: 857px; height: 12px; margin-top: 15px; background-image: url(http://linebreak.org/blog/wp-includes/js/tinymce/plugins/wordpress/img/more_bug.gif); background-repeat: no-repeat; background-attachment: initial; -webkit-background-clip: initial; -webkit-background-origin: initial; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); background-position: 100% 0%; " /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">This process was never explicit, and for the most part was not conscious. If one had said to my fifth-grade teacher, “You are blinding these children,” she would have been shocked and outraged, and would have denied it—in perfectly good faith, in terms of her own consciousness. She was not blinding anyone, as far as she knew—she was teaching us math, English, history. The power of Jim Crow was rarely exercised (on us) personally: it was a collective phenomenon pressing itself on us not from any center, but from every periphery. Foucault would have understood it perfectly as a situation in which</span></span></p><p class="essayquotes"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span></span></span></p><blockquote><p class="essayquotes"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Power relations are both intentional and nonsubjective. If in fact they are intelligible, this is not because they are the effect of another instance that “explains” them, but rather because they are imbued, through and through, with calculation: there is no power that is exercised without a series of aims and objectives. But this does not mean that it results from the choice or decision of an individual subject; let us not look for the headquarters that presides over its rationality; neither the caste which governs, nor the groups which control the state apparatus, nor those who make the most important economic decisions direct the entire network of power that functions in a society (and makes </span><u><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">it</span></u><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> function); the rationality of power is characterized by tactics that are quite often explicit at the restricted level where they are inscribed (the local cynicism of power). . . . [T]he logic is perfectly clear, the aims decipherable, and yet it is often the case that no one is there to have invented them, and few who can be said to have formulated them: an implicit characteristic of the great anonymous, almost unspoken strategies which coordinate the loquacious tactics whose “inventors” or decision-makers are often without hypocrisy. . . . (</span><span mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">The History of Sexuality, volume 1, </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">94-95).</span></span></p></blockquote><p class="essayquotes"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span></span></span></p><p class="essayquotes"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">I have spent most of my adult life—while in the midst of other, at least apparently unrelated activities, far from my point of origin—thinking through the ramifications of the initiation my elders gave me into the world, how I had to reject the world I was given and the self that went along with it, and build a “new” one. There is a great deal to be said about that process, and I have already said a great deal about it. For the most part, the journey was negative and the process painful. I have detailed that </span><span mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">via negativa</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> elsewhere, because it seemed important to me to cast light on a subterranean journey so that others could see a largely unexplored cost of racism—the cost to the children of the racist.</span></span></p><p class="essayquotes"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">For now, I want to do something different: I want to revisit positive moments in my early mental formation, the things, people, events, accidents, that gave me windows into a different way of thought, signposts toward an unimagined future. In particular I want to tease out, as best I can, the materials that amounted to my early education </span><span mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">as</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> a poet, however far I may have been from understanding that I was in fact becoming a poet.</span></span></p><p class="essayquotes"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">It is my plan to write a series of posts, each taking up a different thread in each post, exploring a different avenue, or facet, or strand, or element of an inchoate, unreasonable, feckless process. As far as I can tell, I am who I am by accident, and the temptation to impose order on accident is as unavoidably human as it is mistaken, but I can at the very least pay tribute, and give thanks, to those well-nigh imponderable and ghostly forces that came to my aid where I lived so beautifully disguised to myself as a blind child.</span></span></p><p class="essayquotes"></p><p class="essayquotes" mce_style="text-align: center;" style="text-align: center; "><br /></p></span></div>T.R. Hummerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12113264848463596680noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2667521601821857519.post-80682747683167274902009-05-23T19:10:00.000-07:002009-05-23T19:18:25.997-07:00Schematic<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyg-WbCTXsU6WacXg4waB7OwsJTJYsQJxpTgdcgePInOIK3hBoSdjks1oM0MhfVuoB1O-nu9qMRyquLTW6yqfp2f-YZVc-8olfCvAGoHS4q7hbPzP3SJk_5KdZFwUMwcHsfXPO45F_3-Rc/s1600-h/botticellihellmapc1490.gif"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 259px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyg-WbCTXsU6WacXg4waB7OwsJTJYsQJxpTgdcgePInOIK3hBoSdjks1oM0MhfVuoB1O-nu9qMRyquLTW6yqfp2f-YZVc-8olfCvAGoHS4q7hbPzP3SJk_5KdZFwUMwcHsfXPO45F_3-Rc/s400/botticellihellmapc1490.gif" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5339208761150143538" /></a><i><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://youall.com/HELL/dante.htm">Botticell</a></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://youall.com/HELL/dante.htm">i</a></span></div></i><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#0000EE;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: underline;"><br /></span></span></div><br /><div>Inside the machine is another machine which refers to the machine enclosing it. So he touches her hand, and the image of a child emerges.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>*</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>The steel ratchet in the wind: she felt it against her corneas, pressing precisely into the metric eye sockets, turning, tightening.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>*</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>The elevator kept trembling: the mechanism out of key: but the riders held their eyes fixed on the dial, the reassuring arbitrary numbers.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>*</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Under the hood where gear meshes integer, in the hamster wheel of the heart, a singularity appears, an homunculus, a social security number.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>*</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Wreckage washed ashore, fragments of fuselage and cowling, seat-backs, oxygen masks, and hermit crabs remade themselves of metal and bone.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>*</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>A rat in the dark attic at midnight, bolt-cutter teeth incising insulation. Black wire, red wire. A spark. The pianist's hands stop playing.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>*</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>The train enters the tunnel, great piston breaches the oily cylinder, clockwork tide is driven to foam on the rocks, and the marriage is over.</div><div><br /></div>T.R. Hummerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12113264848463596680noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2667521601821857519.post-42790008763157083292009-05-16T19:27:00.000-07:002009-05-16T19:34:12.533-07:00Interrogations<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6ivR26m7xmrd7EwhvlIL0NSKbtk5nLkALuFliBmEpFypL7kHkV54v95m61GJIDOWF7v2eVLTogfz-GiQttBL8K66efu_CG6S_rVZqPpAg1gZtLKR23Ly-2L-LTwrgTn2ATn588Vl4W3kB/s1600-h/Interrogation.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 350px; height: 350px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6ivR26m7xmrd7EwhvlIL0NSKbtk5nLkALuFliBmEpFypL7kHkV54v95m61GJIDOWF7v2eVLTogfz-GiQttBL8K66efu_CG6S_rVZqPpAg1gZtLKR23Ly-2L-LTwrgTn2ATn588Vl4W3kB/s400/Interrogation.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5336615352157657298" /></a><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.calendarlive.com/media/photo/2003-03/6999016.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.mcall.com/topic/cl-et-johnson15mar15,0,7713663.story%3Fpage%3D2&usg=__TeLUgp5uhGdvVPNJHiwxRCGtwxo=&h=350&w=350&sz=23&hl=en&start=86&sig2=c0j_AnZ91_vxrpfH9rE-6A&um=1&tbnid=NKfKDZdkmOnwJM:&tbnh=120&tbnw=120&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dinterrogation%26ndsp%3D21%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN%26start%3D84%26um%3D1&ei=GncPSuPRO8LgtgfW9NT9Bw"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Matt Mahurin</span></i></a></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>At dinner, he sat silent, staring at his plate while the others chatted--a ringing in his ears, a gray aura around the chop, sulfurous mist.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>*</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>The astronomer closed his dome at dawn. The morning star incised the horizon with a smell of lilies and a circle of blood on the eyepiece.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>*</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>The old woman in the wheelchair watched raindrops inscribe the window. She read its poem to her blind friend, who mumbled protest: too fast.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>*</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>She pauses on the bridge and looks down. Something about the way water moves, about light. But the child pulls her skirt, crying time, time.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>*</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>They sat on the bridge rail drinking wine in starlight, watching for meteors to etch their glasscutter lineage into what passed for future.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>*</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Dying, by then, seemed normal to her, a breath and another breath and nothing, a stone dropped in water continuing in water to be a stone.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>*</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>In pinewoods at midnight the trapped weasel gnawing its own leg stops to consider its bitter self-taste.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>*</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Horses in a meadow over strata of loess and limestone, reflections limned through the meniscus of earth by fossilized skeletons of dolphins.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>*</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>That singular point on the continuum from which time reads like an inscribed transparency: just ahead, the hospital bed, the miraculous IV.</div><div><br /></div>T.R. Hummerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12113264848463596680noreply@blogger.com2