Mindbook

Emissary (V)

2010-09-10T15:02:00.001-07:00

photo by T.R. Hummer

9/10/10

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 here; 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.”

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.

E.M. Cioran writes that “the only corpse from which we can gain some advantage is the one preparing itself 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.

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 expressions, 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.

Emissary (IV)

2010-09-09T17:49:00.000-07:00

photo by T.R. Hummer

9/9/10

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.

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 important he was, and what a force 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.

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 supposed to do.

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.

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?

The world is the sum of its manifold resistances and our evanescent egos nothing more than the heat given off by its friction.

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 my 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.

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. Is like is the grammatical axis of simile; is 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.

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.

Emissary (III)

2010-09-08T19:24:00.000-07:00

photo by T.R. Hummer

9/8/10

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.

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.

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.

From the religious perspective, life is inevitably binary; time, so-called, is the visible side of an axis that rotates through two hemispheres: this life and some other. 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.

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.

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 only problem. Infinite resignation takes a long time. Giving up all one’s worldly possessions is a major administrative feat.

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, Food in History). I say a special farewell to my brother the ox. I am acquainted with his situation.

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 mysterium tremendum, 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.

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.

Emissary (II)

2010-09-07T17:51:00.000-07:00

photo by T.R. Hummer

9/7/10

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. Travel light, Pilgrim. The heavy ones go first.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

Emissary (I)

2010-09-07T14:46:00.000-07:00

Photo by T.R. Hummer

9/6/10

S. and I were cutting dying fronds from the palm in the back yard. I felt a bolt of hot empathy for the trimmings.

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^th birthday; I must now think of myself as an old man.

As old people go, I am only a beginner. But the learning curve promises to be steep, and graduation will come quickly.

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.

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 fait accompli. Long, long ago I thought of death as an enemy; now I understand the futility and foolishness of that anthropomorphization.

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: we come from concealment into the realm of the unconcealed and we linger awhile. There is concealment and I, like everything, will return there. My lingering approaches its conclusion.

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.

Heraclitus’s river cannot be stepped into twice. My river cannot be finally bid farewell.

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.

A Note To Scott Olsen, Editor of Ascent, on the Publication of the First All-Online Issue of That Magazine

2009-10-29T17:14:00.000-07:00

http://physics.weber.edu/carroll/archimedes/crown.htm

Hi, Scott, hi Ascent, bon voyage old wine in new bottles, or maybe that’s old photons in new circuit boards:

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

Go for it, with my blessing.

That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it? My blessing?

Go with Dog, my son. Your magazine is the loaves, fishes, and soup bones of literature.

Available Surfaces VII: In the Palm of the Poet's Hand

2009-08-30T09:03:00.001-07:00

St. Thomas Aquinas, by Franceso de Herrera

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

*

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.”
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.

As we walked back toward his car, Ron said, “Local legend has it that Hardy’s heart is not buried there at all.”

“What do you mean?”

“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.”

“You’re joking.”

“I’m not saying it’s true, but it’s what people say.”

“So, what did they do?”

“The legend says they killed a sheep and buried its heart there instead.”

I paused, considering this. Then I said, “You’ve just revealed a vital difference between Americans and the English, Ron.”

“How so?”

“An American would have killed the dog that ate the heart, and buried the dog; that way the heart would actually be there.”

Ron nodded solemnly. “You’re right. And an Englishman would never kill a dog. For any reason.”

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.

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.

*

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.

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.

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!”

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.

“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?”

“Oh, Ruth, no,” Ron said, “I couldn’t. I’m no good at it.”

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?”

“Of course I will,” I said. “But how do you do it?"

“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.”
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.”

Jack inclined his head slightly. Ron said, “Ruth, please tell him I say hello.”

“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.

Ruth looked at me. “That's it,” she said, “easy-peasy. Fancy a try?”

And so I took Jack Clemo’s hand.

*

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.

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.

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
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.

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.

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.

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).

*

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.

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.

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.

I said to Ruth, “I’m not certain I did that right.”

“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 . . . .”

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!”

Of course, of course, of course: he could speak perfectly well. Up until that moment, he had simply chosen not to do so.

*

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.

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.

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.”

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.

“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.

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.

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.

Jack and Ruth Clemo had whole libraries, whole lives, written in their hands.

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.

*

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.”

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.

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.

I said, “What’s he doing, Ruth?”

“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.”

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.

Jack Clemo: photo by Tricia Porter

Available Surfaces VI: Writ in Water

2009-08-29T19:14:00.000-07:00

Cattle Egret

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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,

the sharp flash,
The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.

Available Surfaces V: Can Teaching be Written?

2009-08-28T09:44:00.000-07:00

Emerson Lecturing

“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.
Well, can you?
What happens in a creative writing classroom?”
--David Baker, http://poemsoutloud.net/columns/archive/in_defense_of_teaching/

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.

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?

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.

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.

*

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

*

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Available Surfaces IV: Earth Angel

2009-08-27T11:57:00.000-07:00

Ohio Serpent Mound

". . . .for beauty is God's handwriting." --Ralph Waldo Emerson

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[*Reposted from The Best American Poetry Blog]

Available Surfaces III: Mrs. Quack and Miss Cuckoo

2009-08-25T18:05:00.000-07:00

Lay on, Macduff,/ And damn'd be him that first cries, "Hold, enough!" --William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 5 scene 8

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.

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.

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.

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 real pimples!

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 hard, and Mrs. Quack was deeply, even fundamentally lazy.

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.

*

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.

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.

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 au natural. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

We are climbing the educational ladder
We are climbing the educational ladder
We are climbing the educational ladder
Every day of our lives

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.

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.

And so we passed our year, shuttled back and forth daily between the Country of Cuckoo and the Queendom of Quack.

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.

“Psst,” he said, “hey, Turtle,” meaning me: “Watch. She’s about to do it again.”

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.

“Do what?” I said.

“Just look.”

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 Macbeth and found the line she was misquoting, I just shook my head and thought: typical.

“I first caught her doing it last week,” Fox said, as Mrs. Quack sat back down and resumed her marking.

“I’ve watched her every day since. She does it every time. Every time.”

“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.

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.

“Does that,” Fox said. He was on the verge of exploding with laughter; he hissed like a manic teakettle.

“You saw what she did? You saw?”

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.

Fox was jubilant. “You see what this means?”

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.

“Look here, Turtle. Check my writing assignment.”

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.

“She’ll be taking up the papers any minute,” he said. “This is all she gets from me.”

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 what I wrote. Words, numbers, it didn’t matter: I loved the work I did, and I took pride in it.

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.

Across the hall, Miss Cuckoo was singing: We are climbing the Educational ladder. 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.

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.

[*Reposted from The Best American Poetry Blog]

Available Surfaces II: The Gravitas of Paper

2009-08-24T23:11:00.000-07:00

"Another damned, thick, square book. Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr Gibbon?" --William Henry, First Duke of Gloucester

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. Inside the house, other boxes were accruing, because we were preparing to move.

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 Poetry in appropriately black Sharpie to prevent confusion; likely I had enough Fiction boxes to encompass a trio of novelists; and the Criticism could have stashed the cremains of a panel of deconstructionists in a tidy mausoleum.

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.

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.

That copy of Ulysses 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.

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.

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.

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, The Georgia Review. 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.

The boxes that were arriving on my porch were, in fact, arriving from Athens, Georgia. Their contents: the first 15 years of The Georgia Review. 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, Best Essays from The Georgia Review.

This task was, I began quickly to realize, Herculean in several senses. The Georgia Review 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 Best Poetry and Best Fiction issues of the Review ten years earlier; a Best Essays 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 The Georgia Review were particularly Augean Stable-ish. The task was huge, the terrain very messy, and the stakes high.

What were the stakes? I had the distinct impression that I was being tested. The Georgia Review 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.

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 Quarterly West, of The Kenyon Review, of The New England Review, and poetry editor of The Cimarron Review. 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.

There is hardly a literary quarterly anywhere that has office space as commodious as The Georgia Review; 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 The Georgia Review, 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 The Georgia Review 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.

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.

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 as content, rather the way a cereal company concerned entirely with matters of nutritional virtue might put forward oatmeal as 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.

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 The Georgia Review. 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 Review began as Agrarian and Fugitive outreach, and adopted a “genteel” segregationism grounded in “The Briar Patch”).

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.

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.

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.

There is something to be said for the internet.

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 made of paper. You are what you eat, and I have eaten my oatmeal. My loyalty here is real.

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.

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.

Along with the excellent staff at The Georgia Review, 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.

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 Review’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.

I will look down, or up, from whatever afterlife I then inhabit, and I will say to myself: there is my legacy.

[*Reposted from The Best American Poetry Blog]

Available Surfaces I: Uncle Ernest’s Tattoos*

2009-08-24T11:52:00.000-07:00

character 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."

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.

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).

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. From there, I understood, it was somehow a natural step to the tattoo parlor.

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. My connection to my Uncle (actually Cousin-By-Marriage) Ernest, therefore, was both complicated and distant.

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.”

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).

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.

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).

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.

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. What will you do when you are grown? I will be a writer, I said. Oh, no, he said, you mustn’t do that. Why? What if no one wants to read what you write? How will you make a living?

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.

I didn’t say “poet” to my brother; I said “writer.” I doubt whether the word poet 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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: Ernest McCollum. Kharakter, kharassein, kharax: 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 The Wasteland 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.

[*Reposted from The Best American Poetry Blog]

Re-Runs of the Apocalypse

2009-07-20T01:30:00.001-07:00

Alexy Titarenko

It was theirs. They stood by the water at dusk, lovers scarred by the violence of their alchemy, transmuting the darkness at the skyline.

*

It was not theirs. The boundaries betrayed them. Out of the core of their argument a shape arose, arsenical whirlwind, last word.

*

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.

*

It was human. A double knot in the double helix hardwired them not to fate but inevitable accident: one molecule awry, everything collapses.

*

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.

*

It was natural. Rivers divorced seas under the aegis of ending, tectonic plates shattered against apartment walls, all evolving closure.

*

It was never natural, not cosmic rays unspooling, epic failure of photosynthesis. The lovers were fuse and timer, thrusting seconds home.

*

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.

Biography of Eros

2009-07-17T23:55:00.001-07:00

Emil Schildt

The witnessing of things in the mind. But what mind? The lovers lay on the bed, handcuffed, saying please, and just for a moment one of them knew.

Sleeping, one of them moaned. It was the dream of the interpenetration of souls. Death is in everything, crystalline arsenic dissolved in alcohol.

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.

They knew it was insanity, and accepted it, but differently. One thought: madness, endlessly. The other thought: madness, finally.

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.

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.

Entropy, etiolation, emptiness: Nothing left but the bed, and the lovers on the bed, and the galaxy surrounding them, dark matter ascendant.

Assimilation

2009-06-28T15:43:00.001-07:00

Jeff Brouws

Even his fingerprints vanished. His skin smoothed like river stone; his grip on the world diminished. He was sliding someplace frictionless.

Lovers had become landscape--the woman he knew that ancient summer was lost in a hedgerow, flowering, leaving, framing what could be seen.

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.

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.

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.

Human emotion reduced him; every passion wore off a layer of skin, every rage took a subsection of organ. Eroded, he walked through walls.

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.

Observatory

2009-06-25T12:07:00.001-07:00

Vermeer

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.

A bountiful harvest season, everything ripening at the decisive moment, whole galaxies tipped like so many apples beyond the event horizon.

We lifted the brass tube: moons came into being, planetary rings, such distances that our bodies faded to shadows in the obliterating lens.

Tiny figure against the expanse of firmament, seen through the magnifying gaze of something godlike with a cross-hair and an ounce of lead.

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.

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.

Light gathers in the perfect lens. Its restlessness is such that it cannot remain there, even in perfection: it moves to clarify or destroy.

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.

Abandon

2009-06-08T12:02:00.000-07:00

Beth Dow

Silence in the house, people gone out, cats sleeping, leafblowers put away, the half life of the crawl space ticking down toward zero.

A wind in the desolation of the closet, incremental movement like the shifting of tectonic plates, while in the wall a mouse skull settles.

In a bathroom drawer there are artifacts: molecules of talcum, dried smear of cat's blood, a lingering odor of unidentifiable ointment.

After the journey, months of wandering through landscapes of bone and salt, we came at last to prairie, a rotting expanse of Persian carpet.

The cleaning finally ended. If there were beds, they would never be made; dishes would stay stained in eternity, and gravity be abolished.

A crack at the center, where even the intelligence of cockroaches was tested: rain eroded the foundation and a simple domesticity entered.

That characteristic turbulence, elemental disturbance in the aether, the tureen vibrating on the sideboard invisibly in the vacant hallway.

Soon, but not yet, the incremental creaking of hinges, the end of molecular bonding, release of form: shapelessness in the door frame, soon.

The "Education" of This Poet (5): Impermanent Earth

2009-06-02T11:22:00.000-07:00

: Mark Bryan - The Tornado Man

For the past few days, at the invitation of the editors of the online journal Linebreak, 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 Mindbook for the past several months. Therefore, with the permission of Linebreak,I'm reproducing those entries. Be sure to visit Linebreak to see the excellent work they're publishing.

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?

In the little Methodist church we went to every Sunday, I heard the word firmament, I learned the importance of a good foundation: You have built your house upon the sand. 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. Build your house upon a rock. And build it of brick, lest there be a storm of wolf breath.

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. The Wizard of Oz 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.

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.

My father was a gardener. The distinction between a farmer and a gardener is one of degree, not kind, and yet there is 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.

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.

“Where did they come from?” I said.

“Out of the ground.”

“But before that. How’d they get into our dirt?”

“From when this was an ocean.”

“This was an ocean?”

“Yes; everything here was under water long ago.”

“Was that Noah’s flood?”

My father, no great churchgoer, paused. “No,” he said. “I don’t think so.”

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.

The "Education" of This Poet (4): Brain Wave and the End of Science Fiction

2009-06-02T10:45:00.000-07:00

http://striplight.org/clean.aspx

For the past few days, at the invitation of the editors of the online journal Linebreak, 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 Mindbook for the past several months. Therefore, with the permission of Linebreak, I'm reproducing those entries. Be sure to visit Linebreak to see the excellent work they're publishing.

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.

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 what? 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.

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.

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.

The science fiction writer Poul Anderson wrote a novel called Brain Wave, 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 Brain Wave (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.

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.

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 inBrain Wave, 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.

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 Lord of the Rings—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.

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. . . .”

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.

“Chirren,” 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.

“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—anyone—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!”

Lunch time. We began to gather our notebooks.

“Oh, wait!” Mr. G. shouted, as he had to in order to make himself heard above the din. “Wait wait wait. One other thing you need to know: the wordnada—n-a-d-a—is a Spanish word. It means nothing. By which I do not mean it means nothing. I mean it is the Spanish word for nothing. Now begone with you, you orcs!”

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.

A Clean, Well-Lighted Place
Ernest Hemingway
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.
"Last week he tried to commit suicide," one waiter said.
"Why?"
"He was in despair."
"What about?"
"Nothing."
"How do you know it was nothing?"
"He has plenty of money."

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.

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.

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.

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.

“Mr. G.,” I said, and stopped.

Mr. G. assumed his faux priesthood. “Yes, my son.”

“This prayer to nothing. . . .”

“Speak.”

“What does it mean?”

He signed and dropped his act for a moment. “I can’t tell you that,” he said.

I paused at that. It seemed like a teacher trick, like telling someone if you can't spell it go look it up. "You want me to figure it out on my own?"

He laughed. “No,” he said. “I can’t tell you because I don’t know.”

I didn’t know what to say. If he didn’t know what the story meant, why had he given it to us?

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.”

“Why,” I said, taking on some of his irony. “Because it’ll get you into trouble?”

“No,” he said, “because it’s a library book, and if you lose it you’ll have to pay for it.”

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.”

I picked it up and looked at the spine.

“Hamlet?" I said.

The "Education" of This Poet (3): The Hive

2009-06-02T07:24:00.001-07:00

livxuponxhope

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.

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:

I saw an arbour with a drooping roof
Of trellis vines, and bells, and larger blooms,
Like floral censers swinging light in air;
Before its wreathed doorway, on a mound
Of moss, was spread a feast of summer fruits,
Which, nearer seen, seem'd refuse of a meal
By angel tasted or our Mother Eve;
For empty shells were scattered on the grass,
And grape stalks but half bare, and remnants more,
Sweet smelling, whose pure kinds I could not know.
Still was more plenty than the fabled horn
Thrice emptied could pour forth, at banqueting
For Proserpine return'd to her own fields,
Where the white heifers low.

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.

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.”

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.

“Which one?” my brother said.

“It don’t matter,” said my cousin. “This one here: the first one.”

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.

“That’s the one right there,” he said, suddenly at some distance behind me. “Do it.”

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 Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. 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.

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?

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.

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.”

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?

I pumped the bellows of the smoker; the smoldering pine straw inside flared and released a dense aromatic fog.

The day receded. I stepped across a boundary between worlds.

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.

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a-glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear the water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

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.

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.

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.

The "Education" of This Poet (2): A Length of Hemp Rope

2009-06-01T17:28:00.000-07:00

Nathan Simpson

For the past few days, at the invitation of the editors of the online journal Linebreak, 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 Mindbook for the past several months. Therefore, with the permission of Linebreak, I'm reproducing those entries. Be sure to visit Linebreak to see the excellent work they're publishing.

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.

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.

About the length of hemp rope, who knows?

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?

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 is 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I wrote of the lens of memory, the lens of my 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 Confessions 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Forgotten?

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.

And who was I? What house did I live in? Did I go to a war? Was I ill? Did I live or die?

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, Stump, Stump! Our shouts were a presumption and a demand. Did we ever ask politely for a ride? Did we ever say thank you 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.

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?

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.

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, kinbaru, rope is an aesthetic medium and a tool for ecstasy. Rope connects things. It holds things. It can sustain and it can destroy.

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.

The piper plays; the rope uncoils and rises into the air; the piper climbs the rope and vanishes. That vanishing is my destiny.

Hence, my friends, poetry.

The "Education" of This Poet (1): Primer

2009-06-01T15:55:00.000-07:00

For the past few days, at the invitation of the editors of the online journal Linebreak, 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 Mindbook for the past several months. Therefore, with the permission of Linebreak, I'm reproducing those entries. Be sure to visit Linebreak to see the excellent work they're publishing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 it 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. . . . (The History of Sexuality, volume 1, 94-95).

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 via negativa 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.

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 as a poet, however far I may have been from understanding that I was in fact becoming a poet.

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.

Schematic

2009-05-23T19:10:00.000-07:00

Botticelli

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.

The steel ratchet in the wind: she felt it against her corneas, pressing precisely into the metric eye sockets, turning, tightening.

The elevator kept trembling: the mechanism out of key: but the riders held their eyes fixed on the dial, the reassuring arbitrary numbers.

Under the hood where gear meshes integer, in the hamster wheel of the heart, a singularity appears, an homunculus, a social security number.

Wreckage washed ashore, fragments of fuselage and cowling, seat-backs, oxygen masks, and hermit crabs remade themselves of metal and bone.

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.

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.

Interrogations

2009-05-16T19:27:00.000-07:00

Matt Mahurin

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.

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.

The old woman in the wheelchair watched raindrops inscribe the window. She read its poem to her blind friend, who mumbled protest: too fast.

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.

They sat on the bridge rail drinking wine in starlight, watching for meteors to etch their glasscutter lineage into what passed for future.

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.

In pinewoods at midnight the trapped weasel gnawing its own leg stops to consider its bitter self-taste.

Horses in a meadow over strata of loess and limestone, reflections limned through the meniscus of earth by fossilized skeletons of dolphins.

That singular point on the continuum from which time reads like an inscribed transparency: just ahead, the hospital bed, the miraculous IV.

Ephemera

2009-04-23T23:31:00.000-07:00

neslockheart

The old woman sat naked in a wicker chair under a jacaranda tree at midnight, sprinkled with purple petals, dreaming of a handful of dust.

Everything in the house had to be put in boxes, even the tiniest object--because that is all death means--handled, wrapped, listed, stored.

It was gathering food among rocks in the arroyo--grasshopper mouse, no bigger than a thumb--then shadow, wings, owl, a silent puff of fur.

After the performance, she removed the sweat-stained costume and her makeup; then, because of the mirror, her face, which was now complete.

Days later, Monday, work, it was already forgotten, that moment in the dark when by synchronicity they climaxed together and were destroyed.

Hot wind, sand blown against plate glass, centuries now, and a fine-etched image emerges, a city, maybe, if anyone were there to see.

That metaphor is dead that says he plows a field and under the sweat of his plowing something writes itself in compost: dead metaphor it says.

Carrying grocery bags, he walks as far as he can through the scorched land without stopping to eat, or think, or pull out his rusted pistol.

They had wandered years though wilderness, looking, not noticing until the land cooled and greened around them that the children were gone.

I told you, he said to the gravestone, someone will always be here, someone will remember the story--as they lowered him, he said I told you.

Singularity

2009-04-08T22:59:00.000-07:00

Cameron Gray

The work was done in her tiny garden dark with the shadow of an office building that lay over her peonies like a bruise or an event horizon.

*

The labyrinth of gravity solved simply by converting string theory to thread, she slew the minotaur of density and floated out of history.

*

The grandmother told a story as they walked, of a girl walking with her grandmother into the forest where a wolf and a girl told a story.

*

When the monkey she'd let in her bed revealed himself, she saw the problem with the Great Chain of Being was not the being, but the chain.

*

A nameless light in the night sky; the animal howls, gnaws his chain, and dies, not knowing the loss of the word "dog," the name "Pompeii."

*

We hymned to doctors; we chanted to priests; we ate strange powders, drank potions, fasted. When we died, our fever modulated into the key of sulfur.

*

The carnival of apocatastasis rolls into the galaxy not an eon too soon, setting up its canopy over the abyss so the sun can go out dancing.

*

The vortex on the pond where the water strider had been was the sign not of the something that took it but of the nothing that did not.

*

One moment in the steely galaxy a falcon gyred, then stalled in his striding on a ripple in the locus: then a spray of neutrinos: then void.

Night Sea Journey

2009-04-02T20:13:00.000-07:00

The poem independent of the poet is poised between the abyss of oblivion and the abyss of readership.

*

Oblivion negates the poem; a readership atomizes it, absorbs it, excretes it, returns it in the form of a fine, pure cultural dust.

*

Culture composts its materials, reducing them to their constituent elements for reuse; poetry breaks down into pure crystal, diamond-dust.

*

Left to itself and to the living, the precipitates of poetry are inert, infertile, potentially destructive: abrasive, clogging, ossifying.

*

Culturally, the relationship between poem and a readership is transactional, bipolar; gift economy requires a triangle. What is the 3rd term?

*

Part of the soul of the poem belongs irretrievably to and with the dead, who supply part of its necessary material and enforce its closure.

*

The dead occupy a third abyss: not of oblivion or atomization but memory; as long as we are, they are: of necessity and not supernaturally.

*

Collectively our memory is our DNA; it eats individuals; it atomizes them, obliviates them, uses them. Death is not in hell but in the cell.

*

Everything in culture is biological, belongs to the body and likewise to the body politic; the dead form the third point to which all tends.

*

The dead are the precipitates of the living; they live on in us collectively; the poem is yours and mine, but Poetry belongs to the dead.

Canon

2009-04-01T20:23:00.000-07:00

Butt Johnson

On a shelf above the Ark, where a cherub, deploying tamed cyclones, supervised the dusting, God set his beloved collection of shrunken heads.

*

What he had constructed contained all the necessary elements for levitation, but his ascension was thwarted by an opaque cloud of words.

*

He might have slept, but the thump of blades on wood startled him, and the muffled screams ahead, and the fighting not to lose his place in line.

*

She was reading a book on the bus: soldiers, betrayals, executions; it absorbed her as the bullet smashed the window just before her stop.

*

All she found was vital, anything en masse a collection. After years, from the weight of the massed material (string, paper, dust), the house mutated.

*

They wrote a wall in the forest; ages they raised it, letter by letter, and in the end they stood behind it, but the enemy was illiterate.

*

The slaves brought stones from a quarry; they were made to shape them, pile them up, and ascend, blindfold, the stairway of their own sweat.

*

Moonlight through the harp cast a shadow of the angel gathering poems from the desktop, sucking their souls through to Poetry.

Nine Genocides

2009-03-30T18:35:00.000-07:00

Louis Finson, The Four Elements, 1611

It was like a hanging: being marched along streets with others, through great institutional doors, up stairs, to a desk, the groaning inbox.

*

They threw the bodies down the stairs, opened the warehouse door, rolled them inside, where the dead were logging hours on the loading dock.

*

Under the bridge, the alchemy of dawn is failing in its ancient transmutation, carbon dioxide and mercury sloughing off molecules of shit.

*

The final radiance arrives: everyone ossifies, tipping statues undercut by erosion, skeletons in derelict museums punching out, departing.

*

The lovers dressed, pulling underwear from under the chaise, stockings from the mantle, fur from bushes, hiding their feelers, hooves, horns.

*

Before they burned the bodies, they killed them; before they killed them they tortured them; before they tortured them, they gave them jobs.

*

Impossible not to forget the beautiful men, the children clever at their books, women full of wisdom, dead, my own body vaporized, my nation.

*

We were carrying bags from the grocer, polishing hammers, playing cards, dreaming of lost bodies, when the effacing brilliance distracted us.

*

Once we imploded the world enlarged, eroding every trace that anything had vanished, rain reclaiming our very atoms the better not to mourn us.

Eight Algorithms for Calibrating Precise Distortion

2009-03-29T22:19:00.000-07:00

Carceri by Piranesi

A box of coins: One my fate, one my face, the others counterfeit. I close my eyes, reach in, choose: wrong, yes, but so it had been written.

*

The man with a headache reached into his mind and extracted a bit of shrapnel, which, examined, was the clone of a passage from Bach.

*

Signing the lien, he felt a twinge in his abdomen, as if someone were writing his own name on his belly with a pen of white phosphorus.

*

No one believed in demons, which made the exorcism a great success: there was dance, drink, and the guest of honor bleeding from the mouth.

*

Entropy broke through the cafe window, tipping a dish of cornichon, blinding the waiter with its radiation, emptying the diners' wallets.

*

Walking the shining hallway to the toilet, the busboy tripped over a marble head with a disgusted face, a patron who refused to leave a tip.

*

The slum in the heart of the flower, alley in the slum, door in the alley: in a grimy room, the homunculus sits, crippled, selling a flower.

*

As he went under anesthesia, the stockbroker dreamed the money he'd embezzled had written itself into a poem, and the poem into an epitaph.

Applied Platonism; or, What Work Isn't

2009-03-28T16:00:00.000-07:00

I had been before to Warehouse 9. Situated on a cul-de-sac near the margin of the Army Corps of Engineers facility where I was then working, it was a large but unprepossessing building: sheet metal quonset-hut style, like an airplane hanger--probably it was in fact a recycled or otherwise diverted airplane hanger--large enough to contain, perhaps, a football field.

When I had looked inside Warehouse 9 before, it was empty except for a large expanse of dust-filtered sun angling down from skylights. This day, therefore, I walked up a short flight of wooden stairs onto a loading dock and opened a door, expecting nothing. What I saw instead was an ocean.

To be more precise, what I saw was a model ocean, a working replica of an ocean. But when I opened the door, I did not yet know that. All I knew was that the place was full of water, to a depth just below the level of the loading dock where I was standing, a sheet of water that extended virtually the length and breadth of the building. I stood for a moment bewildered; there was something here, I had been told, that I was supposed to see, but beyond the water, it was hard to tell what that might be or what I was to do.

As my eyes adjusted to the light, I noticed a narrow platform in front of me, that led to a narrow walkway built of planks that led to the wall and then down the length of the building. I followed it, not knowing what else to do, and then saw that at the far end of the warehouse there was -- what? something, and a couple of people moving in the dusky light.

*

It was many years ago, in a universe far away. I had a job.

1972, a year when people were still considering dropping out as a viable lifestyle: always behind the curve, I was dropping in. I was 22. I had completed a Masters degree in literature and creative writing all except the thesis; struggling to finish the thesis, I convinced
myself that the whole academic enterprise was a mistake for me.

On a whim, I took the civil service exam. I have always been good at taking standardized tests; I realized the first time I took one, when I was in junior high, that such tests are not about knowledge (I certainly didn't know anything); they are about the people who design the tests. If you possess a certain kind of imagination, you can channel the test makers, and so doing, you can think three or four moves ahead of them. This served me well on the Stanford-Binet IQ test, on the PSAT, the SAT, the ACT, and the GRE, among other unpronounceable horrors. It served me especially well on the civil service exam, which struck me as the easiest test I had ever taken. Whoever designed this test, I thought, was simple minded beyond belief.

The test was so dull that I took it on a Saturday afternoon and promptly forgot all about it. When, on the following Saturday, I received a letter from the government, it came as a complete surprise. I won't pretend to remember the precise language of the letter, though I wish I could; the government's language is always entertaining in a perverse way, but unfortunately it is rarely memorable. The spirit of it I remember perfectly, and it was this:

Dear Mr. Hummer: Your score on our absurd test is absurdly good. Though we don't want to, because we suspect you are not one of us, we are forced to place you very high on our waiting list for civil service jobs. We cannot put you in the very top group, because that stratum is reserved for veterans of our armed forces; we are in the middle of a vitally important and highly illegal war on foreign soil, and your non-participation in that war perforce makes you ineligible from being ranked number one, number two, or number three on our list (we have that many veterans in your city who want to work for us), but the unquestionably high score you received on the test makes it impossible for us to ignore you, or even to rank you lower than 4th on the list, no matter how much we'd like to forget about you entirely. When and if your name comes to the top of the list, assuming any government agency would be insane enough to want someone like you, you will receive an invitation from that agency to consider whatever job they are trying to fill. In the meanwhile, please leave us alone.

Ever the obedient citizen, I obeyed that last injunction, and so, after a couple of weeks went by, I was again surprised to receive a letter, this one more specific and more cordial in nature.

Dear Mr. Hummer: We are impressed by your score on the civil service exam and by your profile. If you are interested, please contact us about interviewing for a position with our agency.

And so it was ordained by fate, whatever that word may mean to anyone, that I, apprentice poet, should go to work for the Army Corps of Engineers.

*

The installation where I went to work--let us call it, fictively, to protect the guilty, Hogwarts Experiment Station--looked like the hodge-podge of a minor land grant college, but without students. It had the same pragmatic, industrial-strength, mostly ugly architecture you can see in many parts of America on campuses named X State University. The primary difference was that the sidewalks and lawns were quieter, almost deserted, as if everyone were away on some obscure holiday. Some buildings looked like Nazi bunkers from a B war movie; some looked like the Chicago projects. In all of them, however, there were scientists, engineers, and technicians of every stripe, all hard at work on projects of a bewildering variety.

I was hired, however, not to be part of the Talent, but a very junior member of Management. The only office at Hogwarts, perhaps, that would have found a languishing English major of even the remotest interest took me on: Personnel. I was hired as a Personnel Classification Specialist Trainee GS-5 at the dizzying salary of $8000 a year, plus full government benefits, an arrangement I found wonderfully generous after two years of subsistence on a teaching assistant's stipend plus my wife's income as a low-level researcher for a state research and development agency. The forty-mile commute was a minor inconvenience, but I quickly found a carpool. The details easily came into focus. All I had to do was discover precisely what my job was.

I was given a desk in a room with two other desks. The situation was so familiar from my stint as a teaching assistant—an industrial-gray metal desk in an office with identical desks—that I felt immediately at home.

The sense that I had gone from one university to another was palpable and comforting—all the more so when I discovered that my work centered on a book.

*

It is difficult, from this remove, for me to recover the contours of the mental horizon within which I lived in the days I worked at Hogwarts, as they are long obliterated and many times replaced. I was twenty-two years old, recently married, somewhere in the middle of a long stretch of defining the center and margins of my life. A violent but solitary struggle to annihilate a “false” self—one based on the old-style Southern racism to which I was heir—was coming to an end. In the course of the next decade I would move across several plateaus, bridge an abyss or two, spelunk various cave systems, and become something perhaps remotely resembling an authentic human being.

In the meanwhile, I occupied, without realizing it, a sort of disposable self, one who had desperately cobbled together a set of values, affirmations and denials, goals, needs, and prejudices, and slapped the label “artist” on the whole assemblage. This psychic situation, as I reconstruct that time in my life, is what had led me to Hogwarts. I had a sense of mission, but no direction; I had a conviction of purpose, but no real ethos. I had tried teaching, but found I had nothing to teach, not because I was stupid or even ignorant exactly, but because I had no central values I knew how to share. Values I had, or thought I had, aplenty; I was awash in opinions. But they were brittle affairs in which even I had no real faith. Teaching called every word, every gesture into question, and I found the experience painful. I thought the pain came from the students’ incomprehension of the real, the beautiful, and the true; in fact, the problem was that taking responsibility for their progress reminded me of the failures of my own.

At the same time, I had embarked on an exploration of the so-called metaphysical domain. Goaded by a close study of Yeats, I believed I was a mystic-in-training, that my spiritual vocation was to be carried forward through the vehicle of poetry. I pursued thick books of Blavatsky and Gurdjieff; Hermes Trismegistus and Paracelsus were my familiars. The books I was reading were, in those far-away pre-internet days, hard to find, and their very scarcity convinced me I was onto something. In the absence of a local chapter of the Knights of the Golden Dawn, I joined the Rosicrucians (AMORC) by mail and sat up nights staring into candle flames, muttering the incantation “As above, so below.” I developed a false but temporarily necessary sense of uniqueness: surely I was the only card-carrying neo-Platonist working for the Army Corps of Engineers.

*

To say my work at Hogwarts was to center on a book is an understatement: the work in question was a set of books, or one enormous book distributed through many binders. As texts go, it was amorphous, and changeable: the black ring binders made it possible to remove pages for
revision, to excise the obsolete, and to add the new. But any such process was subject to strict regulation, as every government personnel office in the world had to have identical such texts. It was therefore a highly controlled document, but its physical nature suggested the book Borges describes in his story “The Book of Sand.” The narrator acquires the book from a mysterious man; before he buys it he inspects it.

I opened the book at random. The script was strange to me. The pages,which were worn and typographically poor, were laid out in double columns, as in a Bible. The text was closely printed, and it was ordered in versicles. In the upper corners of the pages were Arabic numbers. I noticed that one left-hand page bore the number (let us say) 40,514 and the facing right-hand page 999.

His examination of the book reveals that it is in fact infinite—not only without beginning or end or order, but also continually changeable, so that a page you turn does not stay where you left it, and the unendurable Truth you encountered there could never be found again.

I wish I could remember the actual title of the set of books that was to govern my life while I remained at Hogwarts; it was pure and perfect bureaucratese, and the language has slipped into some special black hole of my memory. In any case, the people in the office simple called it The Guidelines, and so I too came to call it.

My designation at Hogwarts, as I have said, was Personnel Classification Specialist Trainee GS-5. I was given this title when I was hired, but did not pay much attention to it since it was more or less meaningless to me. I was to come to pay more and more attention not only to my own designation but to everyone else’s since, as it turned out, it was precisely my job to do so.

*

From the outside, Hogwarts is a black box, figuratively speaking. Its function in the large sense is simple: anyone who has a question and can afford to pay for the answer may approach. Generally such entities are other government agencies, state agencies, or municipalities, but in theory it could be anyone. The question is submitted; professionals in the appropriate areas evaluate it and either accept the job or reject it depending on its appropriateness to the facility's potential. If the question is accepted, it enters the black box; time passes, and ultimately an answer, or an admission of failure, emerges from the other side of the box.

Hogwarts has an excellent track record as a black box that spits out accurate answers. My knowledge is dated, but when I was there, the party line, which I have no reason to doubt, was that the facility did not cost taxpayers a penny, but more than paid for itself by virtue of fulfilling its commissions.

From the inside, however, the simplicity of the black box was nowhere apparent. Hogwarts was a large, diverse, busy operation, doing its business along a myriad of avenues, but everywhere its fundamental process was the same: Hogwarts answered questions about the world by making models of the world. They controlled flooding in large river systems by building precise models of those systems; they learned about wave forms and turbulence with wave generating machines and wind tunnels; they designed the wheel for the lunar lander using a model of the surface of the moon. Their models were complex with detail; they were exact and they were elegant. I saw many of them during my tenure at Hogwarts, and my fascination was never exhausted--which was a good thing, since observing the models, and the work of the engineers and scientists who designed and used them, and the model makers who built them, was my job at Hogwarts.

*

Inside the heavy black binders of the Guidelines, there were job descriptions. Every government job at every classification level was represented there--no, not represented: determined. The Guidelines set forth the qualifications, requirements, and duties of every civil service position in the country, from physicist to maintenance personnel, hydrologist to administrative assistant to model maker--including, of course, Personnel Classification Specialist Trainee GS-5. For the uninitiated, that alphanumeric at the end of the job title (every government employee, I learned, has a GS number) determines the rank of the employee within the field, and hence the salary level. The Guidelines contained, in addition to a basic description of the job, a road map for moving from level to level, and hence for advancement. A Personnel Classification Specialist, then, is one whose job it is to mediate between the Guidelines and reality. Someone has to consult the Guidelines for the ideal of a given job at a given level, and then investigate to determine whether Dr. A is actually doing what he or she "should" be doing; if Dr. A. is doing more than the Guidelines dictate, a promotion must be made; if less, a change in duties or a downward adjustment. Since people's salaries are involved, there is a good deal at stake. Therefore, the Personnel Classification Specialist is an employee of some importance. This was applied Platonism with attitude.

The Personnel Classification Specialist Trainee, however, is a different matter. I was on a strict career schedule, whose contour was nothing more or less than a learning curve. Mediating between the real and the ideal, as it turns out, is trickier than it might at first appear, especially at a complex facility like Hogwarts. It had been determined before I was hired that the proper term for a trainee's apprenticeship was three years. For that duration, it was my job to learn; after that, having gone through a series of advancements within the trainee rank on a regular schedule, I would emerge from the chrysalis of training as a full-fledged Personnel Classification Specialist GS-9. GS-9 was, from where I sat, a lofty rank with a generous salary. All I had to do to get there was read, observe, and learn.

In short, my job at Hogwarts was exactly like graduate school.

*

Warehouse 9, then, was part of my learning curve. I was continually being called to go here and go there at Hogwarts to see what went on; it was necessary for me to have a clear and comprehensive understanding of the reality our personnel were part of. Observing was half the job; the other half was absorbing the contents of the Guidelines. Day after day I pored like a scholar of the Kabbala over the arcane contents of that set of volumes, consulting with colleagues when I found something puzzling or incomprehensible. Other times, I was called off to see what a group of hydrologists were doing here, a band of soil scientists there; I observed the permanent model of New York Harbor (complete with a two-foot Statue of Liberty) and the permanent model of the Mississippi River Basin, which occupied 30 square acres. I saw tanks full of turbulence, abstract projectiles, blackboards covered with equations taken from a bad film of the Manhattan Project. I talked to people, who were for the most part delighted to lecture me at length and in great detail on the work they were doing.

Many scientists, I learned, are obsessive and feel, in terms of the hidden essences of the work they do, lonely and--not so much misunderstood as uncomprehended. They enjoyed having an audience, even a captive one; but much of the time I found what they had to say interesting, however little I might actually understand it. They seemed to me not so different from poets, painters, musicians; they were improvising against sets of chord changes and master narratives, and while the products of their labors might be welcome to the world at large, the processes were arcane. The scientist, like the artist, aims for the product, but lives in the process.

*

As I entered Warehouse 9, the wooden catwalk around the edge of the ocean felt precarious, and its precariousness familiar, emblematic of my own situation: walking a narrow, precarious path with a blind wall on one side and an artificial ocean on the other. What on earth was I doing here--here in Warehouse 9, here at Hogwarts, here: this person, slave of this mind? The great vault of Warehouse 9 curved above me: Plato's cave with a vengeance. The shadows of other people flickered at the end of the catwalk. My own bloated shadow walked beside me, distorted, cast by reflected light from the softly rippling water. In the back of my head the voices of the Great Poets whispered: . . . lack all conviction . . . makes nothing happen. In the black book on the shelf above my office desk, the blueprint of my soul resided: GS-5, GS-6, GS-7. Somewhere, real life was happening. But where, and what did that mean?

The catwalk terminated on a beach. The back wall of Warehouse Nine was separated from the water by a zone of contoured sand. A few feet back from the waters edge, there were trees, and beyond the trees, a town--main street with shops, neighborhoods, cars, fireplugs. The trees were no more than three inches high, the buildings to the same scale. Here was a tiny town on a tiny beach. I was Gulliver, and this was my Lilliput: finally, it seemed, I had actually entered a book, rather than opening myself and allowing books to enter me.

At the very back of the building, there was a stainless steel compartment, the sort of thing one goes to Sears and buys to put in the back yard for tool storage. Too men were standing at the door of the compartment, watching me.

"Walk round behind the town," one said, "so you don't knock anything over."

*

The two men who met me in Warehouse 9 were described in the Guidelines as Modelmakers. What their names were I did not know, nor did they know mine; all that mattered was that I was the Personnel Classification Specialist Trainee and that they were Modelmakers: at Hogwarts, by their work are they known, and by their descriptions are they understood. We were the People of the Guidelines.

"What's this?"

"It's a town," one said, as if he were answering an idiot who'd asked the same question about the sky.

These two Modelmakers were strangers to me, but I had already met a good many members of their profession in the course of my work, and had duly pored over the Guidelines pages devoted to them. Of all the professional groups I had encountered at Hogwarts, they interested me the most. Their skills were a combination of the practical and the visionary; when scientists described what they wanted from them, the Modelmakers had to envision an actual construct, create it, and make it function. In some ways they reminded me of carpenters and plumbers I had known (they were carpenters and plumbers, when the job called for it), and in other ways like sculptors, painters, musicians, and poets--with a strong measure of model train fanatic thrown in. Generally, their pay scale (as I knew) was on the low end of the spectrum, but they seemed, as a group, stable, serene, and proud. Their work was utterly indispensable to the work of Hogwarts; without them, the whole place would grind to a halt, and they knew it.

"It's a town," I said. "I see that."

"Yep."

"It's terrific," I said, looking closer. Every shopfront on Main Street was painted in detail: drug store, book shop, soda fountain. All the motorists were obeying the rules. The trees were neatly trimmed, and windowboxes bloomed. "But what's it for?"

"OK, here's the scoop," the older of the two said. "A municipality in California has given us a problem to work on. This is that municipality. It's built as close to the real town as we can get it. Everything is there, right down to the trees; everything is to scale. We work from photographs, and from maps. Tolerances are very tight."

"I see," I said. "And what's the problem you're working on?"

He raised one finger. "There's a bit more," he said, and then gestured out at the water. "The beachfront is all precise as well; the town is built on a bay; this is the bay. The shape of the bay is exact, so is the contour of the ocean floor all the way out."

I looked down at the perfect beach, and noticed suddenly a new detail: over the beach, off the bay, surf was rolling: perfect miniature surf, which rolled in with perfect miniature curl, the leading edge of each fringed with perfect miniature foam.

"Holy shit," I said. It had never crossed my mind that surf of such apparent perfection could be made that small, each wave perhaps three inches high. Surely scale figured into the structure of things at some point; my intuition told me that a wave, in order to adopt so complex a form, would simply have to be bigger than that. But why did I think so? Obviously my intuition was steering me wrong, because here before me was the thing itself.

The skin on the back of my neck began to tingle. Surely some revelation is at hand. . . . The poets in the back of my head woke up; there was a stir in my inner anthology.

"This," I said, "is astonishing." The Modelmakers smiled benignly, as at a child's excitement. "How do you do it?"

"Wave generator," the younger said, pointing out into the distances of the Pacific. About three fourths of the way from which I had come, in the middle of the water, I saw a long metal object; its details were impossible to distinguish at this distance and in this light. "We can program it to make any wave form we want, at variable intensity."

I had seen wave tanks in another laboratory: huge aquariums in which scientists studying turbulence generated wave forms three times my height. That was very impressive, but this was miraculous: big waves were, well, big, and thus impressive, but they seemed thoroughly normal in some important way. These miniature waves were exquisite, and miraculous. I'm not exaggerating when I say that I was rapt by what I saw. I was not Gulliver, standing here: I was God. Or, no, I was an archangel. Perhaps I was a cherub. The gods here were the Modelmakers. This was their creation. It was art--art of the most utilitarian kind, and yet for its own sake--otherwise, why paint the storefront signs, why make the window boxes bloom? It was a bay in California; it was a universe. I found myself moved the way I was moved by symphonies, or by jazz, or by poems.

"Here's the gist of it," one Modelmaker said, while the other took out a small penknife and began grooming his fingernails. "The town proposes to build an offshore sewage treatment plant. That's it out there." Halfway between the wave machine and the beach, I now saw, was a low white rectangle--filled, I presumed, with tiny sewage, precisely to scale (I didn't ask). "What they want to know is this: if there is an earthquake or a tidal wave, will their plant withstand it? And if it doesn't, what will the environmental impact be?"

"So how will you determine that?"

"Simple," he said. "We'll crank that wave generator up to tsunami, stand back, and watch what happens."

Simple. Apocalypse is always simple. I imagined the machine and the wave it would make, would would happen to the trees, the cars, the houses, the post office with its perfect flag, the soda shop. It seemed a blunt and thick-headed way to do science, from one perspective; from another (like Alexander cutting the Gordian knot) it seemed the only possible way.

"Are you going to do it now?" I said.

"Oh, no," said the one with the penknife. "We're still a month away from that. We have a lot of fine tuning to do."

"Looks perfect to me," I said.

"Yeah, well," he said, flipping away a bit of thumbnail. "There are some problems here you can't see."

I felt a small tremor of the nerves. "Like what?"

"For one thing, sand. You can grind sand fine, but only just so fine; beyond a certain point it's not sand any more. If you were little surfer down on that beach, the sand would be too big. The sand is not to scale."

Slippage: my model universe was not what it appeared.

"For another thing," the other Modelmaker added, "there is the problem of the water molecules. Water molecules are water molecules. You can't get model water molecules."

"So--" I said.

"So the water is also not to scale."

This proposition was so peculiar I could not wrap my mind around it. I looked at the evil water, the offending sea, unable to say anything. Had I spoken, I would have sounded like Joyce's seagull: quark.

My own investment in this little world surprised me. I wanted it to work, but suddenly its existence seemed so problematic I could see no way for it to do what it needed to do: to be, not just a toy, but a world. And not just a world, but the world. I looked out at the recalcitrant water, the impossible sand. I was on the threshold of a cosmic betrayal, an infinity of heartbreak.

Finally I found my voice. "What do you do?" I imagined the whole model coming down, the water draining into a gutter, the tiny houses and trees swept into a trash bin, useless.

The Modelmaker paused. And then he spoke, and gave me the thing I had come for--the secret of Life, the Universe, and Everything, as the comic genius wrote--the revelation.

"We have algorithms," he said, "that let us build very precise distortion into the model."

*

I continued to work at Hogwarts for another couple of months, going through the motions of training. I moved from one to another office in Personnel, learning the ropes. I talked to secretaries, hydrologists, electrical engineers, about their actual jobs; above all, I read the Guidelines.

The truth is, though, that after my experience in Warehouse 9, I was done at Hogwarts. I was eager to get back to finishing my thesis, to writing my poems, to study. The missing piece in my thought had been given back to me, the thing that let me understand not only what an artist was, but what a human being was, and a human's business in the world--what was wrong with Plato, and what was wrong with me.

When I resigned from Hogwarts, some wag there said, not unsympathetically, "You're the most expensive ornament we've had around here lately." I could not disagree with him, because it was impossible to explain to him how important the work I had done there had been--to me, at any rate, if not to the Powers of Hogwarts. If I had had the presence of mind, I would have answered "Never hire a Neo-Platonist to do a Platonist's work" and left him slack-jawed. But I'm glad I didn't, for that too had become false. I had graduated from Neo-Platonism. I let my membership to the Rosicrucians lapse, and sold my Gurdjieff and Blavatsky.

Build very precise distortion into the model. In that formulation lies the work of a lifetime--the work of an artist, the work of a real human being in a real world, whatever you mean by real, by human, by world.

"The world is everything that is the case," says Wittgenstein. "The world worlds," says Heidegger. Fair enough, I say. From one day to the next, I don't know the algorithms; from year to year I'm not sure what I'm making a model of. Those are the questions of a whole lifetime. But in the face of all uncertainty, in the middle of the deepest mystery, I have my guidelines, my job description. I know what my work is, and what my work is not.

Eight Extremophiles

2009-03-23T17:37:00.000-07:00

The dream of the poem is of an explosion creating unalterable change in its environment; what good is a poetry that does not change geology?

*

The fact of the poem is a microscopic entity in the upper atmosphere, only discoverable by a superlight vehicle soaked in liquid neon.

*

Between Auden's "Poetry makes nothing happen" and Milosz's "What good is a poetry that does not change nations" walk the ghosts of all poems.

*

The space where reader meets poem is a wrecked zone in the ruin of cultural memory, in the ghetto on the south side of the medulla oblongata.

*

To extract the enzyme that carries the poem from the mind of the reader to the mind of the body politic requires the centrifuge of the muse.

*

Poetry is one strand spun in the double helix of the DNA of the body politic; each poem is a molecule thereof.

*

The DNA is an aggregator, selector, interpreter, and reviser of experience; the poem is a form of experience, unavailable elsewhere.

*

The creature emerges from murky water, crawling, and discovers--by having a shape that can crawl--there is such a thing as a shore.

If the Art of the Possible Meets the Unacknowledged Legislator, Will the Universe Implode?

2009-03-22T13:10:00.000-07:00

I posed a question online the other day that stimulated some amusing responses: When will university departments decide they must have 21st-century specialists on their faculties, and how can we prepare to market ourselves as such? The question was tongue in cheek, but there is a vital issue behind it.

Social engineering has for a long time been in serious disrepute almost everywhere. The fall of the Soviet Union stands for many--thinkers and non-thinkers alike--as emblematic of the failure of humans to be able to apply social theories to social realities. Best leave the thing to run itself, one line of thinking goes; it is self-regulating like a natural system.

But the collapse of the Bush Doctrine appears as decisive an emblem as the collapse of the USSR. Left to themselves, it seems, people run to Ponzi schemes and other forms of outright theft. And so it falls, in the US, to Barack Obama to reify the "progressive" model of social engineering. Whether or not he succeeds in getting his plans through the defensive line of the opposition party, with all the cheerleaders shouting "Socialism," the genie is out of the bottle again. And so the question arises: where are the 21st-century specialists? Can we identify effective engineers of the future among us now?

In the March 19, 2009 issue of Nature, Thomas Homer-Dixon reviews a brace of books that deal in different ways with this subject. Homer-Dixon observes:

In a world reeling from surprise, where once-in-a-lifetime events seem to happen every month, two things seem to be constant. The first is the inadequacy of expertise. Although the people we have anointed as experts might not admit it, they are as bewildered by the world's turbulence as the rest of us. They are also little better at predicting what is going to happen next. The second constant is a pervasive feeling of insecurity. The things we assume to be bedrock truths around which we can organize our lives — scientific theory, moral precepts, political institutions or perhaps the timeless rhythms of nature — seem to be increasingly under assault.

Expertise fails us, it appears, because the nature of our circumstances are so unique and so complex that it is beyond--what? present levels of training and education? human capacity per se?--even to make sense of the present, much less predict and prepare for the future. We need 21-century experts, it appears, though there is not enough 21st century in place for anyone to know what that means.

Homer-Dixon's review evaluates two works of political science, neither of which satisfies him: ". . . both books ultimately disappoint," he says, "for reasons that say less about the books themselves than about the largely unrecognized gravity of humankind's current predicament." Homer-Dixon has his reasons for coming to this conclusion; I would go a step further and say that any "expert's" book on the subject of the speculative shape of the 21st century and beyond is bound to fail. It appears that we need prophets, not experts, for there is and never has been any expertise of the future sufficiently reliable to shape a culture.

And yet cultures have shape. They always have, and as long as they endure, they always will.

*

The future: we have no idea even what we mean when we say that word. We don't shape the future; we lurch into it--individually as fragile vehicles of flesh, collectively as a work of art: the body politic, the necessary fiction, never finished, forever a work in progress.

The shape of a culture is the shape of the body politic. We shape the body politic as best we can to be able to survive the brutality of the "future."

And who gives shape to that chimera? All of us do, through our collective effort to live. Occasionally an individual brings forth, through luck or grace or genius, some idea or work that is so powerful we cannot ignore its influence. The author(s) of the Old Testament fall into that category; Buddha and other "holy" men and women; Thomas Moore, perhaps; Thomas Jefferson perhaps; Marx perhaps. But in making a canon of this kind--based on effect on the shape of the body politic--dare one ignore Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Dickinson, or Whitman among obvious Western examples? Dare one ignore Mozart, Matisse, etc.--add all the names of all the great (or not so "great") artists you can think of. Not only have they played a part, they have often led the way.

It is precisely the artist's job to imagine the body politic. It is precisely the artist's job to negotiate, in ways available to no one else, between the individual body and the body of the Leviathan, the giant we create and sustain who then contains and carries us forward.

*

We live in Plato's Republic precisely to the extent that the artists have been banished from the center of pragmatic cultural imagination. Relegated to the sidelines, to the slums of power (real power, the power of the spirit), artist are forgotten at worst and infantilized at best. And the worst part of it is that many artists have accepted and embraced this situation. It can be pleasant to be infantilized; the "grownups" are engaged in the "real" work of the Republic; the infant is free to scorn real work. This is not to say that artists do not work, but even they are seduced into disbelieving in the true power of their own vocation, and to celebrate that situation. I think it is fair to say that my own generation of poets, by and large, has failed to live up to its full responsibility in this regard; we have been distracted by a large array of non-essentials.

I am not making a plea here for a social realist art, for a utilitarian art, for a pragmatic art. Art should be many things to many people; it should, in fact, be a form of play. But play can be terribly serious.

I am also not making a plea for artists to rise up and take over the government. Picasso would have been a terrible president. Artists without political scientists, without economists, etc., would make the worst kind of botch of the world, and though it might be highly entertaining to watch them do it, I don't suspect any of us would have the stomach for the realpolitik that would result.

What I DO want to suggest is that artists have, in this country at least, been left out of the equation for far too long. What artists do, what they offer, is at least one of the missing ingredients in the situation described by Homer-Dixon. There IS no expertise that will predict the future. But we must, every day we live, create and revise the body politic, which must not be allowed to become too weak to carry us, but also must not become muscle-bound, or too big (like the dinosaurs) or too inflexible, or too invested in being this and not that. It must be an effective shape shifter, ready to become whatever is called for.

Artists, perhaps, are not the best bureaucrats. One hopes not, at any rate. And we need good bureaucrats; I am not one to scorn a brilliant bureaucrat. We need diplomats, and numbers crunchers, and policy wonks.

But who among us knows the most about creating and revising? The particular expertise offered by artists and their creations is essential to the health of any body politic. But our body politic seems to have forgotten this fact: not only the politicians, not only the rank and file of our citizens, but even the artists have forgotten this part of their job--forgotten it, or given up on it in disgust.

None of us can afford that gap, that loss.

Artists: step up. You have a place at the negotiating table, around the council fire. If the other councilors ignore you, refuse to be ignored. If the other negotiators deny you, insist on your right.

How do you refuse, how do you insist? By making art that knows its right in this regard. By making art that will not be denied. Art will shape the body politic in any case, whether politicians or the public, or artists, acknowledge that fact or not. But what will that body look like? What will it be? That question cannot be answered except with the paradoxical observation that, while its nature is unpredictable, its being is in our hands; and if we don't do our jobs properly, keeping firmly our purpose before us, that unknowable and unpredictable creature--which is nevertheless not unimaginable--will be a botch, a Frankenstein's monster, a blob.

Shelley famously, or notoriously, observed that poets are "the unacknowledged legislators of the world." Rarely has he been taken seriously. But our future may well depend on our understanding what he meant, and enacting it.

Ten Implosions

2009-03-22T09:03:00.000-07:00

Smell of iron in the wind off the mesa--the man at the desk looks up, tasting axehead, knife blade, ghost's chains, his mother's womb-blood.

*

Before bed, turning out the last light in the house, she saw the chemical formula for darkness inscribe itself inside her eyelids.

*

He felt ill and lay down as the last bus disappeared into the tunnel with men in suits reading headlines, the markets sliding into fever.

*

In the poem, a girl in a library sleeps, her face on a book; I read her skin in its paper, spot of drool in the margin, a hair in the gutter.

*

All the angels in Rilke gather at the bookshop to argue with Whitman: who touches this book touches what?

*

A couple in a convertible at midnight, arguing bitterly; moon half eroded by the solar wind; at roadside a dead coyote, half eaten by ants.

*

Willows laced over the pond water of history, their image fractured by the ordnance of a war only the dead remember, or a simple wind.

*

What happened at the end, when everyone thought there was no one left to think, was simple: they forgot it all had ended, and went on.

*

There was always filth, someone had to touch it, love it, lest it fade like the traces, eons after, at great distance, of a burnt-out star.

*

At the end of the world an empty beach, empty sea, empty wind, flat, lifeless, leaving nothing behind but its poisonous etching of salt.

Apologia

2009-03-20T19:32:00.001-07:00

A few years ago, at the request of the poet Mark Jarman, I wrote the following “statement of poetic purpose” (which I chose to call an apologia) for the Poet of the Month feature of the PoetryNet website (http://poetrynet.org/index.html). It ran again in January 2009 on the blog of The Kenyon Review, and I reproduce it again here because it seems to me a good basis for further exploration of what I regard as issues crucial to the art of poetry.

I confess that I approach the task of making a statement of poetic purpose with the same apprehension Randall Jarrell felt on being asked what he did for a living by a stranger in the next airplane seat. It is difficult to explain to others just what we are up to as poets; one is tempted simply to point to the poems and leave it at that. But that isn’t fair to people of good will who find the profession of poetry puzzling.

What does poetry do, people sometimes ask, exasperated, it seems, by what they have read or what they have not read; what good is poetry if it has so small an audience?

What good is your pituitary gland, I am prone to answer, and can you say that at this moment you are aware of it? Do you even know what it does? Are you even sure you have one? For the culture, I am convinced, poetry functions on that level; for the engaged individual reader, its work is something else: an electrification, a reminder that there are real mysteries left. For the poet, it is a pure obsession, a sequence of questions which have no answers, of demands that have no satisfaction other than the satisfaction of obsession itself.

The texture of my particular version of this obsession derives from the conviction that poetry inhabits and enunciates an incommensurable zone between individual and collective, between body and body politic, an area very ill-negotiated by most of us most of the time. Our culture, with its emphasis on the individual mind and body, teaches us very little about how even to think about the nature of this problem, which means that our culture, as a collective, is far more mysterious than it seems: even the mystery is hidden. E pluribus unum is a smokescreen: what pluribus; what unum? And yet this phrase is an American mantra, as if it explained something.

Whitman remains the greatest teacher we have yet had on this particular subject, and poets’ fascination with him is founded on his amazing leap into the mind of the body politic. He seems miraculous because what is for most of us a near-unbroachable difficulty was for him no difficulty at all. I am the body politic, his poetry says; I speak the mind of America, the mind of humanity. It is no wonder that the rest of us are a bit more reticent; even if we could think the thoughts of the body politic, would we want to? On the other hand, it may be that contemporary poetry is hypnotized by the good liberalism of the young Wordsworth, who wrote “What is a poet? . . . He is a man speaking to men. . . .” This idea seems so obvious now that—once we translate it out of its gender-specific form—it is well-nigh unquestionable; but the self of Song of Myself is no “mere” human. “I contain multitudes,” Whitman famously wrote; but he also wrote “Who touches this book touches a man.” The boundaries of selfhood are redefined several times over in these two formulations, and Wordsworth’s humble, generous, and simple idea is confounded by the gulf between these poles.

Our present situation, obviously, makes it difficult to share Whitman’s optimistic seamlessness; his job was Adamic, and we live after the American fall (or several of them). It is for that reason, maybe, that American poetry so often pays lip service to Whitman while its practice is grounded much more firmly on Wordsworth. We write most frequently out of “our own” experience, speaking (or singing) in “our own” voices; poetry workshops, critics, and general readers often insist on it (write what you know). And that approach has yielded a large and bountiful crop of poetry in our time, one which is sufficiently diverse in its points of origin that it may seem ungenerous to complain that it is often too similar in method. The most potent divergences we have are neoformalism and language poetry—the former insisting on a return to a former sameness, the latter insisting on the monotony of an idée fixe (what would language do if there were no pesky people involved?). Neither of these routes offers much more than a journey on a Möbius strip.

The most fruitful direction I have assayed is to make my writing a continual meditation on the principle that language is the flesh of the body politic, and therefore deeply complicit in all human doings on the individual as well as the collective plane. I find hope for poetry in this idea, though nothing so ecstatic as Whitman’s near-boundless enthusiasm. Who touches my book touches a book, it seems to me, and forgets this at his or her peril, since men and women are different from books, and more valuable. Still, the book can make a difference; the book can vivify, and the sum of books makes up an important part of the brain and nervous system of humanity.

Nine Incisions

2009-03-20T10:46:00.000-07:00

A man wakes terrified from a dream; he takes down a book of poems and reads, "A man wakes terrified from a dream. . . ."

*

Need drives the mouse in the wall and likewise the furnace at the heart of the sun: not human need, but the need that fuels the neutrino.

*

Being needed to Be. Its war with Nothing's need to remain Nothing punched a hole in the fabric of Nonbeing. Thus God, the Big Bang, Buddha.

*

Human need is a special case: a wound in the world seeping its bloody discharge from nothing to something. Mind is a scab that stanches it.

*

Conscious Being requires constant mediation: with Unconscious Being, and with Nothing. Consciousness triangulates whirlwind and abyss.

*

"Black sound" of Lorca's duende: will of Nonbeing erupting into Conscious Being through Unconsciousness, played on the synthesizer of self.

*

What was "god," ever, but a word we use for need: the kind of need that is manifest in gravity, in the speed of light, the solar wind?

*

For the right reader, the poem is a force--not of nature, but of consciousness, pressing across the gap from nothing to something to waking.

*

A terrified man sleeps, and in his dream he sees the body politic wake, terrified, remembering the poem that begins "A terrified man sleeps. . . ."

Lost Worlds, New Deals

2009-03-15T13:18:00.000-07:00

[This piece appeared in January 2009 on the blog site of The Kenyon Review. I want to repeat it here partly in the interest of completeness and partly to help contextualize some upcoming material.]

O arms that arm, for a child’s wars, the child!
And yet they are good, if anything is good,
Against his enemies . . . Across the seas
At the bottom of the world, where Childhood
Sits on its desert island with Achilles. . . .
–Randall Jarrell, “The Lost World”

It’s a commonplace of aging that childhood, trailing clouds of glory as Wordsworth conceived it, grows ever more distant and ever more difficult of access; the children we once were turn more and more into mental mannequins, polished fictions, as unreal to us in fact as any of the great dead. And we are supposed to mourn the child we were. The archetype of a “normal” life bends toward sentiment where childhood is concerned. If the reality of a particular childhood prohibits this–if a child was a victim, of vicious parents, vicious communities, vicious nations, vicious circumstances, vicious gods–then the adult who survives is required to mourn twice: once for the unhappy child who suffered, once for the happy child who never was.

This is as much the stuff of counseling as it is of poetry. Not only is there an Inner Child, we learn, there is more than one: a Bad Inner Child, who serves as a mask and a diversionary tactic for the Good Inner Child. As part of the act of mourning, one must confront the Bad one and transform him or her–turn Bad to Good, or, push come to shove, Bad to Dead–in order to find one’s way to the Good one. That journey is supposed to lead to healing.

But what, really, are “a child’s wars”? In Randall Jarrell’s poem “The Lost World” (quoted above), trees provide the child’s arms that “are good, if anything is good/Against his enemies.” A good stick is about the best weapon the average child has. How hard can the confrontation with the Bad Inner Child really be? Perhaps the hard part is the journey, the twenty years required to sail from one’s own childhood war, where the best weapon is a wooden horse on wheels, to the island where not the child but Childhood waits–and not Childhood only but also Achilles! Let the dead Greek drink from a bowl of goat’s blood and he will utter truth: I would rather be a slave in a beggar’s house and be above ground than king of kings among the great dead. How useless was my war, Achilles will tell you. How stupid was my death. I played their game and they killed me. Toy sword. Wooden horse. Watch your back. Beware.

What if, when you journey to the Isle of the Inner Child–across the seas, where he or she has retired after childhood’s wars into the polished fiction, the death that is History–your inner child is Achilles?

Or what if your inner child is the product of a vicious community, the image of it: a nasty little racist?

I’m dreaming of a wolf, as Mama wakes me,
And a tall girl who is–outside it’s gray,
I can’t remember, I jump up and dress.
We eat in the lighted kitchen. And what is play
For me, for them is habit.
–Randall Jarrell, “The Lost World”

Childhood for me is an ambiguous zone, precisely double. I entered the world into circumstances enviable in many ways. I was the second and youngest son of an essentially loving family which maintained a peaceful household; we were not wealthy (and so I avoided the problems that wealth can convey) but neither were we poor. We lived on a working farm that was diverse in a way quite unlike most farms now: there was a wide variety of crops (cotton, corn, wheat, milo, and “truck” crops of all kinds; there were beef cattle and a dairy; there was poultry, both chickens and turkeys; there was an apiary), and we grew virtually everything we ate. We children had chores, but our work was not onerous; we learned about animals and plants at close range, and also about life and death.

It was a pretty place–not beautiful, exactly, but appealing and accessible; I was allowed from a very early age, when I was not in school, to roam much of the time where and as I liked. The family collie went with me, and in his presence I felt both befriended and secure (he was intelligent and diligent; he had a passionate hatred of snakes, which he killed on sight; he had an unerring sense of direction and could always find his way home, and mine with him in the event I should get lost). There were other children, cousins, I could play with if I chose; but it was also easy to avoid them if I wanted solitude, which mostly I did. In this polished fiction of my childhood, I trailed Wordsworthian clouds of glory; I wandered lonely as a cloud; I was “young and easy under the apple boughs /About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green.”

And so on and so on and scooby dooby doo.

So that when the day arrived when I understood–suddenly, it seems in retrospect, as if I had been struck by lightning–what a lie it all was, the shock of the discovery almost blinded me–though in fact I had been blind all along, and the blindness of the realization was the beginning of something like real sight.

What was it I realized? There is a long answer and a short one. For the present I’ll give the short one: it was Mississippi, it was the 1950s, we were white people. Everything we had was stolen, even ourselves. Therein lies the doubleness: I had a pilfered Eden. I lived in it even though I had no real right to it. Already fallen, I lived there like a tiny god. When in the fullness of time I learned the truth of my situation, it was too late to know the truth. I was broken; I was fallen; I was compromised.

This is the situation of racists in a society structured around institutionalized racism. In another context, Marx aptly called this sort of delusion false consciousness. That label works as well as any other. It’s a convenient shorthand for a species of damnation.

*
Inner child, you little criminal: where is your lost world? Some worlds are better lost. Your Atlantis is cleaner drowned than when it stood in the innocent air.

*
I said to an acquaintance, who is a therapist by profession, the other day: what I can’t understand is why there are not clinics and twelve-step programs all over the South, indeed all over the world, for the benefit of recovering racists. Alcoholics and drug addicts have programs; why not me?

When I was born, my people came to me and said, in essence, this: you will believe as we do, because we love you, and so you must; if you do not share our belief, you will be the enemy; but what we believe cannot be believed in the clear light and under the scrutiny of clear vision; and so, my child, with love in our hearts, we now will pluck out your eyes. That done, I no longer knew my child’s war was a war; and I could not know that the weapons the good trees would give me were worthless against my enemies. What would set me free?

The truth, yes. And I came to the truth in time. But here’s the rub: the truth will set you free, but it will not heal you. The truth is true, but it is relentless, uncaring, unfeeling. Achilles on the island knows what’s what, but face it: he’s still dead.

You have your scars–honorable scars, maybe, once you know what they are and why you have them–and they are with you forever. If I have one story worth telling, it is the story of my blindness; it is the story of my scars.

*
Inner child, the truth has drowned your world. Your ghost wanders on an island in the sea of truth, cut off forever from the place that gave you breath. And who is with you there? Achilles, the ghost of anger, forever brooding on the falsehoods that destroyed him. Apt company, old soldier. You cannot have your life back. Your love was blind and your rage was blind and you killed your own world without knowing what you were doing. If there were peace, you could rest in it; but that can never be.

Lost world, lost love, lost paradise. What an epic you lived through. What a waste it was.

*
We have a new leader who is unlike any we have ever had. His advent, to many of us, feels like a new beginning, a transformation. Is it in fact? Barack Obama is an exceptional man, but he is only a man. Nevertheless, I hear voices echoing in the body of the nation: heal us, they say; transform us, they say; make us whole, make us new, make us good. How well I understand that desire. How well I know the danger there.

Obama has done many extraordinary things already. The one that surprised me the most came in the speech he delivered on the evening of Nov. 4, 2008. He looked America in the eye and he said the word sacrifice.

That same word, I believe, ended the presidency of Jimmy Carter, who told us many unpleasant truths that few were ready to hear. That word, which no U.S. politician has dared to speak from that time to this, returns at the beginning of Obama’s presidency. In my opinion, whether he, and we, accomplish what we need to accomplish in the coming years will depend on how this word is negotiated.

In order to banish my own blindness, years ago, I had to strike a bargain. I would gain something, but I had to give up something. I could have new eyes, yes. And in order to get them, I would not have to exchange what you might expect. I could keep my childhood, such as it was, because no one comes from nowhere. The island would be there in the endless ocean; Achilles would preside. All that I could keep. What I had to give in exchange was sentiment.

I cannot love my childhood. It is tainted and cursed. My childhood, so innocent and glorious, so loving and full of light, was based on a vicious lie: you are what you are because that person over there, who happens to have black skin, is less than you. That is how you define yourself. That difference, that stupid, evil, wrongheaded distinction, is your soul.

What can I say that is worth anything, coming from such a source? One thing, and one thing only: America, my childhood is your childhood. We come from blindness. Our names are stolen. People have died in order for us to be free, we are fond of saying; but people have died in order that we may own land, have lilting houses, grass, apple boughs. People have died laboring under our yoke. We cannot change that. It is our history. It lives on the island in the sea where our peculiar American Achilles sulks. We are, as Columbus first, for his own purposes, called this continent, otro mundo–not new but other world. We seem familiar to ourselves; we have not yet begun to understand our own otherness: the problem of the other is not the other; it is us.

So if that is true, what can we do against it? We can sacrifice the sentimentalism of our vision of history. Our inner child, our Eden, is not pure. We must not cling to it. American atavism is peculiarly dangerous. It produces insularity, surly isolationism, false consciousness.

Ours is a homemade country. That is part of what is problematic about us; it is also our strength, for that which we made once, we can make again and again, the same way (as Whitman understood so well) we make and remake a poem. What we have created we can re-create. But like all true revision, this can be done only through precise and disciplined and unsentimental sacrifice, to re-vision ourselves in ever-refining form.

Pharmapoesis: Fifteen Chemical Assays

2009-03-11T23:22:00.000-07:00

Whitman said "Who touches this book touches a man." I say "Who touches this book touches a pharmacy."

*

Poetry is as elusive as the cure for the common cold; the poem is as ordinary as aspirin.

*

A given poet's body of work is uneven? The inventor of aspirin also invented heroin.

*

The "necessity" of the poem is a consequence of the condition of an individual consciousness: what do I lack that only the poem fulfills?

*

Poetry has no utility for individual consciousnesses and only hypothetical utility for the zeitgeist. What the oversoul lacks: Poetry?

*

And yet the formulation and distillation of the poem--its extraction and crystallization--follows from the poet's sense of imminent need.

*

The pharmacologist attends to doctors' descriptions of need; the poet attends to a chorus of pain, the blues refrain of the body politic.

*

The self is a creation of that aggregate of selves that is the body politic, which is itself a creation of aggregated selves.

*

Knowingly or unknowingly the poet hears the interior voice of the body politic and attends to the gaps, the lacunae, the abysses in it.

*

If the poet succeeds, the poem does not fill a void but entangles the boundaries of a targeted gap, so that the one side mirrors the other.

*

In this transaction: no benefit in the material or therapeutic sense; how can the "vision" of a single cell affect the health of the body?

*

Corollary of Whitman: entanglement between individual bodies and the body politic is a necessary condition of the existence of the zeitgeist.

*

Body politic is a "necessary fiction," even from Whitman's perspective; it exists only as a "quantum" mirroring of broken individual selves.

*

"For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives/In the valley of its making," a ghost dreaming of a greater ghost, the valley the gap between.

*

The muse exacts/lithiums, prozacs--/The ghost in the machine/needs its dopamine.

Ephemera/Nine Prose Tweeku

2009-03-04T18:39:00.000-08:00

Day-old snow under a stone sky at midnight: and beyond flattened trees, in the shadow of a rust-eaten combine, one animal invisibly moving.

*

The man with the rifle in the blind sits still; his uniform chafes but he cannot move or the face in his scope might ghost and go on living.

*

Wind-driven dust eats at this rock face as it has for centuries, leaving its tracery of scars, its crows-feet, the aneurysm of erosion.

*

The blind girl in the library passes her hands over dusty spines like a pianist, like a pickpocket.

*

The translucence of agate. Shade of the blue fir. Track of a slug, luminous in starlight. Garbage truck. Brickbat. A dead mouse in the wall.

*

If you hadn't recalled the cabbage and turned suddenly back, the man in the suit would never have lost his pistol. Osmosis. Wages of gnosis.

*

A dark chamber in the spine of the boar holds the ozone-colored powder that crystallizes his hunger. He lives in his body only. Die for him.

*

Her eyes convulsed, then closed as the soldier entered her, grinding against her belly the rifle's muzzle, the bracket securing the bayonet.

*

Dawn should be immaculate, burning you clean, but smoke pours out of the wreckage, shrapnel, and a photograph of you on the train, waving.

Nine Compositions for Saxophone and Electron Microscope

2009-03-02T19:24:00.000-08:00

Whitman used "adhesiveness" to describe his ideal for the action of poetry; as well consider it an obscure but vital neurotransmitter.

*

An error of the capitalist model to consider poetry analogous to food; poetry is a drug, and is there for those who need it, not for all.

*

Is it elitist to say poetry is not for all? Is penicillin elitist because not everybody needs it? Poetry answers needs, not numbers.

*

The poem is a dynamic zone wherein the reader gets a glimpse of Poetry--as if a cell could be granted a swift vision of the body it inhabits.

*

The experience of the poem is not therapeutic; rather it is either necessary to the reader or not; indispensible if necessary, excrement if not.

*

To consciousness, the poem is experience; to Being, the poem is a neurotransmitter, carrying messages across the gap between cell and body.

*

Benign chemicals in excess are irrelevant to the body; inessential poetry is likewise sloughed off and excreted.

*

Deep in the structure of the body politic the poem makes its way, well below even the level of the cell, by a subtle but irrevocable osmosis.

*
Meanwhile there is moonlight; wave breaks against wave; horses sleep standing up in an obscure grove; and everywhere the smell of roasting meat.

Sprung Vision; Or, Who is Duane and Why Do I Have His Syndrome?

2009-03-01T13:35:00.000-08:00

Perfect 20/20 vision will not be enough to pass an eye test given to military pilots. It also involves “contrast sensitivity.”One must be able, for example, to see a white cat walking in the snow.

–”Field of Vision,” http://www.innerbody.com/anim/vision.html

Nothing! No oil
For the eye, nothing to pour
On those waters or flames.

–Robert Lowell, “Tooth and Eye”

The light was almost unbearable.

“Look right,” said Dr. de Souza. ”Look up. Look down.” He was examining my left eye with what I can only describe as an illuminated lens. His technician had spent 45 minutes taking detailed digital photographs of my retina–through layer after layer of retinal tissue, I was told–but if Dr. de Souza had made any use of those photographs, I never saw it. My impression is that, though Dr. de Souza works in a clinic that possesses all manner of marvelous devices, he prefers to trust himself instead of the machinery. Throughout my encounter with him, I was impressed by his aura of quiet authority and confidence, which was the very opposite of off-putting. I trusted this neat, semi-handsome, self-possessed man, and I was glad to trust him.

“Look left,” said Dr. de Souza.

“I can’t,” I said.

The burning lens flickered away. “You can’t? Why not?”

“I have Duane’s Syndrome in that eye.”

With my right eye, the one not being examined, I saw a smile flicker across his face, an expression I can only describe with the hackneyed word elfish. Dr. de Souza resembled an elf. Indeed, it occurred to me that he might have been one.

“Duane’s Syndrome! Really!” He bent closer to my left eye. “Look left?” he said again, this time with a different tone.

“Really, I can’t”

“Interesting,” he said, “Very interesting. But it causes me a little problem.” He stepped back and stroked his chin. “I must see your entire retina in order to find where the rip is. When there is that much blood in an eye, there is surely a rip. But if you can’t move your eye, I can’t see the whole expanse.” He paused again, looking at me as if I were a coconut that was being resistant to cracking. “What to do?”

The question was rhetorical. He knew exactly what to do.

“Here’s the thing. We’ll just pop that eye a little.” We will? He produced a demonic little metal spatula, which he pushed all too firmly against my upper eyelid, into the seam between my eyeball and its socket. “Now,” he said, “Let’s see.”

*

Some of my earliest memories are of ophthalmologists’ offices. When I was very small, my parents began taking me on an intermittent quest for the doctor with the answer. I remember dim rooms, eye charts, pleasant technicians with quiet voices, inexplicable lenses and instruments, cases, containers, bottles, droppers, a menagerie of gadgets designed for the simple purpose of covering one eye. Above all, I remember “eye doctors,” in those days men to a man: thin, balding individuals, they form a composite archetype in my mind. “Watch the light,” they go on saying quietly in my mind. “Look here at my nose. Don’t move your head. Follow my finger with your eyes.”

The technology of ophthalmology has changed a great deal since the middle 1950s, but the end-user environment of the profession has remained almost exactly the same: dimness, quiet, an atmosphere of tight-lipped, urgent authority. This is very important, the body language of the examination chair tells you, but don’t be alarmed, we’re here to help, we know what to do. At some point the eye chart ceased to be a poster tacked to a wall; it turned into a mirror, and then into a screen, capable of multitasking. But someone has been at pains to make it look pretty much the same as it always did. Going to the ophthalmologist is a return to a familiar if vaguely fraught milieu. We’ve always been here, studying you, says the table in the waiting room, even though you haven’t thought of us in years.

A visit to the eye doctor never frightened me, even when I was quite small. I can remember being baffled, feeling flattered by a certain level of attention, and always, before it was over, becoming bored. Yet there was a sort of unspoken urgency about these pilgrimages. Two or three times a year, my mother would tell me one evening, “Tomorrow we’re going to see an eye doctor,” and early the next morning, often before dark, we’d be in the family car. Sometimes I’d go to sleep in my bed and wake up in the Ford’s back seat, feeling the vibration of the road through the cushions, a sensation I always enjoyed. Where were we going again? To a town we’d never visited, where there was a different doctor, one who–but look, dear, there’s a pretty horse! And look at that old house behind that hedgerow! What do you think it would be like. . . .

After several years of this, it dawned on me that there might be something wrong.

The internet is an infinite source of entertaining information. On the website of The Ophthalmology Hall of Fame (!), http://www.mrcophth.com/ophthalmologyhalloffame/duane.html, we learn the following facts:

Alexander Duane was one of the first investigators in ophthalmology with a special interest in accommodation and squint. He was born into a prominent family in Molone, New York. His father was the army general James Duane and his boyhood was spent moving between various postings. He was educated at the Union College, Cincinnati, where he gained many academic rewards and thereafter studied medicine at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York, which later became the medical school of Columbia University. After graduation in 1881 Duane interned at the New York Hospital and was educated in eye medicine by the German-born American ophthalmologist Hans Jakob Knapp (1832-1911). He specialized in this discipline and commenced ophthalmological practice in New York in 1884. For a brief period he taught ophthalmology at the Cornell University.

The first time I ever heard the mystical phrase “Duane’s Syndrome” I was, unsurprisingly, in an ophthalmologist’s office. It was 1986; I was 36 years old, Reagan was in the White House, and I lived, strange as it seemed to me, in the middle of the state of Ohio. My glasses were beginning to give me trouble, as they did routinely every couple of years. I was in for a routine exam, to see whether I needed a new prescription. And as I was relatively new in town, I had sought out a new doctor.

The office was one of the infinite series–we have some new information, said the diplomas in gilt frames on the wall–and so I felt immediately at home. I went through the usual routine–insurance card, medical history, a delay for the evident purpose of reading magazines on gourmet cooking and the Super Bowl; then a preliminary examination conducted by a technician concluding with the administering of the magic Drops of Dilation that made one Allergic to the Light, another wait while the drops’ spell matured, and then at last the arrival of The Doctor.

This particular doctor was a little out of the ordinary. She was tall, blindingly blond (or maybe the blindingness was an effect of the dilation of my pupils), and had a definite but graceful Swedish accent. I had picked this practice more or less randomly from the telephone book, but I had made my choice based on the fact that the doctor of record was female (it didn’t hurt, either, that the office was almost directly across the street from my house, but in Mt. Vernon, Ohio, almost everything was just across the street). My motivation in so choosing was not, whatever you may be thinking, anything other than pragmatic. I had discovered some years before that I preferred female doctors in every specialization. Not to make hasty or invidious generalizations, but: it seemed to me then, and seems to me still, that male doctors have a tendency to be more interested in themselves and their own authority than in the patient and his or her malady–whereas female doctors, on average, will actually listen to the patient. Individual experience will vary, but the statistical tendency remains.

When she pointed at the bridge of her nose and said “Look right here,” I was glad to do so. When, after a couple of minutes of examining my eyes, her face suddenly lit up in delight, it was not, alas, I who was the cause of her pleasure; it was my Syndrome: it was that bastard Duane.

“You have Duane’s Syndrome!” she declared (in fact, she almost sang).

“I do?”

“Of course!” she said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, and at the same time a variety of miracle. “May I ask you,” she went on, “would you mind very much if. . . .”

“Would I mind if. . . .”

“I’d like my assistants to see this. We don’t see many cases of Duane’s Syndrome, and it would be useful for them.”

My poor mother was one of the first generation of mothers deflected by the work of Dr. Benjamin Spock. In 1946, his The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care appeared; it became an immediate best seller. 1946, the year of my older brother’s birth, is a threshold year for the baby boomer generation; America shifted gears, and even our isolated farmer family was not unaffected. Whether or not my mother ever read that book I cannot say; it’s possible that she did, but it’s equally possible that she was influenced by newspaper and magazine second- and third-hand interpretations of the master. She was not in any case a theorist. She was a smart, empathic woman with little education who loved her children, respected authority, and was easily motivated by guilt. She was also a traditionalist, a respecter of the mores and methodologies of the past. This constellation of attitudes left her at a crossroads where we children were concerned: one moment we were tender souls at the mercy of a traumatizing world; the next, we were simply pint-sized adults who needed to suck it up and tough it out.

Exactly when she noticed that all was not right with my eyes is unknown to me, but it must have been early on. Duane’s syndrome is a “birth defect,” and its presence is fairly obvious. Clearly it worried her. My earliest memories of our family doctor involves not only needles and gigantic tongue depressors, but also the injunction “Watch my finger; don’t move your head, move your eyes.”

It must have worried her that this little affliction of mine did not fit any familiar pattern. It was not “lazy eye,” or amblyopia, an eye problem more serious and more common but altogether more treatable than mine; when I was in elementary school, several of my classmates wore the familiar “lazy eye” patch, a piece of of white tin designed to cover the stronger of their two eyes, encouraging them to strengthen the other eye by constant use. What was wrong with me more resembled strabismus, or crossed eyes, but if I did indeed suffer from strabismus, it was not a typical case.

As I reconstruct this dimension of my past, it seems to me that my mother was caught between an impulse to find a cure and a sort of inertial fatalism. She would seek out, or hear of, a doctor we had not tried; we would make the pilgrimage; once again, the doctor would be baffled. I remember once, when I was five or six, one such professional gave my mother a pamphlet of eye exercises; I was to do them twice a day. My mother led me through the regimine for perhaps a week with so little enthusiasm for it that even at that age I noticed. When we gave it up, I asked her why we had stopped. “The doctor said we should do this,” she told me, “and when I asked him ‘Will it help?’ he only said ‘It won’t hurt.’” That formulation still seems to me the perfect encapsulization of the whole problem.

“The light of the body is the eye,” we are told in the Book of Luke; “therefore, when thine eye is single, thy whole body is also full of light; but when thine eye is evil, thy body is also full of darkness” (11:33). I’m glad to say that–many though the Bible verses I was required to commit to memory may have been–I did not run across this passage until I was an adult. By the time I was seven, it was clear that my vision was becoming problematic. What would I have made of the “body full of darkness,” or the even more peculiar logic of the single eye versus the evil one?

Blissful in my Biblical ignorance, I was taken, in the fall of 1957, to yet another eye clinic, this time the Oschner Clinic in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I have since come to understand that it was my second grade teacher, Mrs. Mullins, who had suggested to my parents that I should have my eyes (if not actually my whole head) examined. Mrs. Mullins had noticed that I was a very able reader, that I loved books, and that I tended to hold them closer to my face while reading than regulation normally allowed for. This was something new, and so off we went on another mission of pure vision.

The examining room at the Oschner Clinic was a familiar place full of familiar objects; it had the hushed twilight quality of so many other similar rooms I had visited over the years. This time, there would be, before it was all over, a new set of examinations; but the preliminaries by definition came first, and quickly the old problem became apparent.

I cannot remember the doctor’s name, but I recall him as a tall, quiet, faceless man, bald with a fringe of black hair; he was, perhaps, a little heavier of build than the stereotype I had assembled, with a prominent belly under his unbuttoned white coat. But he struck me, even at the time, as uncommonly quick-minded, and above average in common sense.

“Follow my finger with your eyes,” he said. “Don’t move your head, just move your eyes.” The finger tracked slowly from center to my right, then back. Center was his world-orienting nose. Then the moving finger writ to the left, and as it did so, it became two fingers, and on the right edge of my sight, the nose became two noses. Then, as the finger moved back, the world changed from double to single.

I don’t recall the ensuing conversation in its entirety. What I remember was this: that sensible man produced a stainless steel cup from somewhere in the room and set it on the table in front of me. “Put your hand on the cup,” he said, and I did so. Then he moved the cup to the far left side of the table. “Again,” he said, and I put my hand on the cup. Again he moved it, this time far right. “Again.” He repeated this exercise many times, and each time, unerringly, I put my hand on the cup.

“Well,” the doctor told my parents, “it’s clear that he doesn’t suffer from continual double vision. If he did, he would miss the cup half the time.” He demonstrated someone flailing to put a hand on the mirage of a cup; his heavy hand thumped the table. “It would be possible to perform the kind of surgery in his case that we perform for strabismus, but my guess is that it would do no good. Whatever the trouble is, it’s not really a problem unless it’s a problem, if you see what I mean. The boy seems to adjust his sight quite well to the way his eyes work; it’s not giving him any real practical trouble. I suggest, then, that you just don’t worry about it.”

Don’t worry about it was the best of all possible advice, especially for my mother, who naturally preferred not to. For me, it was impossible–particularly from that day forward–not to give considerable thought, if not worry as such, to questions of vision. Following the exchange about the ways my eyes tracked, we proceeded to a more ordinary eye exam, which was the real point of this visit. I read the eye chart; I went through the (for me) novel ritual of looking at letters through various lenses slipped into a slotted frame (”which looks better, number 1 (click) or number 2 (clack).” Then came dilation, a waiting period, a further examination. During the dilation period, my vision slipped into cloudiness; I was given cardboard sunglasses; I tried to read a book but could not focus on it no matter how close to my face I held it.

Following this series of rituals, we hung around Baton Rouge for awhile. We visited the state capitol building, stopping to visit the site of the assassination of Huey Long; in my silly square cardboard sunglasses I tried to read the plaque commemorating this event, and failed–but I fingered the alleged bullet holes in the marble wall. Then we rode the 34 floors to the observation deck high over the city. I had never been so far above the ground–even elevators were a novelty to me in 1957, and my first ride in an airplane more than a decade in the future–and I was excited at the prospect of seeing the ground from such a height, but everything was blurred for me.

The drops used for dilation have evolved since the late 1950s and the effect does not linger nearly so long now as it did then; my eyes would not return to their normal state until the next morning. Well before then–following our tour of Baton Rouge landmarks such as they were–we returned to Oschners, where a new pair of glasses were waiting for me. I put them on, but not much happened; the effect of the dilation cancelled the new lenses. And the next morning, when I woke up and put them on, not much looked different; but when I took them off, there was a marked difference in what I saw. Without the glasses, the world was in soft focus; leaves on trees were indistinct; print in books was fuzzy. I had not noticed before that there was any problem with my vision, but now that I had the glasses, my world without them was a different one than the “corrected” world I saw through them.

The effect, when I took them off, was similar to the effect of dilation on my sight. The suspicion dawned on me–one which I still carry in the back of my mind and examine now and then, unseriously and yet indelibly–that the doctor had put something in my eyes that had tampered with my sight. Before that day, as far as I was concerned, I saw fine. Now, I was near-sighted, a “four eyes,” as my older brother wasted no time in pointing out. Someone had to be responsible for this. The quiet-voiced sensible ophthalmologist was the logical suspect.

Eye and Tooth

My whole eye was sunset red,

the old cut cornea throbbed,

I saw things darkly,

as through an unwashed goldfish bowl.

I lay all day on my bed.

I chain-smoked through the night,

learning to flinch

at the flash of the matchlight.

Outside, the summer rain,

a simmer of rot and renewal,

fell in pinpricks.

Even new life is fuel.

My eyes throb.

Nothing can dislodge

the house with my first tooth

noosed in a knot to the doorknob.

Nothing can dislodge

the triangular blotch

of rot on the red roof,

a cedar hedge, or the shade of a hedge.

No ease from the eye

of the sharp-shinned hawk in the birdbook there,

with reddish brown buffalo hair

on its shanks, one ascetic talon

clasping the abstract imperial sky.

It says:

an eye for an eye,

a tooth for a tooth.

No ease for the boy at the keyhole,

his telescope,

when the women’s white bodies flashed

in the bathroom. Young, my eyes began to fail.

Nothing! No oil

for the eye, nothing to pour

on those waters or flames.

I am tired. Everyone’s tired of my turmoil.

(from Robert Lowell’s For the Union Dead)

This poem of Robert Lowell’s will resonate for anyone who has suffered from problems with the eyes. It will also resonate, I think, for anyone who has suffered from a vision problem in the artistic sense, if not with visionary problems as such. Lowell undoubtedly suffered from all three. He wore thick horn-rimmed glasses, 1950s style, the kind that might have made him look at home with a pocket protector in his shirt and a slide rule case on his belt. Manic depressive, he had clear if sporadic issues with the nature of reality itself. Caught on the cusp between the great modernist moment and something that still lacks a name–postmodernism is an inadequate word that I for one hope will be shortly flushed down the toilet of history–he sometimes floundered in his art, sometimes magisterally lost his way (and that he allowed himself to do this, even after his fame was well established, is a testament to the greatness of his obsession). He wanted, too, to be a visionary in the strict sense; he would have exchanged his Pulitzer Prize for locust and honey in the desert if he had been given the keys to the throne room of Spiritus Mundi. His adherence in the 1940s to a rather radical brand of Catholicism (he was a convert) led famously to his being incarcerated for refusing the draft and opting out of the Second World War.

Certain poets, certain poems, were burrs under Lowell’s saddle–poems he loved and wanted to have written, but which were for various reasons out of reach for him. This, surely, is true for virtually every poet, every artist, and is simultaneously a source of frustration and an incentive to the work. We know how the young Lowell loved and, in his own 20th-century key strove to emulate, Milton: the blind poet who “saw” the whole of human history, in Christian terms at least, in Paradise Lost. We also know how Lowell, along with a whole generation, was torqued by Eliot. These two masters, one out of the depths of history, one on the threshold of his own moment, were the crosspieces on which Lowell the poet was crucified–willingly so, for part of his brilliant and tortured soul longed for a crucifixion peculiarly his own, upside-down, perhaps, on the cross of Poetry.

One other poet, less intensely perhaps but potently nonetheless, was in this sense a great problem for Lowell.

Once, visiting friends who loved poetry as much as I, I played a game we enjoyed: we’d get a bottle of wine (or several) and all the poetry books in the house, put everything on the dining room table, and drink at least some of the wine; then we’d pick up books of poetry at random, open them in an equally random way, and read whatever presented itself. When it was my turn–my fourth or fifth turn, probably, after several glasses of wine–the book that fell into my hand was the wonderful Farrar, Straus, and Giroux reprint of Lowell’s Life Studies and For the Union Dead in one volume. I looked at it with satisfaction; it was the early 1980s, but I had already studied those poems with care and attention for a long while. When I opened the book, though, I found myself looking at a poem to which I had hardly paid any attention. I recalled reading it before and dismissing it–not without reason–as one of Lowell’s “lesser” poems, a relative throwaway. But now, reading it aloud, I was suddenly riveted by the poem’s first line:

Walking and walking in a mothy robe. . . .

Why had I never heard the echo? Of course, of course, of course: the great model was Yeats, the poem “The Second Coming,” with its famous opening: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer.” “The Second Coming” is an enigma to most readers, and to poets it is also a provocation: how did he do it? Where did he get that authority of voice? What is the source of that vision? For a poet with Lowell’s proclivities, these questions must have been urgent, and penetratingly painful.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight. . . .

Yes, Bill Yeats, so you say, but how? Why you? Why not me? What’s the secret; what’s the trick; what offering to what god must you deliver to bring forth that poem and make it whip its great wind against the eardrums of the world?

Lowell’s poem provides us with a glimpse of how this poem, and these questions, affected him:

Dropping South: Brazil

Walking and walking in a mothy robe,

one finger pushing through the pocket hole,

I crossed the reading room and met my soul,

hunched, spinning downward on the colored globe.

The ocean was the old Atlantic still,

always the swell greened in, rushed white, and fell,

now warmer than the air. However, there

red flags forbade our swimming. No one swam.

A lawless gentleness. The Latin blonde,

two strips of ribbon, ripened in the sun,

sleeping alone and pillowed on one arm.

No competition. Only rings of boys

butted a ball to keep it in the air,

while inland, people starved, and struck, and died—

unhappy Americas, ah tristes tropiques!

and nightly in the gouges by the tide,

macumba candles courted Yemanjá

tall, white, the fish-tailed Virgin of the sea,

corpselike with calla lilies, walking

the water in her white night gown. “I am falling.

Santa Maria, pray for me, I want to stop,

but I have lost my foothold on the map,

now falling, falling, bent, intense, my feet

breaking my clap of thunder on the street.”

I will leave it to astute readers to parse the significance of all the parallels and dissonances between this poem and “The Second Coming,” particularly that between Yeats’s Sphinx and Lowell’s Yemanjá, the mermaid-goddess of the Brazilian Umbanda religion, originally a spirit-queen from Yorubaland in Africa. Perhaps more broadly she has become a feature of Santaria religions and Vodou; she is an orisha, part stand-in for the godhead, part nature deity.

For my purposes, what is most important is the grasping of the nature of the visionary moment. In Yeats’s poem, the narrator’s purview is immediately global: from the falcon and the falconer, we follow the widening gyre quickly outward and upward, to a vantage point above the globe where all earthly locations feel immediately visible. For the faded figure in Lowell’s poem, he of the mothy robe and its pocket hole, the globe is not the earth itself but the globe in his study–a reduced scope, surely, from das ding an sich to its mere representation, upon which perches the narrator’s soul like a little daimon, an homunculus. From there we are sucked willy-nilly, randomly it seems, to an inscrutable Brazilian beach: a semblance of luxury stagnates the surface, which is presided over by Yemanjá’s priestess, the sleeping “Latin blonde” while the interior hides something different: starvation, political strife, death. The narrator, bewildered, slides off this scene like a fried egg off a teflon pan: myopic American, he cannot enter here. Slipping toward the goddess, who to him is the Goddess of Otherness, he evokes two tutelary spirits, neither of whom come to his aid. One is Santa Maria, the Virgin Mary, who is another of the emanations of Yemanjá–or perhaps it’s the other way around–but a more familiar version; the other is a scientist, the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, through the agency of his great despairing book Tristes Tropique, which is a jeremiad wrapped in an autobiography. We will never understand the cultures we travel to study, Levi-Strauss argues, because the presence of the anthropologist alters, perhaps destroys, the very culture he or she has come to study. “The first thing travel has now to show us,” he writes there, “is the filth, our filth, which we have thrown in the face of humanity.” The “prayer” that concludes the poem is a doomed one, a prayer of the failure of vision. For Yeats’s narrator, the vision simply closes, and he can still say, as he does in his enormously famous and endlessly quoted conclusion, “Now I know”

. . . now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

He knows, yes; and as far as we can tell, at the end of the poem he is still up in the sky somewhere, watching. Lowell’s narrator, however, falls. He is intense, but he is bent (a good formulation for Lowell’s poetry, and his mind, throughout), and the voice that should be great within him, his thunder, is broken.

Long though the explication may be–and there is a good deal more I could say about these two poems side by side–most of it struck me all in a flash of insight once I saw the linkage. I don’t want to argue, still, that this is one of Lowell’s great, or even very good, poems. In and of itself it is perfectly all right. But as a gauge of Lowell’s visionary evolution, it is crucial. The party line on Lowell is that he futzed around with religion when he was young, converting from is Boston Protestantism to the intense Catholicism of his early adulthood, but then, having discovered Freud among other things, he left all that behind and began taking his own troubled life as the subject of his poetry. While there is truth in that distillation, there is also much in it that is misleading. “Dropping South, Brazil,” is, I am convinced, an indication of where the visionary impulse in Lowell went. It was not extinguished, it was defeated; but the defeat was not absolute, and the breakage not without issue.

One last important visionary, with a falcon of his own, should not be left out of account: Gerard Manley Hopkins, the poet who embodied another of Lowell’s thwarted ambitions, a genuine if deeply difficult priesthood. Hopkins was a gnarly, meaty practitioner, a formidable poetic musician, whose enduring innovation he called “spung rhythm,” which he derived from what he called the “instress” of the world–spirit (the accent in the poetic line) striving against, and chiming with, matter (the unstressed syllable). For Hopkins, the vision per se was a given: the world is beautiful, and the poet praises it (when he is not lamenting his own shortcomings and his error of despair); what mattered most was the music, the hymn within which one broadcast praise. For Lowell, the problem is different: it is the vision itself which falls short, and he shores it up with his own peculiar distortions: “I saw things darkly, / as through an unwashed goldfish bowl,” or as he puts it in another poem, “Myopia: a Night,” “all’s / ramshackle, streaky, weird / for the near-sighted, just / a foot away.”

Lowell became a practitioner of “sprung vision,” a way of seeing that was accurate because it was precisely “off,” within which the so-called “confessional” impulse reveals itself as still part of the pattern of a visionary exercise, however partial, blurred, myopic. That myopia, for Lowell, is inescapably ours, if not necessarily universal. Perhaps it is a product of our historical context. Perhaps it is a product of a particularly American short-sightedness. Does the “Latin blonde” see more than Lowell’s narrator? It’s hard to say: she’s sleeping, and in sleep she has access to her own beautiful dreaming, while Lowell is left insomniac, trapped in his waking nightmare. If for Joyce “History is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake,” for Lowell it seems to be a nightmare for which only falling asleep is a cure. He knew his history, and he wrote it: cultural history, and the history of Robert Lowell. If there was a failure of consonance between those two narratives, it could only be because one could not see it. My history is necessarily a product of cultural history, Lowell’s poetry reasons. It has to be. If I don’t see precisely how that is true, then that is a symptom of my own blindness. Therefore, I will confess to being blind. In that confession will inhere my truest vision.

The following information is quoted from a website called Genome (http://www.genome.gov/11508984):

Duane’s syndrome (DS) is a rare, congenital (present from birth) eye movement disorder. Most patients are diagnosed by the age of 10 years and DS is more common in girls (60 percent of the cases) than boys (40 percent of the cases). DS is a miswiring of the eye muscles, causing some eye muscles to contract when they shouldn’t and other eye muscles not to contract when they should. People with DS have a limited (and sometimes absent) ability to move the eye outward toward the ear (abduction) and, in most cases, a limited ability to move the eye inward toward the nose (adduction). Often, when the eye moves toward the nose, the eyeball also pulls into the socket (retraction), the eye opening narrows and, in some cases, the eye will move upward or downward. Many patients with DS develop a face turn to maintain binocular vision and compensate for improper turning of the eyes. In about 80 percent of cases of DS, only one eye is affected, most often the left. However, in some cases, both eyes are affected, with one eye usually more affected than the other.

My case of Duane’s is typical. I have not a “limited” but an “absent” abduction of the left eye; and while my adduction is relatively unaffected, I do exhibit some retraction: as the eye tracks right, the eyeball is pulled back a bit into the socket. My explanation for this, which is purely of my own invention, is that the atrophied muscles are unyielding and as the eye moves away from them they anchor it down, pulling it inward.

The long and short of it is that my left eye, while tracking more or less normally to the right, will not track leftward past the middle. I suffer, therefore, some loss of peripheral vision on the left side. My left eye–or rather the area around the eye–has a visible droop on the left side, since the eyeball never rotates to that side; the muscles around the eye have atrophied due to disuse. Finally, if I look at something or someone obliquely to my left without moving my head, I am in fact suddenly cross-eyed, a condition I can correct easily simply by turning my head until the eyes are working in parallel again. The effect is visible and often quite noticable; it was this symptom that worried my mother until the Oschner’s clinic doctor released her from anxiety, and sent us all on our quest for answers–answers we never really got.

I was in my middle thirties before I had a name for this condition, and the full explanation for it followed quickly from that revelation from the “Swedish blond” ophthalmologist of Mt. Vernon, Ohio. But I had understood Duane’s Syndrome all my life from the inside. Turning my head exaggeratedly to the left has always been a necessary over-correction of mine; dealing with the mild teasing, and the interest, that came from the strange manifestation of my inability has been familiar to me longer than my memory extends, and is with me still.

Myopia is something else again. As is usually the case, my near-sightedness was progressive throughout my teenaged years and into my twenties; every year I had to trade a pair of glasses for a stronger pair. Short-sightedness is sympomatic of a hyperextended eyeball, one that tends toward the shape of an egg rather than that of a sphere; the focal points of my eyes are in the wrong place, and so the world is blurred. As one grows, the hyperextention becomes more exaggerated, and stronger corrective lenses are necessary.

To what extent does the warpedness of my vision contribute to my poetry? We can be reasonably sure that it does not cause it, else all nearsighted people would be poets, and all poets nearsighted, an assertion that is not (quite) true even metaphorically speaking. Nevertheless, I am certain that, had I not had various kinds of problems with my eyes, my poetry would be different. My vision would be different. I might trust the world to be what it is more than I do. I would not have access to that profound alteration in the apparent nature of things to which removing one’s glasses gives rise. Without the “unwashed goldfish bowl” of my peculiarly distorted sight, I might believe more seamlessly and yet more naively in what Joyce called “the ineluctable modality of the visible.”

A case of Duane’s Syndrome

For many years I had been warned. A person whose eyes are like yours . . . there is a tendency . . . beware of certain symptoms. Sitting in Dr. de Souza’s examination room, waiting, as one does, for various things to take place before the doctor appears, I thought of the history of my vision. It presented itself as a series of identical visits to rooms like this one–in effect, of visits to this room, where I had been so many times before, even though I had never actually been here. The eyeball gets longer and longer. Eventually, perhaps, the viscous humor inside the eye separates from the retina. When it does, the retina may tear. This process may be more or less serious. It can result in partial or total detachment of the retina. The end result in extreme cases can be blindness.

I had finally seen the flashing, the weird heat lightning in the eye. I had seen the gout of blood, which presented itself as a ghostly gray plume in the middle of my vision. Here at last, as the Bible puts it, “that which I had feared was upon me.” And as is so often–but alas not always, no indeed–that which I had feared was not so bad. I had to have a little repair job done, which Dr. de Souza committed freehand with a little hand-held laser; it worked on my retina like a tiny nail gun, shooting bursts of cauterizing light onto the tear. This process was weirdly painful; one is not accustomed to feeling tiny nails, as it were, shot against the back of the eye, and the soul protests at its window being dealt with in such fashion. But the thing was done.

What I will not soon forget, though, was the moment irony entered the room like a demented technician, right on cue and perfect of performance. Of my nameless syndrome, fifty years ago, that Oschner’s ophthalmologist–probably dead now–had said: it’s not a problem unless it’s a problem. Now, of my Duane’s Syndrome, Dr. de Souza said: Interesting. But it causes me a little problem.

A little problem. All those years I sat in my boring classroom experiementing with my weird eye: if I turn my eyes this way, if I try it that way: and what are those strange translucent objects floating in my field of sight? And how is it a tree looks one way with glasses on, another with glasses off–which is real? What have the doctors done to me? Something in my thought: they took my good clear sight away, they gave me glasses. Who has done this thing?

A grownup forgets all this of course. Of course. And yet, St. Augustine, more grownup than anyone ever has been, realized suddenly, “I have become a problem unto myself.”

“Here’s the thing,” said Dr. de Souza. “We’ll just pop that eye a little.” We will? He produced a demonic little metal spatula, which he pushed all too firmly against my upper eyelid, into the seam between my eyeball and its socket. “Now,” he said, “Let’s see.”

My muse, my Sphinx, my Yemanjá: Sprung vision. What image out of the soul of the laser will come to trouble my sight? Yes. We’ll see. We’ll see

Going Gentle

2009-02-28T10:51:00.000-08:00

. . .voices

uninterruptedly
talking, in Eternity:
names being mentioned,
things cleared up finally;
what he said, what she said,
who got pensioned;

deaths, deaths and sicknesses;
the year he remarried;
the year (something) happened.
She died in childbirth.
That was the son lost
when the schooner foundered.

He took to drink. Yes.
She went to the bad.
When Amos began to pray
even in the store and
finally the family had
to put him away.

“Yes . . .” that peculiar
affirmative. “Yes . . .”
A sharp, indrawn breath,
half groan, half acceptance,
that means “Life’s like that.

We know it (also death).”

–Elizabeth Bishop

My father died on December 17, 1994. When his lung cancer had been diagnosed a few years before that, I was not surprised. I have never seen a more intransigent case of nicotine addiction than his. He smoked unfiltered Lucky Strikes and Camels for decades; in later years he switched to filtered brands, but was never able to give up tobacco, though he tried many times. He was a poster boy for lung cancer. Still, the small-town doctor he insisted on using missed it, for how long we still don’t know. Emphysema was diagnosed; cancer, no.

Surgery for the initial cancer went well; the upper right lobe of his lung, with a “self contained” tumor in it, was removed; he recovered. For a couple of years, he did well. The removal of part of a lung caused him some difficulty; decreased lung capacity coupled with emphysema made it hard for him to breathe at times. Still, on the whole, he was in reasonable shape, and his prognosis after radiation treatment was guardedly good. But his health began to decline, and in the fall of 1994 a new diagnosis came in: brain tumor.

An intelligent man without much education, reared on a farm with a farmer’s intimacy with the up-close-and-personal knowledge of the fate of the body that farmers have, and a non-combatant but nonetheless real participant in World War II (serving in England during the Blitz), my father was a fatalist. He never talked about faith or things of the spirit, whatever one may mean by those things. The closest he ever came, in my presence, was to say once, after the lingering death of one of his uncles, “When my time comes to die, I want to go off by myself in the woods alone like an animal; animals understand how to die.”

He was hospitalized in late November of 1994. I was living and teaching in Eugene, Oregon at the time, and was prepared to go home for the holidays to be with my parents in any case; I stayed in touch with my mother to monitor his progress (toward what at first we were not sure). His tumor was diagnosed at first as inoperable and then as operable, but on the eve of surgery his case was studied by an anesthesiologist, who said, “This man cannot be put under general anesthesia; his lungs are too weak: it would kill him.” In the end they opted for a less intrusive procedure to attempt to shrink the tumor: draining it with a syringe, which could be done with a local anesthetic.But that procedure failed; the tumor, to the doctors’ surprise, contained no fluid, and so there was no benefit from what must have been, to my father, a terrifying and demeaning process.

My office phone rang one afternoon while I was revising an essay I had long been struggling to write–”Ex Machina: Reading the Mind of the South,” which is about race and class in the Mississippi where I was born; my father figured in it, as he had to do, as the racist he was, and I was there as the bewildered boy I was, trying to understand his loving, brutal lessons about how to be what I was supposed to grow up to be: by his definition, a white man. The essay had been in and out of my thought for a decade, and I was finally wrestling it onto the page; it was a deep emotional struggle, and I was exhausted by it, as I was exhausted by the knowledge of my father’s illness

When I answered the phone, my mother said–without preamble, as I recall–”Your father says he wants to leave the hospital, go home, and die. What do you think?”

My mother is a person of strong and to all appearances unquestioning religious faith; my father, I think, was a nihilist: a home-grown country-western meat-and-potatoes anti-philosophical nihilist, but a nihilist nonetheless. His ideas, insofar as I know them, were atavistic, pragmatic, materialistic, and pessimistic. He was quiet about all this, as he was quiet about almost everything; strong opinions erupted from him only when he felt threatened. Impending death, you might say, is the ultimate threat; in the end he had one opinion and he expressed it.

The morning he died, my mother woke me at 4:30 a.m. I was sleeping on the living room sofa so I would be as close as possible to what we knew by then was to be his deathbed: a rented hospital bed placed not in my parents’ bedroom but in the guest room that had originally been a garage, but had been converted years before for my grandmother when she could no longer live alone; after her death, that room was largely deserted.

“I’m sorry to wake you so early,” she said, “but your father’s having a hard time breathing. Come see what you think.”

What do you think; what do you think? What can you think? What is there to think?

When my mother asked me that question a week before, when she called me in my office in Oregon, my answer was the only one I could make: “I don’t know. What does his doctor say?”

“Why don’t you call him?” my mother said, and gave me the number of an oncologist in Jackson, Mississippi, where the hospital was.

The oncologist was a sympathetic and yet no-bullshit man. “When your father came in here two weeks ago,” he said, “I thought we could do a lot for him. Now, I think there’s nothing we can do for him. You might as well honor his wishes. Take him home.”

We made arrangements. My parents lived in a remote rural place, 120 miles from the hospital in Jackson, 15 miles from the hospital in Macon. We signed up for home health care: a nurse would visit every other day, starting on Monday, the 19th of December. A bed and an oxygen bottle were rented. I bought an overpriced short-notice airline ticket.

“How long does he have?” I asked the oncologist.

“Impossible to say with any kind of certainty,” he told me. “I’d estimate somewhere between one and three months.”

So we were preparing for a siege.

In old novels the term death rattle is shorthand for a host of unpleasant things neither author nor reader wants to dwell on. Stridor seems to be the word most used in contemporary medical literature for the sound a dying human makes struggling to breathe, or not to breathe. My father was clearly struggling. He was not unconscious, but whether he was conscious in the usual sense was impossible for me to tell. His breathing was loud and labored–

A sharp, indrawn breath,
half groan, half acceptance. . . .

“Let’s give him oxygen,” I said, and we broke the seal on the new oxygen bottle. If the oxygen helped, neither of us could see it.

“I’m calling the nurse,” I said, and when the rented health care professional groggily answered her telephone, I said to her the same thing my mother had said to me: I’m sorry to wake you so early. What do you think?

Think.

Most films do a very poor job with death scenes. A gut-shot soldier, or policeman, or criminal, closes his or her eyes and quietly goes. This is the cinematic version of the literary term death rattle. My experience tells me death is harder than that, and noisier.

One film that is an exception to the rule is the excellent Carrington, in which the death of the author Lytton Strachey is anything but dignified. In the midst of his own death stridor, he pauses and says his last words: “If this is dying, I don’t think much of it.” Then he carries on with the noisy, messy process of shutting his body down.

I flew from Oregon to Dallas, where my brother met me at the airport, and we set out immediately for home. We drove through the night and arrived in Jackson in the morning, just in time to check my father out of the hospital. When we got there, he was alert and clearly glad to see us, but he did not speak. He seemed to have given up speaking.

My mother took us aside while the nurse got my father ready for the two hour ambulance ride home. “He stopped speaking a couple of days ago. He hasn’t said anything at all.” At some point a little later, when we were alone for a moment, I asked her “What was the last thing he said?” With a stricken look, she said “He told me ‘I’m ready to die; I just don’t know how to do it.’”

Just how do you do it? What do you think?

I think we’re in rats’ alley
Where dead men lost their bones.

“It sounds like he’s not getting enough oxygen,” the nurse said sleepily. “You have oxygen there, right?” Of course. And we’re already using it. We had a small clip on his nose that held the oxygen tube in place. “Try the mask,” said the nurse; “That should work better. Call again if you need me. Otherwise I’ll see you Monday morning.”

The oxygen was useless. I tried keeping the mask on, but it clearly didn’t change anything.

I imagined my father in a room, in the dark, looking for a door.

My father and I did not have a terribly close or easy relationship. We loved each other; his love for his children was enormous, and instinctual, like his love for the farm on which he was born. He wanted to return to that farm to die; he wanted us with him.

What stood between us was nothing less than a world view. We could not see eye to eye on virtually any issue. Race was the deepest rift between us. His racism was intransigent and virulent. After a series of confrontations when I was in my late teens, we hardly ever discussed the matter again; it was clear to both of us that we were on opposite sides of an abyss. If we had continued arguing about it we would have ended up hating each other. I visited my parents often during the years of my adulthood; we all wanted to see each other. But we hardly talked about anything of any real importance. In a very real sense we all knew there was nothing to discuss. We lived, so to say, on different planets, in different mental worlds. There was no bridge across.

No bridge save one.

His dying–the process of it–changed things by reduction. In that state, my father was incapable of ideas. He had no world view, or his world view was reduced to a single question: where is the door? How do I get out?

The night before, late, I was with him alone. My mother had gone to bed, worn out. My brother had left earlier that day; he needed to go back to his office in Dallas, and planned to return for Christmas; we had time; hadn’t the doctor said my father had at least a month?

I’d given him pills, which he took easily enough. He had a lot of medication, including a mysterious drug called Zocor; I had no notion what that was, but a little research revealed that it was a new antidepressant. Antidepressant? The man is dying; isn’t he entitled to be depressed? Still, I counted them out, I gave him water.

He seemed to be asleep. I sat in a chair beside his bed, reading. The death stridor was still hours away. But he became restless. He threw back the sheet. He sat up, for the first time since he’d been home. And for the first time in over a week, he spoke.

“I want.”

Clearly speaking was nearly impossible for him. His voice was a rasping whisper. He seemed to have to struggle to find the words he wanted.

He said it again: “I want. . . .”

“What do you want, Dad,” I said. “Do you want water? Ice chips?”

“I want . . . I want . . . .”

I went near him and put my head down so as to be certain not to miss what he might say. “What do you want?”

Then he found it, and said it all in a tortured breath: “I want to be a corpse.”

Having delivered that sentence on himself, he lay down and went to sleep.

By 6:30 the next morning, he’d found the door, he’d turned the knob, he’d gone.

The doctor had said at least a month. My father lasted four days.

At 7:00, the doorbell rang. It was my uncle, the middle brother of three; the oldest had died a decade before, also of cancer. As he came in, he said “I just stopped by to see how Cap is.” He was a farmer; 7:00 was already the middle of the morning as far as he was concerned.

He must have seen something in my face, because he paused and leaned forward. “What’s wrong?”

“Dad died about half an hour ago, Uncle Earl,” I said.

I might as well have struck him in the face. This was his little brother, the baby of the family, the smartest and handsomest, in many ways the darling of the whole community. When he was a boy they started calling him “Cap,” short for Captain; his other nickname was “Wheel,” short for Big Wheel. He was the little captain of his world, the CEO of the family. He couldn’t be dead.

I took my uncle into the bedroom where my mother stood beside my father, holding his hand, stroking his forehead. He looked peaceful, as they say, but hardly natural. He looked very dead. As he had wanted, he turned into a corpse.

My uncle hugged my mother, and they both stood silent there, reduced to helplessness by my father’s death. It was up to me to be the grownup; they were incapable of it.

“Well,” I said. “I have to call the coroner now.”

At that point something happened that, remembering it, I still find unbelievable, while at the same time I know it was utterly predictable. My uncle, roused from his shock, looked at me so angrily he might as well have run at me with a naked knife.

“NO!” he shouted. Literally, he shouted; he was almost screaming.

“Excuse me?” I said.

“You will NOT call the coroner. I will NOT have that–that–nigger woman–come into this house and paw over your father’s body!”

I thought hard for us all, my only swerving. . . .

About fifteen minutes before my uncle appeared, and about fifteen minutes after I was certain my father was dead, I had one of those unwelcome epiphanies that often arrive at such moments: I had no idea what to do next. Generally deaths such as my father’s occur in hospitals, with plenty of authority figures armed with forms to fill out waiting in the wings. But there was nobody here but my mother and me. Neither of us had thought to ask what the aftermath of my father’s dying would entail; we thought we had plenty of time.

“Call your cousin Glen,” my mother suggested. “He’ll know what to do.”

My cousin–who happened to be Uncle Earl’s son in law–was a doctor who lived forty miles away, one town over. I called him up and repeated the formula, “I’m sorry it’s so early.” He was kind, and professional. I must call the coroner, he said. The coroner will come and examine the body, and then take it to the funeral home of our choice.

In the moment of my uncle’s outburst, I had to think. I felt, frankly, like kicking his racist ass out of my mother’s house. I felt like screaming back at him. He was standing on the far side of my father’s body from me; my father, who might well under other circumstances have sat up and agreed with him, said nothing, having assumed his corpsehood fully. My mother hardly seemed to have heard what my uncle was saying; she continued stroking my father’s forehead, crying quietly.

In the end I said nothing. I needed to spare my mother any further trouble. I dialed my cousin’s number again. Let the son in law deal with the old man. I had other things to do.

. . . then pushed her over the edge, into the river.

Not an angel. Not a spirit. Not a ghost. A corpse.

As he was dying, all my differences with my father evaporated. I stood by his bed through the last couple of hours of his life; I gave him ice chips, which he accepted thirstily: the “death rattle” dries the throat powerfully, and even a dying body, turning into a corpse, wants water. He was no longer at a distance; the ideas that separated us were gone. He was a man, dying, and I was his son.

Even the violent, familiar ugliness of my uncle’s outburst did nothing to change that understanding.

The county coroner in that part of the world is elected; for years, the electoral process had belonged to the white minority. By 1994, that had long changed, and virtually every elected official there was African American. That fact alone was enough to enrage a man like my uncle, or my father either, come to that. In his mind, too, there was something especially intimate about the ministrations following death that he found simply unbearable.

I made certain he was gone by the time the coroner arrived. She was cool, smart, sympathetic, and thorougly professional. She arrived in a hearse, with an assistant; she examined the body. I signed some forms. She shook my hand and gave me a gentle, tired smile.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “We’ll take care of him now.”

(Quotations are from Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Moose,” T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” and William Stafford’s “Traveling Through the Dark.” The title alludes to Dylan Thomas’s poem “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.”)