March 2008 Archives
Ten minutes on March 29, 2008
In his ten minutes of a while ago, Peter talked about two things that have brought Margann and I closer: her sister dying, and the dog. And this is utterly true. They both fit the comment Julia made, about couples doing something together that neither is expert at, something involving risk. And emotion, it seems.
This is also a Burning Man mantra: learn something new. Be learning something new all the time to avoid the Slough of Despond, also known as El Rut, which is Spanish for “the Rut.” Some routines are better than others, but all routines routinize thought and action. Learning something new forces the learner into psychological states, brings obstacles and new forms of knowledge forward, reminds us of what it has been like to be new at something. Zen Mind, Beginner Mind is a book (by Suzuki?) that I kept on my shelf for a long time in my youth; part of the discipline of Zen is to bring one fresh to a situation, even a situation you think or feel you know perfectly well, extensively. Perhaps it is most important to have a Zen mind when your regular mind has fallen into El Rut, despite, or due to, begin smart, savvy, knowledgeable.
Every night I have to walk Cliff, and every night I get to walk Cliff under the night sky. I’m outside my house, the big box that I love but that keeps me from the weather, the scent of jasmine, the rain. I wrote in my dissertation that every technology has a shadow side, and especially things we’ve used as prostheses – cars, cameras, telephones, among others – take away something we had, legs without wheels, vision without the framing of a camera, speech without the mediation of Motorola. Houses are technologies and houses have their shadow sides too. And when it is 10:45 at night and I walk past all the houses here at cohousing, windows lit in random patterns, and out beyond onto Western Drive and the edge of the Dark Forest (well really the comparatively vast land and ocean space that borders the west edge of all of Western and fans out in a giant V toward the horizon) I am walking away from house technology, and back out into the world that house technology is partly responsible for degrading.
This is another thought about technologies: often they come between us and the environment, and so add layers of buffer so that the feedback loop between environmental degradation and human consciousness of this degradation seems too slow. Perhaps this will be the 21st century version of the Children’s Crusade in the middle ages: thousands leaving their homes, and becoming nomadic. Not only this: nomadic but with technologies aimed at giving them more feedback about the actual state of the water, soil, air, the ocean and the farmlands, insect life and the life of blue whales and – I’m in my dream of the future here, so pardon me while I prolong it a bit further – and, most importantly, their religion is a hybrid of saving the natural world’s coherence and structure as much as possible, and developing technological systems modeled on the complexity of the gaian ecological evolved system of the Earth, and aimed at interfacing with the Earth systems rather than dominating them or considering these living systems so much fuel to do with as we please. This religion has cool rituals and the people who do the most to study and preserve the biosphere are rewarded with honor and laurel wreaths and trips to Hawaii and the sex appeal (the sex lives?) of rock stars.
As I write this and imagine a non-tragic, non-apocalyptic ending to the story of the human being and the ecosphere, I think of meaning. This to me seems to have been one of the two or three life changing meanings I found at Stanford, while I was busy becoming disillusioned with literary criticism and academia. The meaning, from reading all those environmentalists and radical ecologists, and scientists, Commoner and Schumacher and especially Hazel Henderson, is that we must include the oikos of ecology in the oikos of economics or we will degrade our world utterly and wake up to find we cannot unmake what we have done, to great gnashing of teeth. Oikos means household in Greek; economics originally is the the nomics, the counting, of the household: the jars of olive oil, the oxen. Ecology is the logic of the oikos, that is, the logic of the earth considered out house and our home.
We have to learn, over and over, to see things again.
These cans of beans, these plastic computers, these ten thousand things at Wal Mart and Longs, all must be seen again, not as consumer items, things we are entitled to make and to buy simply because we can. Instead, they have to be put back in context, when that context, that history of making, has been hidden, eclipsed. We don’t see the real life of objects as they come to us bearing the aura of human ingenuity, the pollution of entire rivers or lands, the fair or unfair chain of value that rewards some with Solomonic amounts of gold and rewards others with enough to not starve and the golden rule – those who have the gold, make the rules. Instead, we see a bizarre (I imagine later historians, if there are such, looking back appalled, “What were they thinking?”, the way we imagine medieval doctors and their treatments) history of objects: the advertisement. It is history emptied of actual history; it is the history of representations in media. Not just that hamburger comes in plastic and no one sees the effort to raise the animals, the conditions of such raising, the slaughter; also, the thousands of surreal histories of the virtual life of beef, or anything: slogans (“Beef: it’s what’s for dinner”; “Pork, America’s other white meat”; Cheese made from contented cows”) and images (all the imaginary cows in ads, cows that talk, that have cartoon word bubbles over their heads on the sides of trucks, cows that dance and jump over moons and in close-ups munch grass in great contrast to the actual cows, whom very few see except perhaps out the window of the car speeding along the highway, or in a documentary on slaughterhouses).
It seemed to me tonight , walking yet again down that road where the world of houses and cars and wires edges onto the older darker world, that Shelley was right when he imagined that in a world increasingly dominated by science, technology, industry, and concepts of utility and product and getting and spending, the invisible systems that create the meaning of those powerful new realities of the 19th Century are not themselves productive of happiness or meaning for humans. Instead, we need the new poets to be poets of science, of societies, of systems; they must be transformative leaders who help shape healthier, sustainable human worlds. And Shelley, and Wordsworth, and Blake, and Keats, all felt this strongly: that something in Nature calls to our own nature, and in so calling gives us the things we find we lack in the nature of human-made environments. For Shelley, this never ever meant simply retreating to some hothouse life in the country, or moving away from the things humans imagine and make, the knowledge humans accrue over time and cultures and belief systems. It actually meant doing the difficult work of reconciling the apparent Two Cultures of Science and Art, and using our imaginations to grapple with the effects of technology. Unguided by values that are not inherent in technology per se, societies, Shelley argued, would simply add power and acceleration to the uglinesses and evils of the human world.
I’m home now, Cliff is home and Bailey safely asleep and Margann cozily so for two hours already, with this: humans desire meaning in their lives. One’s life turns out to have meaning outside of and added to what one imagines is the meaning of their life. We live in the house of our self, and we then leave this technology of self, this box, and find that all around us, touching us on all sides, different from our own box, are systems that not only have different meanings, but that we must not ignore, to our peril.
It is the stories, the invisible technologies, that I’ve always been fascinated by. “I want a hero,” writes Byron in Don Juan; I desire a hero, I lack one. I want a story about technology and its shadow, the unimaginably valuable, complex-as-any-creator-god Earth that makes human technologies possible. I desire it; I lack it; and so, like Byron, even though the world throws up so many heroes, so many stories about technology, I’ll choose Don Juan, I’ll choose the boy educated to not recognize his own nature, his eros, but who is seduced out of this ignorance by those who are drawn to him, and by the call of landscapes, mountains, oceans, far from the boxes, real and imagined, where he grew up, which he grew out of.
I love my house. It is a house like the one I grew up in, and so also a box for repetitions and securities. To make it not simply a box: how do we do that? What makes a house, not only a home, but something connected to the not house, all the systems outside?
Tell me how you make your house not a box. Tell me how you make your life one that means, or how you imagine it is meaningful. Tell me a story of how humans got smarter about all their technologies, and the oceans didn’t die. Tell me a good night story.
In his ten minutes of a while ago, Peter talked about two things that have brought Margann and I closer: her sister dying, and the dog. And this is utterly true. They both fit the comment Julia made, about couples doing something together that neither is expert at, something involving risk. And emotion, it seems.
This is also a Burning Man mantra: learn something new. Be learning something new all the time to avoid the Slough of Despond, also known as El Rut, which is Spanish for “the Rut.” Some routines are better than others, but all routines routinize thought and action. Learning something new forces the learner into psychological states, brings obstacles and new forms of knowledge forward, reminds us of what it has been like to be new at something. Zen Mind, Beginner Mind is a book (by Suzuki?) that I kept on my shelf for a long time in my youth; part of the discipline of Zen is to bring one fresh to a situation, even a situation you think or feel you know perfectly well, extensively. Perhaps it is most important to have a Zen mind when your regular mind has fallen into El Rut, despite, or due to, begin smart, savvy, knowledgeable.
Every night I have to walk Cliff, and every night I get to walk Cliff under the night sky. I’m outside my house, the big box that I love but that keeps me from the weather, the scent of jasmine, the rain. I wrote in my dissertation that every technology has a shadow side, and especially things we’ve used as prostheses – cars, cameras, telephones, among others – take away something we had, legs without wheels, vision without the framing of a camera, speech without the mediation of Motorola. Houses are technologies and houses have their shadow sides too. And when it is 10:45 at night and I walk past all the houses here at cohousing, windows lit in random patterns, and out beyond onto Western Drive and the edge of the Dark Forest (well really the comparatively vast land and ocean space that borders the west edge of all of Western and fans out in a giant V toward the horizon) I am walking away from house technology, and back out into the world that house technology is partly responsible for degrading.
This is another thought about technologies: often they come between us and the environment, and so add layers of buffer so that the feedback loop between environmental degradation and human consciousness of this degradation seems too slow. Perhaps this will be the 21st century version of the Children’s Crusade in the middle ages: thousands leaving their homes, and becoming nomadic. Not only this: nomadic but with technologies aimed at giving them more feedback about the actual state of the water, soil, air, the ocean and the farmlands, insect life and the life of blue whales and – I’m in my dream of the future here, so pardon me while I prolong it a bit further – and, most importantly, their religion is a hybrid of saving the natural world’s coherence and structure as much as possible, and developing technological systems modeled on the complexity of the gaian ecological evolved system of the Earth, and aimed at interfacing with the Earth systems rather than dominating them or considering these living systems so much fuel to do with as we please. This religion has cool rituals and the people who do the most to study and preserve the biosphere are rewarded with honor and laurel wreaths and trips to Hawaii and the sex appeal (the sex lives?) of rock stars.
As I write this and imagine a non-tragic, non-apocalyptic ending to the story of the human being and the ecosphere, I think of meaning. This to me seems to have been one of the two or three life changing meanings I found at Stanford, while I was busy becoming disillusioned with literary criticism and academia. The meaning, from reading all those environmentalists and radical ecologists, and scientists, Commoner and Schumacher and especially Hazel Henderson, is that we must include the oikos of ecology in the oikos of economics or we will degrade our world utterly and wake up to find we cannot unmake what we have done, to great gnashing of teeth. Oikos means household in Greek; economics originally is the the nomics, the counting, of the household: the jars of olive oil, the oxen. Ecology is the logic of the oikos, that is, the logic of the earth considered out house and our home.
We have to learn, over and over, to see things again.
These cans of beans, these plastic computers, these ten thousand things at Wal Mart and Longs, all must be seen again, not as consumer items, things we are entitled to make and to buy simply because we can. Instead, they have to be put back in context, when that context, that history of making, has been hidden, eclipsed. We don’t see the real life of objects as they come to us bearing the aura of human ingenuity, the pollution of entire rivers or lands, the fair or unfair chain of value that rewards some with Solomonic amounts of gold and rewards others with enough to not starve and the golden rule – those who have the gold, make the rules. Instead, we see a bizarre (I imagine later historians, if there are such, looking back appalled, “What were they thinking?”, the way we imagine medieval doctors and their treatments) history of objects: the advertisement. It is history emptied of actual history; it is the history of representations in media. Not just that hamburger comes in plastic and no one sees the effort to raise the animals, the conditions of such raising, the slaughter; also, the thousands of surreal histories of the virtual life of beef, or anything: slogans (“Beef: it’s what’s for dinner”; “Pork, America’s other white meat”; Cheese made from contented cows”) and images (all the imaginary cows in ads, cows that talk, that have cartoon word bubbles over their heads on the sides of trucks, cows that dance and jump over moons and in close-ups munch grass in great contrast to the actual cows, whom very few see except perhaps out the window of the car speeding along the highway, or in a documentary on slaughterhouses).
It seemed to me tonight , walking yet again down that road where the world of houses and cars and wires edges onto the older darker world, that Shelley was right when he imagined that in a world increasingly dominated by science, technology, industry, and concepts of utility and product and getting and spending, the invisible systems that create the meaning of those powerful new realities of the 19th Century are not themselves productive of happiness or meaning for humans. Instead, we need the new poets to be poets of science, of societies, of systems; they must be transformative leaders who help shape healthier, sustainable human worlds. And Shelley, and Wordsworth, and Blake, and Keats, all felt this strongly: that something in Nature calls to our own nature, and in so calling gives us the things we find we lack in the nature of human-made environments. For Shelley, this never ever meant simply retreating to some hothouse life in the country, or moving away from the things humans imagine and make, the knowledge humans accrue over time and cultures and belief systems. It actually meant doing the difficult work of reconciling the apparent Two Cultures of Science and Art, and using our imaginations to grapple with the effects of technology. Unguided by values that are not inherent in technology per se, societies, Shelley argued, would simply add power and acceleration to the uglinesses and evils of the human world.
I’m home now, Cliff is home and Bailey safely asleep and Margann cozily so for two hours already, with this: humans desire meaning in their lives. One’s life turns out to have meaning outside of and added to what one imagines is the meaning of their life. We live in the house of our self, and we then leave this technology of self, this box, and find that all around us, touching us on all sides, different from our own box, are systems that not only have different meanings, but that we must not ignore, to our peril.
It is the stories, the invisible technologies, that I’ve always been fascinated by. “I want a hero,” writes Byron in Don Juan; I desire a hero, I lack one. I want a story about technology and its shadow, the unimaginably valuable, complex-as-any-creator-god Earth that makes human technologies possible. I desire it; I lack it; and so, like Byron, even though the world throws up so many heroes, so many stories about technology, I’ll choose Don Juan, I’ll choose the boy educated to not recognize his own nature, his eros, but who is seduced out of this ignorance by those who are drawn to him, and by the call of landscapes, mountains, oceans, far from the boxes, real and imagined, where he grew up, which he grew out of.
I love my house. It is a house like the one I grew up in, and so also a box for repetitions and securities. To make it not simply a box: how do we do that? What makes a house, not only a home, but something connected to the not house, all the systems outside?
Tell me how you make your house not a box. Tell me how you make your life one that means, or how you imagine it is meaningful. Tell me a story of how humans got smarter about all their technologies, and the oceans didn’t die. Tell me a good night story.
Ten minutes on March 27, 2008
So I was in the hot tub last night with the lovely and talented Julia, who is visiting from Olympia, Washington, with her daughter Josie.
I had had one of those days that didn’t allow for much down time: get up, walk dog, drive to school, teach two classes, rush to a meeting and eat lunch at it, rush to another meeting for two hours, rush back to office, printer is broken, print off handouts to a remote printer in the English Department, walk over, find office is closed, go back, download documents onto flash drive, go to the little warren of part timer offices, print documents, printer runs out of paper, begin printing on scrap paper, woman brings another ream of paper just in time, rush to class, eating a yogurt as dinner, teach for two and a half hours, drive home.
Upon getting home, I am struck – literally – by the scent of cherry blossoms, jasmine, all sorts of perfume products thoughtfully manufactured by Nature, inc. The sky features the usual zodiacal suspects and no moon yet. Julia is at the Forests house, and I find her there deep in conversation with Cat and Will, with Josie chiming in and thirteen year old Owen glued to the laptop. Off we go to the hot tub, doff clothing, and slide into the hot soup.
The topic turns, as it often does, to marriage, and I trot out my parallel play theory. To wit: for many of us, early parenting meant trading off: you work, I am on the bambino; I work, you are on the bambino; I need to sleep, so you need to do childcare. As the children got older, more space was opened up for both parents. This space was filled, for many, with things that adults need to keep their sanity and grow as individuals: gym visits, sports, reading, reconnecting with friends, taking on more responsibilities at work, and so on. This pattern continued, with intermittent attempts to connect with one’s spouse.
Added to this is a certain brutal logic to long term relationships like marriage. Each half of the marriage is a moving target; the person we met oh so long ago is not the same person we wake up to now, for better and for worse. Inevitably, the young (youngish?) god or goddess we fell in love with has disappointed us in some ways, perhaps many; and we have disappointed them. Repetition has rendered many of our interactions rote or routine, despite our best efforts to bring energy and love to our partner. And perhaps we had assumptions or hopes, often unspoken or hidden, about what the trajectory of the relationship would look like in its ideal state; this trajectory then veered from its ideal course, like the crash and burn efforts of the early American space program.
This is not news to anyone I’m sure. But (I said to Julia, who sat with the light from either the moon or a nearby houselight filtering through trees onto her lovely face, so that her eyes and forehead were often lit, her nose and mouth shaded) this parallel play results in nontrivial distance between partners in various ways, different for different couples, but usually most troubling where the said couple has already encountered conflict. The upshot is not simply that the empty nest syndrome hits and the couple looks up and wonders what they will talk about now that the one main topic of conversation and focus of couple energies has gone; it is also the gradual erosion of intimacy, of opportunities for intimacy, and of the kinds of energy and structures of feeling that produce intimacy. Meanwhile, parallel play has potentially produced situations outside the couple that provide excitement, energy, engagement, challenge, all of which serve to heighten the contrast with the more fraught interactions of marriage. And on top of all this, somewhere along the line couples with children become couples with children, a fleet of cars, a house and mortgage, bank accounts, complex scheduling involving entire years, tax returns, IRAs…so that said couple resembles a small business more than a set of lovebirds. I’m not sure of this, but I bet a large percentage of the conversations between husband and wives sounds like management meetings, strategic planning, or possible parodies of these things.
We talked about the usual responses to this: counseling and therapy, and the generic activities for re-engaging with your partner (going off for a weekend, for a week, having dinner, movies, and so on). Then Julia said something that I thought was really brilliant. It felt brilliant because when she said it I felt something hit me in the stomach area, which is often where truths go when they can’t access the brain directly owing to the fact that the brain’s door is blocked by mental laundry on the floor that hasn’t been folded. But I digress. Julia said that she thought couples perhaps needed to learn something together that neither is good at, and that this something should perhaps be challenging, somewhat difficult, involving risk.
She spoke for a while (she said many other thoughtful things but they must remain in the shadows for the nonce) and then we sat with the night sky above us, like a veil held up between us and the mysteries of life, with only a few holes in it where the light was shining through. I looked over her shoulder at the houses nearby, most dark now, many with a couple and a family sleeping in them, each facing one or another of the challenges we had been discussing. I felt an overwhelming compassion for them, for myself, for all of us. We’re all trying to figure this stuff out while riding a bicycle on a tightrope and juggling twothreefourfive balls in the air, and the safety net is full of holes and the crowd is looking on, hoping that we’ll amaze them, thrill them with what we can do, and go home with just a little wonder inside them. And maybe that is just what they need, that little packet of energy and wonder, when they wake up the next day and look over at spouse and progeny and begin their own riding and juggling.
Two a.m.! The ground is cold on the bare feet, but a nice cold. The moon is caught in tree branches, so that only a piece of it comes through, only fragments of the light it reflects from its partner in nocturnal light, the sun. But of course behind those trees, it is full and round and bright, same as it ever was, same as it ever was.
So I was in the hot tub last night with the lovely and talented Julia, who is visiting from Olympia, Washington, with her daughter Josie.
I had had one of those days that didn’t allow for much down time: get up, walk dog, drive to school, teach two classes, rush to a meeting and eat lunch at it, rush to another meeting for two hours, rush back to office, printer is broken, print off handouts to a remote printer in the English Department, walk over, find office is closed, go back, download documents onto flash drive, go to the little warren of part timer offices, print documents, printer runs out of paper, begin printing on scrap paper, woman brings another ream of paper just in time, rush to class, eating a yogurt as dinner, teach for two and a half hours, drive home.
Upon getting home, I am struck – literally – by the scent of cherry blossoms, jasmine, all sorts of perfume products thoughtfully manufactured by Nature, inc. The sky features the usual zodiacal suspects and no moon yet. Julia is at the Forests house, and I find her there deep in conversation with Cat and Will, with Josie chiming in and thirteen year old Owen glued to the laptop. Off we go to the hot tub, doff clothing, and slide into the hot soup.
The topic turns, as it often does, to marriage, and I trot out my parallel play theory. To wit: for many of us, early parenting meant trading off: you work, I am on the bambino; I work, you are on the bambino; I need to sleep, so you need to do childcare. As the children got older, more space was opened up for both parents. This space was filled, for many, with things that adults need to keep their sanity and grow as individuals: gym visits, sports, reading, reconnecting with friends, taking on more responsibilities at work, and so on. This pattern continued, with intermittent attempts to connect with one’s spouse.
Added to this is a certain brutal logic to long term relationships like marriage. Each half of the marriage is a moving target; the person we met oh so long ago is not the same person we wake up to now, for better and for worse. Inevitably, the young (youngish?) god or goddess we fell in love with has disappointed us in some ways, perhaps many; and we have disappointed them. Repetition has rendered many of our interactions rote or routine, despite our best efforts to bring energy and love to our partner. And perhaps we had assumptions or hopes, often unspoken or hidden, about what the trajectory of the relationship would look like in its ideal state; this trajectory then veered from its ideal course, like the crash and burn efforts of the early American space program.
This is not news to anyone I’m sure. But (I said to Julia, who sat with the light from either the moon or a nearby houselight filtering through trees onto her lovely face, so that her eyes and forehead were often lit, her nose and mouth shaded) this parallel play results in nontrivial distance between partners in various ways, different for different couples, but usually most troubling where the said couple has already encountered conflict. The upshot is not simply that the empty nest syndrome hits and the couple looks up and wonders what they will talk about now that the one main topic of conversation and focus of couple energies has gone; it is also the gradual erosion of intimacy, of opportunities for intimacy, and of the kinds of energy and structures of feeling that produce intimacy. Meanwhile, parallel play has potentially produced situations outside the couple that provide excitement, energy, engagement, challenge, all of which serve to heighten the contrast with the more fraught interactions of marriage. And on top of all this, somewhere along the line couples with children become couples with children, a fleet of cars, a house and mortgage, bank accounts, complex scheduling involving entire years, tax returns, IRAs…so that said couple resembles a small business more than a set of lovebirds. I’m not sure of this, but I bet a large percentage of the conversations between husband and wives sounds like management meetings, strategic planning, or possible parodies of these things.
We talked about the usual responses to this: counseling and therapy, and the generic activities for re-engaging with your partner (going off for a weekend, for a week, having dinner, movies, and so on). Then Julia said something that I thought was really brilliant. It felt brilliant because when she said it I felt something hit me in the stomach area, which is often where truths go when they can’t access the brain directly owing to the fact that the brain’s door is blocked by mental laundry on the floor that hasn’t been folded. But I digress. Julia said that she thought couples perhaps needed to learn something together that neither is good at, and that this something should perhaps be challenging, somewhat difficult, involving risk.
She spoke for a while (she said many other thoughtful things but they must remain in the shadows for the nonce) and then we sat with the night sky above us, like a veil held up between us and the mysteries of life, with only a few holes in it where the light was shining through. I looked over her shoulder at the houses nearby, most dark now, many with a couple and a family sleeping in them, each facing one or another of the challenges we had been discussing. I felt an overwhelming compassion for them, for myself, for all of us. We’re all trying to figure this stuff out while riding a bicycle on a tightrope and juggling twothreefourfive balls in the air, and the safety net is full of holes and the crowd is looking on, hoping that we’ll amaze them, thrill them with what we can do, and go home with just a little wonder inside them. And maybe that is just what they need, that little packet of energy and wonder, when they wake up the next day and look over at spouse and progeny and begin their own riding and juggling.
Two a.m.! The ground is cold on the bare feet, but a nice cold. The moon is caught in tree branches, so that only a piece of it comes through, only fragments of the light it reflects from its partner in nocturnal light, the sun. But of course behind those trees, it is full and round and bright, same as it ever was, same as it ever was.
Ten Minutes on March 23, 2008 Take Two
Easter, like Christmas, is often about children getting up early and adults getting up earlier to hide things. This Easter the inimitable Ruth was gone, so Cat and Kelsey organized the hiding, the running of the smaller children, and then the running of the older ones. I love every part of it, especially how so many of the older kids are quite happy thank you very much to have a foot in being just a kid still, whatever that means to them.
I opened one eye, then the other, and when I got the All Clear I woke up out of my waking dream that I lay in a bedroom which was a treehouse, soft cool sheets on my skin and birdsong and children and laughter quick now here always. I think there was some mildly erotic element as well, morphing relatively seamlessly into being both open to touch (the sheets, the air, the sleep still hanging over the body, a light dusting of sleeping powder). Sleep to awake with a stop at mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm….
I could hear children’s voices buzzing in the flowers somewhere and Kelsey’s voice, the one built for Command of Children, a trumpeting sound and nice to hear at that, since it means she is Back With Us and not Away At College. The clock looked at me with no expression, simply letting me know that 9:02 had now been replaced digitally by 9:12 and then 9:25. Jump up get out of bed drag a comb across your head downstairs get the camera check the phone wonder where your family is check clothing and head out into the stunning sunlight of 9:33 on an Easter Sunday in the year of our Lord 2008.
Apparently our Lord has given over running of the proceedings to an also absent Easter Bunny, and his stand-ins Kelsey and Cat and other adults who hid eggs in wonderful places on the head of a stone Buddha in a birdcage suspended from a tree behind the leg of a bench a table a marble horse. Chocolate eggs and plastic eggs and hardboiled old school eggs, nestled in the crook of a stunning cherry tree, slid under tufts of grass on the green, highlighted against the corners of windows. The kids gather on the steps and the parents take pictures and movies and shout out orders and when things will start and people run because they are late and pictures must be delayed then retaken and the even more late come some are slightly abused by the now rowdy crowd of sugar fiends and egg hiding aficionados.
Somehow all the adults get their shot at the espresso machine, the pictures are taken, and the smaller children bristle as the countdown, well, counts down, and off they go, not simply searching for earthly delights, but finding them hidden everywhere, over and over, who knew the world contained such things just for the looking. And these things, and the hiding of them, are all accomplished by adults who then watch the chasing of these things, this element of all quests, and this most elemental wish, that what we quest for is worth it when and if we find it.
The whole day is then spent hanging out with each other, comparing loot, doing summery stuff you do when you are on Spring Break and the weather is So Very Fine. Maybe later you will be somewhere different, a long way from here, perhaps dispirited, or at the least challenged and humbled and even in a pickle, and you’ll search for something to put on the scales over on Life Worth Living, or When I Was Happy, and you’ll come upon this day sticking up out of its memory slot, practically waving its hand saying Remember me, Remember me!
Easter, like Christmas, is often about children getting up early and adults getting up earlier to hide things. This Easter the inimitable Ruth was gone, so Cat and Kelsey organized the hiding, the running of the smaller children, and then the running of the older ones. I love every part of it, especially how so many of the older kids are quite happy thank you very much to have a foot in being just a kid still, whatever that means to them.
I opened one eye, then the other, and when I got the All Clear I woke up out of my waking dream that I lay in a bedroom which was a treehouse, soft cool sheets on my skin and birdsong and children and laughter quick now here always. I think there was some mildly erotic element as well, morphing relatively seamlessly into being both open to touch (the sheets, the air, the sleep still hanging over the body, a light dusting of sleeping powder). Sleep to awake with a stop at mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm….
I could hear children’s voices buzzing in the flowers somewhere and Kelsey’s voice, the one built for Command of Children, a trumpeting sound and nice to hear at that, since it means she is Back With Us and not Away At College. The clock looked at me with no expression, simply letting me know that 9:02 had now been replaced digitally by 9:12 and then 9:25. Jump up get out of bed drag a comb across your head downstairs get the camera check the phone wonder where your family is check clothing and head out into the stunning sunlight of 9:33 on an Easter Sunday in the year of our Lord 2008.
Apparently our Lord has given over running of the proceedings to an also absent Easter Bunny, and his stand-ins Kelsey and Cat and other adults who hid eggs in wonderful places on the head of a stone Buddha in a birdcage suspended from a tree behind the leg of a bench a table a marble horse. Chocolate eggs and plastic eggs and hardboiled old school eggs, nestled in the crook of a stunning cherry tree, slid under tufts of grass on the green, highlighted against the corners of windows. The kids gather on the steps and the parents take pictures and movies and shout out orders and when things will start and people run because they are late and pictures must be delayed then retaken and the even more late come some are slightly abused by the now rowdy crowd of sugar fiends and egg hiding aficionados.
Somehow all the adults get their shot at the espresso machine, the pictures are taken, and the smaller children bristle as the countdown, well, counts down, and off they go, not simply searching for earthly delights, but finding them hidden everywhere, over and over, who knew the world contained such things just for the looking. And these things, and the hiding of them, are all accomplished by adults who then watch the chasing of these things, this element of all quests, and this most elemental wish, that what we quest for is worth it when and if we find it.
The whole day is then spent hanging out with each other, comparing loot, doing summery stuff you do when you are on Spring Break and the weather is So Very Fine. Maybe later you will be somewhere different, a long way from here, perhaps dispirited, or at the least challenged and humbled and even in a pickle, and you’ll search for something to put on the scales over on Life Worth Living, or When I Was Happy, and you’ll come upon this day sticking up out of its memory slot, practically waving its hand saying Remember me, Remember me!
Ten minutes on March 22, 2008
Today was the tenth anniversary of moving into cohousing. I was late because I was going through fourteen envelopes full of pictures from 1996 to 1999. I brought a huge selection to the party, and people came over and looked at pictures of this place when it was a nice overgrown field, when it was being planned, and when the sticks started to go up. There are pictures of the houses rising like bots, and a couple gatherings in front of not quite built yet houses in a sea first of mud and then of mulch and mud.
I walked over from the part to watch some of the March madness at the common house. Stanford men got by Marquette in OT and Stanford women dominated somebody. On the way I could hear the laughter coming from the open houses, and the kids playing beckon beckon with Rhiannon (home from college with her cute self administered short haircut), and all the trees are going off so that wind blows a snow of pink and white petals and the scent stays in a halo around the trees well into the evening.
I spent a good part of today recovering from my long day yesterday: waking up in French Corral, a used to be gold rush town way way way up on a ridge out Highway 49. I woke up and looked out over at the Wells Fargo building, a brick affair from the mid 19th Century, and the rolling hills. Birds were calling to me, saying “come out and take a leak and get your stuff and put it in your car and drive to espresso” so I did exactly that, taking a minute to say goodbye to Luna (Darcy’s cat who Steven inherited) and feeding her wet food so she'll like me. Nevada City was about 20 or so minutes away, down a road with trees and cows and houses and a few trailers. In town felt like the opposite to French Corral; it felt like real estate had come and placed its hand on all the buildings, taking a small part of their souls. But then I found a café with lox for the bagels and very decent espresso and said, well so be it, and read about all the fires that ravaged the Seven Hills here back in the day. The entire place burned at least twice taking with it a rather large amount of the value of the town.
So. Nice breakfast in the sun in the window of a café right on the main drag so I could mull over the architecture of the place and people watch (one fellow with the serious prospector’s whiskers, a couple guys falling over each other’s feet, people who looked like the hand of real estate had touched them). Then drive to Darcy’s, drive the already loaded truck to the dump down 49 to west 20 on the ramp off again right right and onto the dump road. Drive onto the scales; drive around to the dumping area; hump a bunch of stuff off the truck and into a big pit. Not much dignity for the funeral of things; a loud of noise, bulldozers and trucks and stuff breaking. I kept thinking how someday people would mine solid waste disposal areas for metal, machinery, who knows what.
Then get weighed again, pay, drive back to North Bloomfield Road, load the truck with the rest of the material possessions of the dead woman, drive to Salvation Army, and unload for the last time. The guy working there took pictures of the graffiti on the side of the truck, and told me he and his uncle tagged a lot before they got caught and went to jail. Now his uncle has a site and puts up all sorts of tags from anywhere and everywhere. Then a quick lunch, call Steve for the fourth time and know for sure he’s left his phone home, drop the truck and pay the U Haul dude to drive me up to Darcy’s for less than the taxi would charge. A last look at the place, quiet now in the afternoon sun, peaceful but with a slight edge as I look over at the tree we planted for Jer, site of two violent deaths. Nature doesn’t care, I think, and I don’t quite believe in ghosts, but the mind can’t quite believe all is gone forever here of the sounds, the blood, the rapid expulsion of two spirits like a quick exhale, a packet of energy sent back into the universe as the body slumps back to stuff.
So with all that and going to Penn Valley and playing disc golf with guys I met there (Ron the talker, the someday pro, Budice the long haired dude with some sweet shots, named for his ubiquitous Budweiser product in his bag) and driving straight from Penn Valley to Fresno, eating a meal and then on the road and over the mountain and back, finally, finally, home.
I walked in and found Rhiannon just home from Middlebury, found Kelsey there too and El (who just won the National Poetry prize for her age group) and Kathy Corby (like me dead tired) and I slumped and talked just a bit and drank in their energy and laughter and went out and walked between all those trees, begun in mud and on drawings, now each a halo of unearthly scent, of oh so earthly scent, sweet and sharp in the cold air, like an offering, like a prayer.
Today was the tenth anniversary of moving into cohousing. I was late because I was going through fourteen envelopes full of pictures from 1996 to 1999. I brought a huge selection to the party, and people came over and looked at pictures of this place when it was a nice overgrown field, when it was being planned, and when the sticks started to go up. There are pictures of the houses rising like bots, and a couple gatherings in front of not quite built yet houses in a sea first of mud and then of mulch and mud.
I walked over from the part to watch some of the March madness at the common house. Stanford men got by Marquette in OT and Stanford women dominated somebody. On the way I could hear the laughter coming from the open houses, and the kids playing beckon beckon with Rhiannon (home from college with her cute self administered short haircut), and all the trees are going off so that wind blows a snow of pink and white petals and the scent stays in a halo around the trees well into the evening.
I spent a good part of today recovering from my long day yesterday: waking up in French Corral, a used to be gold rush town way way way up on a ridge out Highway 49. I woke up and looked out over at the Wells Fargo building, a brick affair from the mid 19th Century, and the rolling hills. Birds were calling to me, saying “come out and take a leak and get your stuff and put it in your car and drive to espresso” so I did exactly that, taking a minute to say goodbye to Luna (Darcy’s cat who Steven inherited) and feeding her wet food so she'll like me. Nevada City was about 20 or so minutes away, down a road with trees and cows and houses and a few trailers. In town felt like the opposite to French Corral; it felt like real estate had come and placed its hand on all the buildings, taking a small part of their souls. But then I found a café with lox for the bagels and very decent espresso and said, well so be it, and read about all the fires that ravaged the Seven Hills here back in the day. The entire place burned at least twice taking with it a rather large amount of the value of the town.
So. Nice breakfast in the sun in the window of a café right on the main drag so I could mull over the architecture of the place and people watch (one fellow with the serious prospector’s whiskers, a couple guys falling over each other’s feet, people who looked like the hand of real estate had touched them). Then drive to Darcy’s, drive the already loaded truck to the dump down 49 to west 20 on the ramp off again right right and onto the dump road. Drive onto the scales; drive around to the dumping area; hump a bunch of stuff off the truck and into a big pit. Not much dignity for the funeral of things; a loud of noise, bulldozers and trucks and stuff breaking. I kept thinking how someday people would mine solid waste disposal areas for metal, machinery, who knows what.
Then get weighed again, pay, drive back to North Bloomfield Road, load the truck with the rest of the material possessions of the dead woman, drive to Salvation Army, and unload for the last time. The guy working there took pictures of the graffiti on the side of the truck, and told me he and his uncle tagged a lot before they got caught and went to jail. Now his uncle has a site and puts up all sorts of tags from anywhere and everywhere. Then a quick lunch, call Steve for the fourth time and know for sure he’s left his phone home, drop the truck and pay the U Haul dude to drive me up to Darcy’s for less than the taxi would charge. A last look at the place, quiet now in the afternoon sun, peaceful but with a slight edge as I look over at the tree we planted for Jer, site of two violent deaths. Nature doesn’t care, I think, and I don’t quite believe in ghosts, but the mind can’t quite believe all is gone forever here of the sounds, the blood, the rapid expulsion of two spirits like a quick exhale, a packet of energy sent back into the universe as the body slumps back to stuff.
So with all that and going to Penn Valley and playing disc golf with guys I met there (Ron the talker, the someday pro, Budice the long haired dude with some sweet shots, named for his ubiquitous Budweiser product in his bag) and driving straight from Penn Valley to Fresno, eating a meal and then on the road and over the mountain and back, finally, finally, home.
I walked in and found Rhiannon just home from Middlebury, found Kelsey there too and El (who just won the National Poetry prize for her age group) and Kathy Corby (like me dead tired) and I slumped and talked just a bit and drank in their energy and laughter and went out and walked between all those trees, begun in mud and on drawings, now each a halo of unearthly scent, of oh so earthly scent, sweet and sharp in the cold air, like an offering, like a prayer.
Ten minutes on March 21, 2008
You took my love
And put it to the test
I saw some things that I never would have guessed
Neil Young yowling up here on the ridge. We are way up on a ridge at the top of nowhere. I saw the place and remembered Steven’s story about his motorcycle: it is locked in the barn of a boy named Jonny boy. The credit boys will never find it.
Neil young is singing, “Why do I keep fucking up” it is what 1980 he is live down here in Nevada City no recorded in a very fucking cool recording barn (on the ranch he bought from X with the buffalo). A four piece band playing this shit in a barn. Plywood Digital is his studio, in contrast with Redwood Digital which is Neil’s recording gig up where I live in Santa Cruz.
I’m at the end of the long day of March 20. I wrote this morning, in Coffee Town, fueled on espresso and anonymity and Steinbeck and the writer as a good identity for me now. And here it is 1:28 and we escaped under the radar of the Nevada City cops and got from the Izabels (very very good local band vocals bass killer bad fast guitar window of opportunity they played among maybe 14 songs all night).
We loaded the truck again. I dumped all the house stuff at about 1:30. The drive wasn’t bad; down Darcy’s road, then down 49 to west 20 right away right right right right until you are at the Fairgrounds (sculpture of a huge huge iron drawing horse pulling) and three miles down at the dump, weigh in, throw shit off the back of the truck, watch the bulldozer push it all into a pile, seven eight nine cars trucks dumping shit.
I thought, this is like a funeral home for objects. The soul is gone from this mixer, this CD player, this set of dishes, this bag of bathroom articles, this overstuffed sofa missing a cushion. I didn’t feel a lot of emotion, but instead like the gravedigger in Hamlet. “Alas poor Yorick. I knew him Horatio.”
So right now the truck is loaded and pointed the right way the goodwill stuff is all together on the left side of the garage and the floor is swept and the plaece straightened.
I just said goodnight to Steven. It is 1: 50 and I’m listening to live or livish Neil Young and he is totally rocking it. With the champagne eyes. I love the way she walks I love the way she talks I love the way she moved Farmer John I’m in love with your daughter the one with the champagne eyes [radical rocked out Neil guitar here with Crazy Horse backing him up). We got back from the trip to Nevada City: we ate seriously again and drank a bottle of sangiovese that wasn’t very good and Steven thought the waitress was awfully nice and I did too. We paid and tipped her out and went to the Izabel gig, getting there right on time. I talked with a woman who dug the Talking Heads the DJ was playing in between the pregroup and Izabel. She turned out to be selling their T shirts and CDs. The band was, as advertised, high energy, up and coming, with an amazing guitar player and a set of reasonably party friendly songs and a nice crowd. Dancing after a day of moving the last of Darcy’s stuff was good; the long guitar jams made for a nice long space to dance in, and there were a few people who seemed delighted to be rocking out. Steven knew the two girls in red dancing together; they said hey and danced with him and he was one happy country boy.
Music and shots of Patrone and meeting people; then the long drive from Nevada City to this little burg, filled with talking and the full moon, still hanging in the sky and silvering the mountain and the road and all.
Two am exactly. Time to dive underneath the covers of my bed near the lamp I always wanted from Amsterdam with the three tulips, and the poster of the absinthe queen that I have too, and the books on magick and a mirror at 10 year old height for his daughter when she comes over.
OK, this one is in the books. Let the record show that today was full of light, late winter light everywhere. And finally – let it show that while I was loading the truck, a pest control guy came by and we got to talking he heard about Jeremiah and Darcy and he said damn drugs then he said don’t get me wrong I warn’t no angel and he talked about the sixties and doing acid and how some of his friends didn’t make it back from the acid use. And he looked up and got an expression rather like the Ancient Mariner of the Rime and said, “I have always lived by the saying, ‘Don’t take anything your spirit can’t kill.”
When Steven later drove up the three of us talked a little then the bug guy left (Burroughs was a bug guy, Steven reminded me) and I told Steve what he’d said to me, as if the whole day was for him to come bearing this one true thing.
Goodnight, Grampa. Goodnight, jen girl.
You took my love
And put it to the test
I saw some things that I never would have guessed
Neil Young yowling up here on the ridge. We are way up on a ridge at the top of nowhere. I saw the place and remembered Steven’s story about his motorcycle: it is locked in the barn of a boy named Jonny boy. The credit boys will never find it.
Neil young is singing, “Why do I keep fucking up” it is what 1980 he is live down here in Nevada City no recorded in a very fucking cool recording barn (on the ranch he bought from X with the buffalo). A four piece band playing this shit in a barn. Plywood Digital is his studio, in contrast with Redwood Digital which is Neil’s recording gig up where I live in Santa Cruz.
I’m at the end of the long day of March 20. I wrote this morning, in Coffee Town, fueled on espresso and anonymity and Steinbeck and the writer as a good identity for me now. And here it is 1:28 and we escaped under the radar of the Nevada City cops and got from the Izabels (very very good local band vocals bass killer bad fast guitar window of opportunity they played among maybe 14 songs all night).
We loaded the truck again. I dumped all the house stuff at about 1:30. The drive wasn’t bad; down Darcy’s road, then down 49 to west 20 right away right right right right until you are at the Fairgrounds (sculpture of a huge huge iron drawing horse pulling) and three miles down at the dump, weigh in, throw shit off the back of the truck, watch the bulldozer push it all into a pile, seven eight nine cars trucks dumping shit.
I thought, this is like a funeral home for objects. The soul is gone from this mixer, this CD player, this set of dishes, this bag of bathroom articles, this overstuffed sofa missing a cushion. I didn’t feel a lot of emotion, but instead like the gravedigger in Hamlet. “Alas poor Yorick. I knew him Horatio.”
So right now the truck is loaded and pointed the right way the goodwill stuff is all together on the left side of the garage and the floor is swept and the plaece straightened.
I just said goodnight to Steven. It is 1: 50 and I’m listening to live or livish Neil Young and he is totally rocking it. With the champagne eyes. I love the way she walks I love the way she talks I love the way she moved Farmer John I’m in love with your daughter the one with the champagne eyes [radical rocked out Neil guitar here with Crazy Horse backing him up). We got back from the trip to Nevada City: we ate seriously again and drank a bottle of sangiovese that wasn’t very good and Steven thought the waitress was awfully nice and I did too. We paid and tipped her out and went to the Izabel gig, getting there right on time. I talked with a woman who dug the Talking Heads the DJ was playing in between the pregroup and Izabel. She turned out to be selling their T shirts and CDs. The band was, as advertised, high energy, up and coming, with an amazing guitar player and a set of reasonably party friendly songs and a nice crowd. Dancing after a day of moving the last of Darcy’s stuff was good; the long guitar jams made for a nice long space to dance in, and there were a few people who seemed delighted to be rocking out. Steven knew the two girls in red dancing together; they said hey and danced with him and he was one happy country boy.
Music and shots of Patrone and meeting people; then the long drive from Nevada City to this little burg, filled with talking and the full moon, still hanging in the sky and silvering the mountain and the road and all.
Two am exactly. Time to dive underneath the covers of my bed near the lamp I always wanted from Amsterdam with the three tulips, and the poster of the absinthe queen that I have too, and the books on magick and a mirror at 10 year old height for his daughter when she comes over.
OK, this one is in the books. Let the record show that today was full of light, late winter light everywhere. And finally – let it show that while I was loading the truck, a pest control guy came by and we got to talking he heard about Jeremiah and Darcy and he said damn drugs then he said don’t get me wrong I warn’t no angel and he talked about the sixties and doing acid and how some of his friends didn’t make it back from the acid use. And he looked up and got an expression rather like the Ancient Mariner of the Rime and said, “I have always lived by the saying, ‘Don’t take anything your spirit can’t kill.”
When Steven later drove up the three of us talked a little then the bug guy left (Burroughs was a bug guy, Steven reminded me) and I told Steve what he’d said to me, as if the whole day was for him to come bearing this one true thing.
Goodnight, Grampa. Goodnight, jen girl.
Ten minutes on March 20, 2008
I am staring at rooftops full in late afternoon sun but it is 11 in the morning. The rooftops are in sun and the housefronts all in shadow, and above the houses stand a regiment of pine trees, and above it all a square of cloudless azure sky. It’s a fine painting, very much like the ones I was showing to my literature class last week: Schuler, or even better, Hopper. Outside the sky is dotted with winter clouds, small, some looking like ideograms, kanjii, Rorschach images morphing out of parallel.
I’m in Grass Valley, at my current favorite cafe, Coffee Town (with a bookstore attached). Bob Dylan is singing
Early in the morning
Its early in the morning
Baby please come home
Baby please come home
I just don’t wanna be
So all alone
The harmonica work, the blues rhythm, contrast with the electronica they’ve been playing (Portishead, nice, Thievery Corporation, Air). I go up and ask – yup. iPod on mix.
Yesterday was wild, a sort of party with some moving thrown in. Steven Ford met me downtown, we drank a quick espresso and went to get the U-Haul, and it started to rain, as though Darcy was still around, and we were not going to ever ever move any of her stuff in dry weather. It reminds me: I ate breakfast today in front of Fox news at the hotel (“Fox News: fast and fair!”). The news: floods in the Midwest, in Missouri, rivers over banks, a woman driving back to save her pets trapped with her 65 year old mother, the pets all die, the humans are saved, no wait one pet survives.
Flood. Darcy Genevieve Sweeney. More and more you look like Kali.
The stories I heard last night got me (out of the flood of stories Steve told me, sitting at the base of a huge tall tree as I stood over him up in the truck, in one of the innumerable pauses in work). One: the neighbors who were interviewed by the cops said there were two shots. The first one into the ground, Steven thinks, to make sure the gun worked. The second into the head. She had two guns and one was a 25 mm, a wussy little gun that could kill you if you got infected from the bullet wound. The Beretta is meant to destroy. The evidence bag had a gun in it surrounded by parts of the head, bone shattered by the resonance like an earthquake in the skull, though the skin holds most of the head together afterwards.
As I write this the music is Miles, melancholy and cool, an everyone in here is reading, working quietly, even the espresso machine feels like the kind you’d install in a cathedral.
Steven gave her the gun because she felt more secure with it. I wonder. He shook his head and talked about the Army, tintinnitis, killing someone and watching guns do their work as a cop…Huntington Beach, the other “Surf City USA,” his first cop gig. The dark began to fall, the truck was now full of the last butt ends of the house’s material goods, some nice silverware, an authentic Irish tea service (I turned it over Steven asked no it isn’t is it? But it was, Made In China), some people show up to ask about renting the house and Steve takes them on the grand tour, the guy complaining all the time companiably about his motorhome and what a nuisance the damned thing is, the complaining of the living I think. Good natured grumping. He is in real estate; he tells us about houses selling for $100,000 in places that would go now for name large number here.
As we talked we talked about ghosts, haunting. It was funny and strange to every once in a while look up and say to Darcy or her ghost or our own memory of her still hovering, “Hey no offence babe but…” or “Why did you do it you brat?” or just “Hey if you are listening…”
The woods got dark like in a fairy tale and the house was now empty full of the nonmaterial things and we got in the pickup and went to Grass Valley and walked to the Owl and got a late meal a big guy meal steak duck potatoes some decent reds and I taped Steven but it wasn’t as powerful as the stuff we’d gone over before.
Neither of us was quite ready to go but he had to work at 430 am and I had to get into my hotel and so we said farewell and his headlights described an arc across the dark and moved up the empty road up and away into the mountains.
I am staring at rooftops full in late afternoon sun but it is 11 in the morning. The rooftops are in sun and the housefronts all in shadow, and above the houses stand a regiment of pine trees, and above it all a square of cloudless azure sky. It’s a fine painting, very much like the ones I was showing to my literature class last week: Schuler, or even better, Hopper. Outside the sky is dotted with winter clouds, small, some looking like ideograms, kanjii, Rorschach images morphing out of parallel.
I’m in Grass Valley, at my current favorite cafe, Coffee Town (with a bookstore attached). Bob Dylan is singing
Early in the morning
Its early in the morning
Baby please come home
Baby please come home
I just don’t wanna be
So all alone
The harmonica work, the blues rhythm, contrast with the electronica they’ve been playing (Portishead, nice, Thievery Corporation, Air). I go up and ask – yup. iPod on mix.
Yesterday was wild, a sort of party with some moving thrown in. Steven Ford met me downtown, we drank a quick espresso and went to get the U-Haul, and it started to rain, as though Darcy was still around, and we were not going to ever ever move any of her stuff in dry weather. It reminds me: I ate breakfast today in front of Fox news at the hotel (“Fox News: fast and fair!”). The news: floods in the Midwest, in Missouri, rivers over banks, a woman driving back to save her pets trapped with her 65 year old mother, the pets all die, the humans are saved, no wait one pet survives.
Flood. Darcy Genevieve Sweeney. More and more you look like Kali.
The stories I heard last night got me (out of the flood of stories Steve told me, sitting at the base of a huge tall tree as I stood over him up in the truck, in one of the innumerable pauses in work). One: the neighbors who were interviewed by the cops said there were two shots. The first one into the ground, Steven thinks, to make sure the gun worked. The second into the head. She had two guns and one was a 25 mm, a wussy little gun that could kill you if you got infected from the bullet wound. The Beretta is meant to destroy. The evidence bag had a gun in it surrounded by parts of the head, bone shattered by the resonance like an earthquake in the skull, though the skin holds most of the head together afterwards.
As I write this the music is Miles, melancholy and cool, an everyone in here is reading, working quietly, even the espresso machine feels like the kind you’d install in a cathedral.
Steven gave her the gun because she felt more secure with it. I wonder. He shook his head and talked about the Army, tintinnitis, killing someone and watching guns do their work as a cop…Huntington Beach, the other “Surf City USA,” his first cop gig. The dark began to fall, the truck was now full of the last butt ends of the house’s material goods, some nice silverware, an authentic Irish tea service (I turned it over Steven asked no it isn’t is it? But it was, Made In China), some people show up to ask about renting the house and Steve takes them on the grand tour, the guy complaining all the time companiably about his motorhome and what a nuisance the damned thing is, the complaining of the living I think. Good natured grumping. He is in real estate; he tells us about houses selling for $100,000 in places that would go now for name large number here.
As we talked we talked about ghosts, haunting. It was funny and strange to every once in a while look up and say to Darcy or her ghost or our own memory of her still hovering, “Hey no offence babe but…” or “Why did you do it you brat?” or just “Hey if you are listening…”
The woods got dark like in a fairy tale and the house was now empty full of the nonmaterial things and we got in the pickup and went to Grass Valley and walked to the Owl and got a late meal a big guy meal steak duck potatoes some decent reds and I taped Steven but it wasn’t as powerful as the stuff we’d gone over before.
Neither of us was quite ready to go but he had to work at 430 am and I had to get into my hotel and so we said farewell and his headlights described an arc across the dark and moved up the empty road up and away into the mountains.
Ten minutes on March 18, 2008
The Canon PowerShot sd750
Digital elph
7.1 megapixels
is matte silver
and its lens is covered in the center by a plastic snap-to piece
its two halves a stylized yin yang
outside its circle
one two three circles encircle it
The moon
Elph of some majesty
Many candles bright
Is not matte silver
It is the same bright silver as Canon
The word above the lens
Its full face is pointed at a hut tub
Outside its circle
One circle also bright silver
Huge, a third of the horizon,
Hovering, an eye
On things.
From the digital eye
A tear in clear plastic
The flash
From the moon
Mars in traditional long range red
Wars are martial
Or otherwise
We discuss them
Kevin says several things
Each of these things
Has a ring around it
Each idea its halo
They take their place in air
As air
Talk and oratory
They last as long as we hold them
In our memories
And longer
Mars’ angry red face
Is a dot smaller than the dot
On this i
We are once again in hot water
The moon’s circle
Like the smoke ring from a wizard in a book
Curls for a long time perfectly
Circling effortlessly
Then begins to dissipate
Circle to oval
The tear defining a third of the horizon
[end draft]
Content of hot tub discussion available on request
All rights reserved
Terms of project and action collaboration available
Obama speech available wherever fine videos are embedded
Thanks to Kathy and Ram
And I haven’t even talked about what the trees indicated on the doggiwalk, or the way the street is a microcosm of all California and a yoga for loving your locale…
The Canon PowerShot sd750
Digital elph
7.1 megapixels
is matte silver
and its lens is covered in the center by a plastic snap-to piece
its two halves a stylized yin yang
outside its circle
one two three circles encircle it
The moon
Elph of some majesty
Many candles bright
Is not matte silver
It is the same bright silver as Canon
The word above the lens
Its full face is pointed at a hut tub
Outside its circle
One circle also bright silver
Huge, a third of the horizon,
Hovering, an eye
On things.
From the digital eye
A tear in clear plastic
The flash
From the moon
Mars in traditional long range red
Wars are martial
Or otherwise
We discuss them
Kevin says several things
Each of these things
Has a ring around it
Each idea its halo
They take their place in air
As air
Talk and oratory
They last as long as we hold them
In our memories
And longer
Mars’ angry red face
Is a dot smaller than the dot
On this i
We are once again in hot water
The moon’s circle
Like the smoke ring from a wizard in a book
Curls for a long time perfectly
Circling effortlessly
Then begins to dissipate
Circle to oval
The tear defining a third of the horizon
[end draft]
Content of hot tub discussion available on request
All rights reserved
Terms of project and action collaboration available
Obama speech available wherever fine videos are embedded
Thanks to Kathy and Ram
And I haven’t even talked about what the trees indicated on the doggiwalk, or the way the street is a microcosm of all California and a yoga for loving your locale…
Ten minutes on March 16, 2008
Saturday night I found myself out with Margann, at a café called Chocolat. They have a da kine bowl of organic chicken soup, and all sorts of drinking chocolates in the Euro style. We ate in that companiable space of the long married, and the silly space of the never quite grown up. The water came in a glass replica of the Tour d’Eiffel. It made pouring water a long distance affair, and the cups were small, so I was quite involved with the graceful structure in its glass form all evening. The off waitress (the one outside; we were inside at the community table, a warm corner of a warm place) looked like the young Faith Hill as a hippy, with dreads and a killer white dress in flounces and cowboy boots and a nose ring and the best affect and smile.
We ate food and then got sleepy and I looked at her face (the midwife face, the one that was up all night on Friday delivering the stunning woman who screamed during the sew-up, reliving trauma abuse ah the mysteries of the body and its soul) and she was so half mast I thought back to the television of my youth when a station would go off the air during the last stint of babysitting “this is the end of our programming day” and that big march music would come on “OHHH say can you seeeeeee” and jets would fly across the sky flags would wave at sunset and it would be time for exhaustion. I started playing the song in my fake-trumpet voice and she smiled a sleepy smile and tilted over to lay her head on me, like the Eiffel Tower leaning, a little Gallic smile on her face, on the Arc du Triomphe, and saying, you drive.
I drove to the 515 (a bar on Cedar) to pick up the credit card I’d left after two single malts had limited my short, medium, and long term memories to a slight buzzing sound like bees in a bottle. Then home again home again jiggity jig to the egg shaped green of cohousing, above the usual stars pretending to be a hunter a bear a dog a club a scorpion. The night was darkdark black with brilliant pinpricks of diamond light gems on a velvet cape I thought not for the first time words fail here the word home for example or alive or quiet or year or season. Season in particular glows for me in memory; it was not warm out, a bit of a sting in the air, Margann walking in front of me, passing the trees one two three all going off flowering the scent like no other thing in the world so specifically sweet a halo of scent around each nowdark tree
I found myself laughing to think that the scent reminded me exactly of the scent of these exact trees exactly one year ago people lived like this by scents temperatures colors and the years accumulated in the senses so that this year this tree this scent had in it – has in it – all the other springs, the other selves I was, the other particulars of relationship, love, friendship, sorrow, dream, fear, wonder.
Aging, once again, flipped around and became remembering, putting back together, composing. I am many, said Whitman; I am you, I partake of multitudes. How many in my little neighborhood my little community walked tonight by these trees, going off like fireworks, redpink in the day with a berry here and there, at night pink catching light and winking like eyes…how many remembered last spring, four springs ago, a happiness not thought of or felt for years, a longing remembered and longed for again? All of us, so different in what passes along the neural corridors, so similar in having such corridors. We are like our houses; the floorplan is almost identical, the furniture and art and where the silverware goes so different. And like our houses, ten years in, stuff is falling apart,the toilet paper roll falls off its cheap bracket, held on with a screw worth $.0000001, our happinesses are more fragile in some cases, or there is dry rot in the foundation of the relationship, and much work needing to be done, and a great deal of sadness in the whole business.
Margann walks in the door, I walk in the door, and the dog dances like we are the King and Queen of All Reality, and he desperately curries our favor in some great affair of State.
Time for a walk.
Saturday night I found myself out with Margann, at a café called Chocolat. They have a da kine bowl of organic chicken soup, and all sorts of drinking chocolates in the Euro style. We ate in that companiable space of the long married, and the silly space of the never quite grown up. The water came in a glass replica of the Tour d’Eiffel. It made pouring water a long distance affair, and the cups were small, so I was quite involved with the graceful structure in its glass form all evening. The off waitress (the one outside; we were inside at the community table, a warm corner of a warm place) looked like the young Faith Hill as a hippy, with dreads and a killer white dress in flounces and cowboy boots and a nose ring and the best affect and smile.
We ate food and then got sleepy and I looked at her face (the midwife face, the one that was up all night on Friday delivering the stunning woman who screamed during the sew-up, reliving trauma abuse ah the mysteries of the body and its soul) and she was so half mast I thought back to the television of my youth when a station would go off the air during the last stint of babysitting “this is the end of our programming day” and that big march music would come on “OHHH say can you seeeeeee” and jets would fly across the sky flags would wave at sunset and it would be time for exhaustion. I started playing the song in my fake-trumpet voice and she smiled a sleepy smile and tilted over to lay her head on me, like the Eiffel Tower leaning, a little Gallic smile on her face, on the Arc du Triomphe, and saying, you drive.
I drove to the 515 (a bar on Cedar) to pick up the credit card I’d left after two single malts had limited my short, medium, and long term memories to a slight buzzing sound like bees in a bottle. Then home again home again jiggity jig to the egg shaped green of cohousing, above the usual stars pretending to be a hunter a bear a dog a club a scorpion. The night was darkdark black with brilliant pinpricks of diamond light gems on a velvet cape I thought not for the first time words fail here the word home for example or alive or quiet or year or season. Season in particular glows for me in memory; it was not warm out, a bit of a sting in the air, Margann walking in front of me, passing the trees one two three all going off flowering the scent like no other thing in the world so specifically sweet a halo of scent around each nowdark tree
I found myself laughing to think that the scent reminded me exactly of the scent of these exact trees exactly one year ago people lived like this by scents temperatures colors and the years accumulated in the senses so that this year this tree this scent had in it – has in it – all the other springs, the other selves I was, the other particulars of relationship, love, friendship, sorrow, dream, fear, wonder.
Aging, once again, flipped around and became remembering, putting back together, composing. I am many, said Whitman; I am you, I partake of multitudes. How many in my little neighborhood my little community walked tonight by these trees, going off like fireworks, redpink in the day with a berry here and there, at night pink catching light and winking like eyes…how many remembered last spring, four springs ago, a happiness not thought of or felt for years, a longing remembered and longed for again? All of us, so different in what passes along the neural corridors, so similar in having such corridors. We are like our houses; the floorplan is almost identical, the furniture and art and where the silverware goes so different. And like our houses, ten years in, stuff is falling apart,the toilet paper roll falls off its cheap bracket, held on with a screw worth $.0000001, our happinesses are more fragile in some cases, or there is dry rot in the foundation of the relationship, and much work needing to be done, and a great deal of sadness in the whole business.
Margann walks in the door, I walk in the door, and the dog dances like we are the King and Queen of All Reality, and he desperately curries our favor in some great affair of State.
Time for a walk.
Ten minutes on March 14, 2008
The quality of light
It was fun teaching William Carlos Williams last week. “No ideas but in things.” “A poem is a machine made of words.” And
This is just to say
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
He said so many incendiary things! He thought of Eliot as a horrorshow for American poetry, Pound too. I stood up in the classroom because I needed to walk around a little when talking about Williams, to gesture. I showed some photographs of him, and some parodies of This is Just to Say. I taught the two Breughel poems, The Dance and Landscape with Fall of Icarus. I looked out and wondered if the students liked the poems, liked me talking about them, or were somewhere else.
No ideas but in things.
I realized, partway through a sentence about American poetry and its various roads (via Stevens, via Eliot, via Williams) and I was in a longago memory, of my teacher telling me upon hearing I wanted to write on Stevens, “Williams would be a better choice. Williams is where American poetry went. Stevens…” His sad dogeyes said Stevens, well. Stevens would be a mistake, a waste of time.
What shall we call this pedagogy? He fired me up to write on Stevens and I always associated Williams with the road not taken. I liked that aper on Stevens, too. I wrote on his poetry and his prose and did a good job.
But in the middle of teaching I was in a memory, and then I looked up to see the photograph of Williams, and then paintings by Dumart? And Schuler? Of grain elevators and lines and industrial spaces. And I found myself moving toward the images on the screen, on the quality of light of small images, and the contrasting beauty and illuminated splendor of the selfsame images on my monitor at the front of the room. And I looked out and talked about the connection once again always isn’t it? Between modernist writing and modernist painting, the fragmentation of space, the concerns with the modern in technique but also in content (earlier one didn’t paint grain elevators and industrial spaces unless one was actually slapping paint on them).
I looked out and talked but inside I was looking at the quality of light in the room. The overhead flouresecents, now turned off to allow the digital projector to magically lantern the very nice white screen pulled low over the now useless blackboard. When they went back on, it was as if one had woken up Rip Van Winkle like in a new world. Gone the world of black and white photograph of Williams from the 30s, from the 60s. Gone the world of red sign blue building and sky of Schuler, the yellow exciting lines gently touching the fine art of its subject and turning it into a perspectival drawing, something to make someday.
Instead, like waking up in a pale sunlight, a waning world, bright but in a dulling way. The bodies of my students were bathed in this light, and in retrospect I imagined the way all sorts of things bathe them and paint them this way and not more excitingly, more alive. This is the light of buying things, of Safeways and Costcos. The commodities seem alive, bright, and the people dull, carrying them from their shelves in wire rolling carts to other people tapping keys. All the faces are bathed in the same light. This is a banal observation, and yet…
I am writing this and I think, let’s all get up now, no leave your notebooks, let’s all get up and go more into the artificial, the artistic: let’s walk into these paintings these photographs these colors. Or…(didn’t I just teach Romanticism as well???)
Let’s go outside; reality is a fucking huge big screen, it makes plasma look lame. The rendering is, well, it is made for us!
It is Spring, or there is such in the air. I am smitten by the flowering trees. I don’t know what to think, or to teach. Ok. Here we go.
The quality of light
It was fun teaching William Carlos Williams last week. “No ideas but in things.” “A poem is a machine made of words.” And
This is just to say
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
He said so many incendiary things! He thought of Eliot as a horrorshow for American poetry, Pound too. I stood up in the classroom because I needed to walk around a little when talking about Williams, to gesture. I showed some photographs of him, and some parodies of This is Just to Say. I taught the two Breughel poems, The Dance and Landscape with Fall of Icarus. I looked out and wondered if the students liked the poems, liked me talking about them, or were somewhere else.
No ideas but in things.
I realized, partway through a sentence about American poetry and its various roads (via Stevens, via Eliot, via Williams) and I was in a longago memory, of my teacher telling me upon hearing I wanted to write on Stevens, “Williams would be a better choice. Williams is where American poetry went. Stevens…” His sad dogeyes said Stevens, well. Stevens would be a mistake, a waste of time.
What shall we call this pedagogy? He fired me up to write on Stevens and I always associated Williams with the road not taken. I liked that aper on Stevens, too. I wrote on his poetry and his prose and did a good job.
But in the middle of teaching I was in a memory, and then I looked up to see the photograph of Williams, and then paintings by Dumart? And Schuler? Of grain elevators and lines and industrial spaces. And I found myself moving toward the images on the screen, on the quality of light of small images, and the contrasting beauty and illuminated splendor of the selfsame images on my monitor at the front of the room. And I looked out and talked about the connection once again always isn’t it? Between modernist writing and modernist painting, the fragmentation of space, the concerns with the modern in technique but also in content (earlier one didn’t paint grain elevators and industrial spaces unless one was actually slapping paint on them).
I looked out and talked but inside I was looking at the quality of light in the room. The overhead flouresecents, now turned off to allow the digital projector to magically lantern the very nice white screen pulled low over the now useless blackboard. When they went back on, it was as if one had woken up Rip Van Winkle like in a new world. Gone the world of black and white photograph of Williams from the 30s, from the 60s. Gone the world of red sign blue building and sky of Schuler, the yellow exciting lines gently touching the fine art of its subject and turning it into a perspectival drawing, something to make someday.
Instead, like waking up in a pale sunlight, a waning world, bright but in a dulling way. The bodies of my students were bathed in this light, and in retrospect I imagined the way all sorts of things bathe them and paint them this way and not more excitingly, more alive. This is the light of buying things, of Safeways and Costcos. The commodities seem alive, bright, and the people dull, carrying them from their shelves in wire rolling carts to other people tapping keys. All the faces are bathed in the same light. This is a banal observation, and yet…
I am writing this and I think, let’s all get up now, no leave your notebooks, let’s all get up and go more into the artificial, the artistic: let’s walk into these paintings these photographs these colors. Or…(didn’t I just teach Romanticism as well???)
Let’s go outside; reality is a fucking huge big screen, it makes plasma look lame. The rendering is, well, it is made for us!
It is Spring, or there is such in the air. I am smitten by the flowering trees. I don’t know what to think, or to teach. Ok. Here we go.
Ten minutes on March 7, 2008
Here is a quick list of today. I woke up feeling a bit less terrible with the crud I’ve been suffering for three days. I drew a bath, that most civilized of healing rituals, and inched into the hot water, and read Sybille Bedford’s Jigsaw (An Unsentimental Education) for an hour, and was transported to the South of France, 1929. The house was quiet, as if supporting this change in locale, and I became a 17 year old girl, went to several parties, watched my mother become addicted to morphine, fell in smitten love with a charismatic woman, made a couple circuits between London and la Midi, and learned to drive. I turned on the hot water occasionally and read Bedford on water in London (plenty of it and hot) and in Souvray (water in summer was always scarce for everyone, baths were complicated). Aldous Huxley showed up with his wife Maria, and I watched them be utterly generous.
Bailey and Zander got up and chattering in the language of 12 year olds. Margann got up, and I heard her laughing – that laugh! One of the best things, really, laughter in general and hers in particular – and chiding the boys. Then she went downstairs and Cliff did his Cliffy dance for her, wiggling his butt and wagging his tail so hard it seems as if it would dislocate something, all on his two hind legs. Bailey cam up and complained that his friend was still here but Mom wanted him to walk the dog with her. Bailey looked tired, as if he’d stayed up late reading and woken up early, which turned out to be the case. I coached him on talking to his mother – he had a friend here, it was polite to wait till he left, tell her what you want clearly – and down he went. Negotiations went smoothly, more laughter, Zander went off to his basketball game, and Bailey and Margann took Cliff to dog park to romp. Dog heaven, more like.
The transition from Huxley, first love, and Souvray to dressing for breakfast was only partly cruel; I threw clothes on and drove to Café Brazil, nipping in at the News Stand Café to get their (superior) coffee (from Café Intelligensia in Chicago, fair trade, direct, eco friendly, and damn good). Café Brazil is tiny, always crowded, a bright yellow and green and blue box of bustle and music. The Acai bowls to drink, the cocota, the orfeo, all made me forget (for a time) my French existence. I sat with my family and took their emotional temperatures, shook the instrument in my mind, and set about drawing them together by telling Margann I has just written about Bailey’s essay, and sent it to about forty people, and in about a minute Bailey was telling the story of the Catholic school dance to Margann and I watched mother and son, their faces like two suns in the same sky, shiny, the family resemblance. Margann slid her food over to Bailey who had already eaten, and he ate his share of the frijoles and eggs, and she ate the rest, and I thought about Souvray and how the mother, the daughter, and the step-father ate in cafes and thought about the magic of good food at a table in public.
Outside it was summer in March, no lions, just lambs, all sorts of trees blooming and flowers going off and birdsong even above the dull sounds of internal combustion. Home was more of the same; Margann went off with Mahk on a mountain bike ride as part of her training for the triathlon, and Bailey and I shot hoops and then slouched around and read a Finnish story called Moominpappa at Sea, first inside on the couch and then outside in the glorious sun on the couch we’d placed on our porch. Then off he went to play, and I read a dissertation on Satan humor (fantastic writing, I was jealous and happy for the author), and finished Jigsaw, and Bailey came back and we slouched some more and he asked me about my worst drug experience and I told him it was a legal drug called Prednisone and then described what mild psychosis felt like. I had very bad poison oak and lay in bed and the Prednisone made me feel like I wasn’t myself there was no self anymore exactly the outside was all there was and it was dissolving my sense of coherence and I started to say mechanically I don’t like this over and over and like a spell that brought me back into my body tentatively at first like someone inhabiting a new strange room or an old room one abandoned and then returned to. He was interested I think and he proceeded to tell me stories about his friend Carter at school and confiscated cell phones. The talk felt just like a bath, warm and surrounding, and the sun poured down like honey and the couch and porch made a kind of island and time was suspended, as if this were already a memory I was having in the future. I decided that I would most likely look back on this as the very image of closeness before puberty, the very image of closeness period. A certain kind of ease here, of easy grace with words, a son who loves stories, telling and hearing, who has grown up surrounded by narratives, and by people who often have a tale to tell.
I have not done justice to the intellectual river I canoed down in that dissertation, or the complexity of life between the wars in Europe, the bohemianism, the sexual mores at odds with the Victorian and the bourgeois, the food – oh the food! I have not described the dinner tonight with friends, dear friends, or the witty wine (anti pulciano!) or how my life now seems parallel to that life in 1929, politics remote and not promising, people in their primes, often startlingly competent, alive, engaged, and a constant DNA strand of sorrow twining around a DNA strand of joy.
Between the strands, in each of us, ladders like letters, ladders like stories we climb to arrive at who we are, were, will be.
Here is a quick list of today. I woke up feeling a bit less terrible with the crud I’ve been suffering for three days. I drew a bath, that most civilized of healing rituals, and inched into the hot water, and read Sybille Bedford’s Jigsaw (An Unsentimental Education) for an hour, and was transported to the South of France, 1929. The house was quiet, as if supporting this change in locale, and I became a 17 year old girl, went to several parties, watched my mother become addicted to morphine, fell in smitten love with a charismatic woman, made a couple circuits between London and la Midi, and learned to drive. I turned on the hot water occasionally and read Bedford on water in London (plenty of it and hot) and in Souvray (water in summer was always scarce for everyone, baths were complicated). Aldous Huxley showed up with his wife Maria, and I watched them be utterly generous.
Bailey and Zander got up and chattering in the language of 12 year olds. Margann got up, and I heard her laughing – that laugh! One of the best things, really, laughter in general and hers in particular – and chiding the boys. Then she went downstairs and Cliff did his Cliffy dance for her, wiggling his butt and wagging his tail so hard it seems as if it would dislocate something, all on his two hind legs. Bailey cam up and complained that his friend was still here but Mom wanted him to walk the dog with her. Bailey looked tired, as if he’d stayed up late reading and woken up early, which turned out to be the case. I coached him on talking to his mother – he had a friend here, it was polite to wait till he left, tell her what you want clearly – and down he went. Negotiations went smoothly, more laughter, Zander went off to his basketball game, and Bailey and Margann took Cliff to dog park to romp. Dog heaven, more like.
The transition from Huxley, first love, and Souvray to dressing for breakfast was only partly cruel; I threw clothes on and drove to Café Brazil, nipping in at the News Stand Café to get their (superior) coffee (from Café Intelligensia in Chicago, fair trade, direct, eco friendly, and damn good). Café Brazil is tiny, always crowded, a bright yellow and green and blue box of bustle and music. The Acai bowls to drink, the cocota, the orfeo, all made me forget (for a time) my French existence. I sat with my family and took their emotional temperatures, shook the instrument in my mind, and set about drawing them together by telling Margann I has just written about Bailey’s essay, and sent it to about forty people, and in about a minute Bailey was telling the story of the Catholic school dance to Margann and I watched mother and son, their faces like two suns in the same sky, shiny, the family resemblance. Margann slid her food over to Bailey who had already eaten, and he ate his share of the frijoles and eggs, and she ate the rest, and I thought about Souvray and how the mother, the daughter, and the step-father ate in cafes and thought about the magic of good food at a table in public.
Outside it was summer in March, no lions, just lambs, all sorts of trees blooming and flowers going off and birdsong even above the dull sounds of internal combustion. Home was more of the same; Margann went off with Mahk on a mountain bike ride as part of her training for the triathlon, and Bailey and I shot hoops and then slouched around and read a Finnish story called Moominpappa at Sea, first inside on the couch and then outside in the glorious sun on the couch we’d placed on our porch. Then off he went to play, and I read a dissertation on Satan humor (fantastic writing, I was jealous and happy for the author), and finished Jigsaw, and Bailey came back and we slouched some more and he asked me about my worst drug experience and I told him it was a legal drug called Prednisone and then described what mild psychosis felt like. I had very bad poison oak and lay in bed and the Prednisone made me feel like I wasn’t myself there was no self anymore exactly the outside was all there was and it was dissolving my sense of coherence and I started to say mechanically I don’t like this over and over and like a spell that brought me back into my body tentatively at first like someone inhabiting a new strange room or an old room one abandoned and then returned to. He was interested I think and he proceeded to tell me stories about his friend Carter at school and confiscated cell phones. The talk felt just like a bath, warm and surrounding, and the sun poured down like honey and the couch and porch made a kind of island and time was suspended, as if this were already a memory I was having in the future. I decided that I would most likely look back on this as the very image of closeness before puberty, the very image of closeness period. A certain kind of ease here, of easy grace with words, a son who loves stories, telling and hearing, who has grown up surrounded by narratives, and by people who often have a tale to tell.
I have not done justice to the intellectual river I canoed down in that dissertation, or the complexity of life between the wars in Europe, the bohemianism, the sexual mores at odds with the Victorian and the bourgeois, the food – oh the food! I have not described the dinner tonight with friends, dear friends, or the witty wine (anti pulciano!) or how my life now seems parallel to that life in 1929, politics remote and not promising, people in their primes, often startlingly competent, alive, engaged, and a constant DNA strand of sorrow twining around a DNA strand of joy.
Between the strands, in each of us, ladders like letters, ladders like stories we climb to arrive at who we are, were, will be.
Ten minutes on March 6, 2008
I’ve been on and off sick for three days. I could write in detail about this, but certain of my esteemed readers have already suggested I do too much of this bodily discussion in my conversation.
I worked with Bailey tonight on his essay, “Should kids enjoy/avoid parties?” He talked about why parties are good – dancing, getting to know people, having fun. Then he said to me that he thinks parties are lame, that dancing is stupid, and went on to tell me a hilarious story of going to a dance at a Catholic school and having the nuns hover on the edge of the dance floor with rulers to make sure no girl got nearer “than this [body bent over, arms stiffly held out, legs bowed]” and told me that I probably thought dancing was good because “it allows you to express your emotions which you think is really important” but he begs to differ. Then he wrote about not going to alcohol parties if you are under age, or to parties where there are weird or boring people. While revising the conclusion owen came over, and they talked about parties at Owen’s school PCS, and Bailey said he wanted to go but Owen said they were lame, and then proceeded to describe the ‘freaky dancing’ girls and boys do, slapped up against each other’s body and writhing. Bailey then did an interpretive dance involving freaking and I think some Red Hot Chili Peppers song.
Then we went through and found all the second person references that broke the essay rule of third person, and had a discussion of what a pronoun is, and what transitions are. He had written a pretty good one for his conclusion – “All in all…” – but he didn’t know it was a transition. And after an hour, a reasonably entertaining one at that, the essay made its late way across the inky night to his teacher’s inbox.
I was struck by the gulf between the essay as school project, and what Bailey “really” thought. School is where you write what is expected, perhaps; and you try to avoid what you really feel or think when that seems at odds with the expectations of the homework. And after all, why not? Who would ever invest themselves in writing for this audience? I’m being a bit extreme here because of course, some love to write for anyone, and others are called to writing because of good teachers and good connections with teachers.
But I wonder what it would look like if instead of an essay, there were four days of just writing stuff you think about a topic, and then looking to see what that stuff looks like, and then using that as your jumping off point. You could even let students respond anonymously to anonymous writings and so allow for difference, challenge, and the altering of positions.
I like Bailey’s teacher a lot. I bet she is trying to gain some of these goals. And some of the ‘honesty’ of some of these 12 years olds would be slightly or very terrifying, I imagine.
Still.
I’ve been on and off sick for three days. I could write in detail about this, but certain of my esteemed readers have already suggested I do too much of this bodily discussion in my conversation.
I worked with Bailey tonight on his essay, “Should kids enjoy/avoid parties?” He talked about why parties are good – dancing, getting to know people, having fun. Then he said to me that he thinks parties are lame, that dancing is stupid, and went on to tell me a hilarious story of going to a dance at a Catholic school and having the nuns hover on the edge of the dance floor with rulers to make sure no girl got nearer “than this [body bent over, arms stiffly held out, legs bowed]” and told me that I probably thought dancing was good because “it allows you to express your emotions which you think is really important” but he begs to differ. Then he wrote about not going to alcohol parties if you are under age, or to parties where there are weird or boring people. While revising the conclusion owen came over, and they talked about parties at Owen’s school PCS, and Bailey said he wanted to go but Owen said they were lame, and then proceeded to describe the ‘freaky dancing’ girls and boys do, slapped up against each other’s body and writhing. Bailey then did an interpretive dance involving freaking and I think some Red Hot Chili Peppers song.
Then we went through and found all the second person references that broke the essay rule of third person, and had a discussion of what a pronoun is, and what transitions are. He had written a pretty good one for his conclusion – “All in all…” – but he didn’t know it was a transition. And after an hour, a reasonably entertaining one at that, the essay made its late way across the inky night to his teacher’s inbox.
I was struck by the gulf between the essay as school project, and what Bailey “really” thought. School is where you write what is expected, perhaps; and you try to avoid what you really feel or think when that seems at odds with the expectations of the homework. And after all, why not? Who would ever invest themselves in writing for this audience? I’m being a bit extreme here because of course, some love to write for anyone, and others are called to writing because of good teachers and good connections with teachers.
But I wonder what it would look like if instead of an essay, there were four days of just writing stuff you think about a topic, and then looking to see what that stuff looks like, and then using that as your jumping off point. You could even let students respond anonymously to anonymous writings and so allow for difference, challenge, and the altering of positions.
I like Bailey’s teacher a lot. I bet she is trying to gain some of these goals. And some of the ‘honesty’ of some of these 12 years olds would be slightly or very terrifying, I imagine.
Still.
Ten minutes on March 3, 2008
I’ve been thinking about something called the mundane cyborg. What I mean is that in films and novels the cyborg character is usually pretty extreme: ice-climbing implants in one’s feet in Elizabeth Lynne, Darth Vader’s elaborate breathing apparatus and helmet and prosthetic hand (ditto for Luke), eye implants and neural jacks and all that. The result is a character that is very memorable, extremely able or powerful in some way. RoboCop is an extreme example of this, as is Steve Austin, the $6 million man. Both have been in horrific crashes and their bodies are massively re-engineered.
However, I’m also interested in the mundane intimate relationships we have with our technology. For example, I have had an asthma inhaler for 20 years now, and I could probably count on one hand the number of days I spend without one in my pocket. It is perhaps the way hunters felt about their flintlocks: necessary to survival. It isn’t a cinema-friendly technology, and no movies are likely to be made about cyber-asthmatics, but it meets a critical test: when I don’t have it I feel something is missing which is part of me. If amputation is too strong, try something else: the inhaler, a little red plastic L shaped tube which slips around a metal canister with a plastic nozzle, is most definitely NOT THERE when it is not there, and the brain feels it before it knows it and the hand goes to the pocket to feel for it even though it knows it is not there.
Of course there are other mundane technologies. The credit card. Going into the world without your link to money, your ability to enter the vast salmon stream of shopping and purchasing, your ticket to ride, is possible; many do it each day. But for me, I’ve had a credit card in my back pocket for 20 years as well. It is like the inhaler; with it, I can often instantly right things that have gone wrong. Without it, I am shut out of an increasing number of places.
And the cell phone, it goes without saying, cannot be left behind or else one goes without saying, at least saying to distant fellow users. And glasses. Mine are not strong, I am a recent adopter (I need them to read signs while driving, and it helps to see round plastic objects coming toward my face at high speeds), so occasionally I get partway down the street before I realize they are no longer an embodied augmenting device comfortably sitting on the bridge of my nose.
The key thing is that you feel a massive missing, a disturbance in the Force. You feel dis-Organized, as your peripheral organs are not with your body. Without my cell phone I often feel amputated, as if I have lost a key limb that enables much of my communication. Your body has as it were grown over these foreign objects, so that they are part of the body’s force field, its magnetic signature. They could of course be embedded, ‘truly’ cyborg and not just intermittent intimate paraphernalia. But m point here is that this would not make a difference that makes a difference; quite the opposite. We see all these cyborgs with their implants and alterations and imagine we are not them; the opposite is the case. We are slowly becoming cyborg, and the implications are enormous, dramatic, and yet we turn our gaze to the Terminator and away from so much of the real action.
Oh one other thing before I shut down my body for the night, or rather put it to sleep like a laptop. Some prosthetics like cars enable organs like feet to do the impossible, to go from LA to Santa Cruz in under 6 hours, like the Seven League Boots from fairy tales. And this is a truly amazing power with all sorts of implications. Not everyone in the fairy tale makes good use of the powers the old woman or man gives them. But my point is: as you drive your Seven League Boots cars, those exoskeletons running on dinosaurs or corn, yoru actual legs do nothing. Now that we have eliminated the clutch in most cars, they do so little it is easy to say that they have been as it were amputated, or put into a kind of paralysis, so that they lose function. And we then have to go to the gym to use other machines that exercise our legs so we don’t lose the function machines have taken away in order to lend us magical powers.
My image of people and cars can be seen in Darth Vader, the dark father, the dark knight. When he is dealt his mortal blow, his son is by his side, and Vader asks Luke to take off his helmet. Inside is a shockingly white, partial head, withered and ill-looking. It is the price of the Dark Side, perhaps, but also the price of the technology. No matter how many mitochlorians you have, it appears many bodies need to be taken out and run like a pony, put through their paces, appreciated for the finely wrought machines they are. The same pride that flows down the arm or leg flows strangely but truly into the glove, the cleat, the disc that leaves the world of the body and carves meaningful runes in the air. The hunter hefts her knife and lovingly slides her fingers along its blade, and the blade lets the hand feel its sharp knowledge of knives.
Is a cell phone a knife or a car? Or both? Or neither?
I’ve been thinking about something called the mundane cyborg. What I mean is that in films and novels the cyborg character is usually pretty extreme: ice-climbing implants in one’s feet in Elizabeth Lynne, Darth Vader’s elaborate breathing apparatus and helmet and prosthetic hand (ditto for Luke), eye implants and neural jacks and all that. The result is a character that is very memorable, extremely able or powerful in some way. RoboCop is an extreme example of this, as is Steve Austin, the $6 million man. Both have been in horrific crashes and their bodies are massively re-engineered.
However, I’m also interested in the mundane intimate relationships we have with our technology. For example, I have had an asthma inhaler for 20 years now, and I could probably count on one hand the number of days I spend without one in my pocket. It is perhaps the way hunters felt about their flintlocks: necessary to survival. It isn’t a cinema-friendly technology, and no movies are likely to be made about cyber-asthmatics, but it meets a critical test: when I don’t have it I feel something is missing which is part of me. If amputation is too strong, try something else: the inhaler, a little red plastic L shaped tube which slips around a metal canister with a plastic nozzle, is most definitely NOT THERE when it is not there, and the brain feels it before it knows it and the hand goes to the pocket to feel for it even though it knows it is not there.
Of course there are other mundane technologies. The credit card. Going into the world without your link to money, your ability to enter the vast salmon stream of shopping and purchasing, your ticket to ride, is possible; many do it each day. But for me, I’ve had a credit card in my back pocket for 20 years as well. It is like the inhaler; with it, I can often instantly right things that have gone wrong. Without it, I am shut out of an increasing number of places.
And the cell phone, it goes without saying, cannot be left behind or else one goes without saying, at least saying to distant fellow users. And glasses. Mine are not strong, I am a recent adopter (I need them to read signs while driving, and it helps to see round plastic objects coming toward my face at high speeds), so occasionally I get partway down the street before I realize they are no longer an embodied augmenting device comfortably sitting on the bridge of my nose.
The key thing is that you feel a massive missing, a disturbance in the Force. You feel dis-Organized, as your peripheral organs are not with your body. Without my cell phone I often feel amputated, as if I have lost a key limb that enables much of my communication. Your body has as it were grown over these foreign objects, so that they are part of the body’s force field, its magnetic signature. They could of course be embedded, ‘truly’ cyborg and not just intermittent intimate paraphernalia. But m point here is that this would not make a difference that makes a difference; quite the opposite. We see all these cyborgs with their implants and alterations and imagine we are not them; the opposite is the case. We are slowly becoming cyborg, and the implications are enormous, dramatic, and yet we turn our gaze to the Terminator and away from so much of the real action.
Oh one other thing before I shut down my body for the night, or rather put it to sleep like a laptop. Some prosthetics like cars enable organs like feet to do the impossible, to go from LA to Santa Cruz in under 6 hours, like the Seven League Boots from fairy tales. And this is a truly amazing power with all sorts of implications. Not everyone in the fairy tale makes good use of the powers the old woman or man gives them. But my point is: as you drive your Seven League Boots cars, those exoskeletons running on dinosaurs or corn, yoru actual legs do nothing. Now that we have eliminated the clutch in most cars, they do so little it is easy to say that they have been as it were amputated, or put into a kind of paralysis, so that they lose function. And we then have to go to the gym to use other machines that exercise our legs so we don’t lose the function machines have taken away in order to lend us magical powers.
My image of people and cars can be seen in Darth Vader, the dark father, the dark knight. When he is dealt his mortal blow, his son is by his side, and Vader asks Luke to take off his helmet. Inside is a shockingly white, partial head, withered and ill-looking. It is the price of the Dark Side, perhaps, but also the price of the technology. No matter how many mitochlorians you have, it appears many bodies need to be taken out and run like a pony, put through their paces, appreciated for the finely wrought machines they are. The same pride that flows down the arm or leg flows strangely but truly into the glove, the cleat, the disc that leaves the world of the body and carves meaningful runes in the air. The hunter hefts her knife and lovingly slides her fingers along its blade, and the blade lets the hand feel its sharp knowledge of knives.
Is a cell phone a knife or a car? Or both? Or neither?
