First Meal, First Thoughts

My first newspaper was a cereal box. I hid behind that orange rectangular box of Wheaties believing those flakes were the breakfast of champions. I was becoming the hero of my life, ready to soar. There was a certain magic watching the written words come to life; like witnessing a flower bloom.

These days the only things I read on the box are the carbohydrate and fiber content.

Breakfast is more than a meal. It’s a ritual. Same routine every morning to get us ready to meet the day. It’s the imposition of order before the chaos of life has its way with us.

Everything is contained in anything. Wallace Stevens never left this country; Emily Dickinson hardly left her room yet found the universe within. Walls became windows. 

Many of us have learned the power inherent in a circumscribed space. We gain an intimacy with borders. The  cottage cheese ceiling might yield its secrets. There is a choreography in the way we move and a music in the collective hum.  

Consider the snowflake. Better yet, the cornflake. Each one, unique. As an island in a sea of milk it has an enormous seacoast. No flakes could be mistaken for Colorado or Utah with all those perpendiculars. The flakes look more like Michigan or the jagged right margin of a poem. It welcomes possibilities.

Then, as now, I am in a profound engagement with my cereal bowl, eating and ruminating at once. Now at the bottom of the bowl in faux-Delft blue is a scene of two peasants crossing a bridge between mountains with their cargo revealed, mission accomplished.

What I am spooning is a flag of strawberries, milk and blueberries. A morning anthem. A reminder of what once was and how far we have strayed.

Art As Religion

Two fuzzy words and that’s alright.

I don’t mean art as an investment or hedge against inflation. And I’m not referring to religion as some sort of hollow ritual reeking of piety and drained of relevance. Not the illusion of permanence but rather the experience of emergence.

In their best sense both art and religion are experiential and share the common goal of transformation and transcendence. They reach. They move us beyond words. Yet each is an expression grounded in the world of human possibility. The most intimate moments between people or a solitary in-dwelling have a religious dimension. When I was drawn into Van Gogh’s iris flowers vibrating on the wall in Amsterdam I was as transfixed and lifted as a shaman touching the sublime. A numinous moment from liturgical music is no different than viewing a Japanese ceramic exhibit or watching Judith Jamison from the Alvin Ailey troupe dancing Revelations.

The way that dance or sculpture redefines visual space, music rearranges acoustic space. They each bring us a sense of the sacred. So too does poetry by reinvigorating language and evoking what is ineffable. Poetry can be a portal to a realm beyond explication; not religion the noun but religious the adjective, as in a religious experience.

We need, at least I need, to be fed in this way. To find, in the quotidian, what is resoundingly and overwhelmingly true and felt. There is an essence, a mystery to existence which art yields in glimpses. After all, one must prepare for the afterlife, futile but a fine madness.  

I avoid the word spiritual only because it seems to have been hijacked by the New-Agers or quasi-Buddhists; those who have changed their names to Sunset or Sylvan Glen Glade. Same with the word soul which has been debased from overuse. Too bad, I welcome these words back into ordinary discourse.

I think of spirit as the breath, as to enthuse, an outpouring of vitality, exuberance, an offering of oneself. Soul is a metaphor for that most vulnerable inscape; the place where we live in quietude, contemplatively. To live fully is to bring them together. One derivation of the word religion is meant to bind. It says nothing about the supernatural. It is enough to live wholly rather than holy. Or to put it another way, what humans do out of their spirit and soul is holy, worthy of wor(th)ship.

To pause at the bud on the morning glory that wasn't there yesterday. To walk in the woods and become a vessel. Devoutly to notice. To repair what we can. To act religiously.

 

  

Living In the Moment

Here I am, trying to catch the butterfly of the moment even though butterfly is one of those words devoutly to be avoided in any poem worth its anti-gravity even without the crooked teeth of the right-hand margin, except for Hallmark Cards with their obligatory monarchs. The best I can do is note all the flutterbys I failed to net. Why butter, I wonder? Flutter is better than butter, so say I and now I know the answer though I wish I could withdraw the question: Because their excrement looks like butter so says Google as if it were a flying cow so from now on I’ll take my toast dry, thank you, and that could be my butterfly moment with patterns made by my toaster oven on the low-carb, high fiber Keto bread, but hold the excrement, and besides what other species is named after their poop, I ask you?

 

The trouble with moments is that they are relentless.There goes another uncatchable one. I can’t imagine that butterflies enjoy being pinned, after all, life is short enough orchestrating their symphony among the wildflowers. I wonder if their brief days are a frenzy or are there patterns, as in toast, we can't see? Jesus, is that you, Jesus or is it Walt Whitman? To be permitted to hold my gaze into those leaves of grass. if only for a split nanosecond, seems to me a better use of butter as they flutter by.  I'll be on the wings of the lepidoptera as it dreams of its past life as a caterpillar. 

If any of the above makes sense to you I would advise seeking help from a professional or else enter into the chaos of a poetic cauldron.There's not a moment to lose.

Losing It

It is normal to lose things. Pauline Kael lost it at the movies. I wonder if Arthur Sullivan ever found his Lost Chord. At this age all of my friends are orphans, even if Oscar Wilde said it was unfortunate to have lost one parent but to lose both appeared to be carelessness. We lose our innocence, our virginity, our hair and our teeth, all in the natural order of life and some of us lose our marbles. I remember when Peggy went on a diet and lost height. In World War I a whole generation was lost literally and the decade after, the survivors were lost figuratively. How a whole continent got lost we won’t know until someone from Atlantis shows up for an interview. While looking for some lost object a few years ago I had a brilliant insight, namely that everything is somewhere. Plato couldn’t have said it better or even Yogi Berra. My friend filled her bathtub in anticipation of a water cutoff from the hurricane. By morning the water was gone. I think it turned up in a flooded street in Glendale. Today I was looking for an imporant paper and decided it wasn't so important after all; at that point I found it. A few weeks ago I lost my keys and found my glasses in the search. I can hardly wait to lose my credit card so I might find my lost library card. It’s actually fun looking for my cell phone and hearing it beep, Here I am, under a stack of newspapers. Then there’s the frustration looking for something so important, I put it in a special place; so special that I have no memory where that might be. A few weeks ago I took it to a new level. I spent three days looking for a prescription received by mail order. I had a distinct memory of opening the package and putting the contents on the dining room table. I could picture it. Finally I called the pharmacy and found out they hadn’t sent it yet. I was looking for something that wasn’t there. I had heard how effective it is to form an image of a lost article before setting out on the hunt. As one faculty diminishes, another rushes in. Everything may, indeed, be somewhere but not necessarily in this realm. The next time I start looking for something I’d better make sure it’s not all in my head like Donald who lost the election but attacked the scorekeeper, referees, umps and the five million in the stands. 

Monsoonal Air

Makes me swoon with the sound of it. Imagine an alto sax in cahoots with a lunatic moon; a recording of Sleepy Lagoon. The air is syrup, in a soupy spoon, thick enough to climb that cratered balloon. Every year we get a dose of this undocumented air from Baja or maybe Khartoum. 

Low pressure trough, they say. It comes up like over-ripe fruit, pregnant with its bag of water. Thunderous, tripping the sky electric enough to zap a few unfortunate folks. It’s a big show not enough to quench a thirsty plant with its tongue hanging out. But enough to monsoonal me back to those nights of sweaty summers.

The smell of rain on a hotwalk is to me what that madeleine cookie was to Proust. The illegal moisture from Mexico finds asylum in my head and with it a remembrance of a distant summer. 

Whatever happened, happened to all of us. It was a communal experience. Or so it seemed to this ten-year old. The weather and the war and whooping cough, We had our heroes and our shared menace, infantile paralysis, spies and the dreaded third rail.

Then there was the Good Humor truck whose bell tolled for us. An orange popsicle would cool us down for a few minutes. On a lucky day the stick that held the ice cream might make the next one free. When the summer shower was done we would float those sticks down the river by the gutter in a race to the sewer. I went fishing once; got me a nickel from that basin.  

A few inhalations carry me east to rain-outs and subways with sticky straw seats, August nights when I leaped in my Keds for fireflies higher than a fly ball. Neighbors slept on fire-escapes in their underwear. The living was easy. Humidity and heat were tied in extra innings on our skin.

Air-cooled refrigeration was the banner outside the Austin theater. There was always a double feature plus the movie playing in our heads. Then, as now, everyone is watching a different film.  

Overhead fans didn’t do much but scatter the flies so people came out to un-stifle themselves. So did the gnats. They swarmed by gazillions all over the front window of my father’s drug store. Windows in those days were much more than glass. They were an art form labored over by a window-dresser who, with pins in his mouth, built attractive castles from empty boxes of Bromo-Selzter, hot water bottles, Band-Aids, Bisodol Mints, Doan’s Pills, Gelusil and the ubiquitous Ex-Lax package. In the mix were an apothecary jar or two to dignify the façade.

It must have been the flag colors of the Ex-Lax sign that attracted the gnats. They covered that part of the window and gradually the rest of it in sufficient numbers to excite the neighborhood. I don’t think the store ever had such traffic, at least at the outside entrance. My father possessed a natural calm which could break a fever. He needed every bit of it to persuade the crowd we were not being invaded by an alien species. Triple digit heat does strange things to people.

Whoever names hurricanes tagged this one Hilary with one el but I expect she'll get blamed for the expected deluge on Fox News and any damage she caused. 

August 15th

Today is the 2^nd anniversary of Peggy’s death. She lived 104 days after her 100^th birthday. And she lives still in these rooms and in my heart. I’m looking out the same windows. Her ashes are in the soil of the tree bending toward me. The force that through the green fuse drives the flower, for Dylan Thomas, was the same force of nature Peggy radiated. 

Even as our life became more circumscribed in the final years her imagination soared. She lived on a transcendent plane while somehow keeping her feet on the ground. 

She is also in these walls covered with 14 bookcases. Voices from poets, philosophers, novelists and artists are in constant conversation with her. Peggy had no resistance for gathering small objet d’art. They take their place on the shelves in front of the books. Each has her signature.

The energy Peggy embodied charged my air. Now more than ever we all need those affirmations. I often find myself carrying her spirited way of being; at least I feel her addition. I am slowly becoming fluent in her language of gratitude. I didn’t used to talk to myself.

Peggy wrote nine books of poetry and three novels. Well over one hundred poems were published in literary magazines. Here are some choice lines lifted from her poetry book, Ever After, written under her Peggy Aylsworth name, available from Amazon.

What goes unnoticed cheats the soul.

That kiss did complicate your life ..................a magnificent complication (my words)

From this window larger than the years / you bring me lakes, calm as grass and shade / the insistence of green.

I live within the boundaries of all I cannot know. Years are their own illusion. / No trace is left by the flight of the cardinal.

This altar love, attends, holds.....Our constancy delivers an homage / that needs no vows.

We are met and something in us rearranges our geography.

We swell, our bodies hot, reminding how the bread will rise / the sky allowed to weep.

She hears a voice of shrieking gulls that shiver her to thoughts of water she barely understands / What lies below/ a cold stone in her hand.

If I could understand the weight of loss, / I’d know why man reads goose bones for the weather of his soul.

I want his heart cupped in my hand / a tending to unfold the noon-bloom he forgot. / I want the long night city to renew his morning. (For Robert Walser)

On aisle seven a baby offers me his blessing. / Patient, I wait in line for the second coming. 

There are limitless explanations for what we do. None of them quite true.

To consider the matter of generosity /  you might begin with the laundress / who revealed God to the monk in his virgin bed.

A perfect fit I told the salesman. / I went outside / The new shoes shined like your first hello.

No Movie For Old Men

I saw Oppenheimer the other day. I hope to recover in a few weeks. My eyes and ears are still jangling. The higher the decibels the more pity I felt for the filmmaker, Christoper Nolan. Apparently, he didn’t believe in his own movie. Why else pulverize us with hundreds of decibels over and over. 

Somewhere in the third hour the visuals of the beautiful, horrific, fiery, mushroom burst appeared yet again but this time without sound and I cheered silently from the depths of my battered being. I had a vision of Munch's screaming woman running out of the theater.

Notably lost in his assault on our senses was any depiction of the human toll of 150,000 incinerated Japanese civilians plus others dead from the radiation. He couldn’t find room for that in this three-hour biopic made into a genre movie. The subject has multiple tributaries but melodrama is not one of them. Perhaps  it is better told as a documentary.

The face of Cillian Murphy (Oppenheimer) showed torment throughout yet his anguish was a given and I cannot recall any dialog to support it. For those whose knowledge of history doesn’t reach that far back I would imagine much time was spent trying to sort through the needless editing cuts. The movie begged for continuity. Instead, we were served a jigsaw puzzle with too many pieces.

The side show of Louis Strauss was a red herring; an inconsequential drama of petty revenge. Somehow it became the centerpiece where it didn't belong as anything more than an asterisk in history books. Nolan lost his way.

That episode served only to take us out of the claustrophobic room where Oppenheimer’s name was being muddied by cold warrior congressmen. Even there the overblown bombast had the whiff of bad theater. 

Am I alone in feeling that amplified music is intrusive to one's sensibility? Nolan, I submit, would do well to trust the power of understatement. 

The magnitude of the event is not well-served with magnanimous cinema. The subject matter is both large and small. Too small for a director of blockbuster movies. I don’t want my block busted.  And it is too large for him to master obliquely, so that nothing was revealed other than what was already well-known.

There is certainly another story to be told of those days when the Cold War had its beginnings. Let it happen in the hands of  another filmmaker who doesn't feel it necessary to literally create a seismic shift in order to evoke an upheaval in geopolitics. 

It needs to be said, with all its flaws, the movie should be seen if for no other reason than to recall those fraught times in our history. The hysteria aimed at so-called subversives is alive and unwell as it has always been. Choices made then set off a chain reaction whose ripples became waves. There is no separation between science and society or technology and the fabric of our lives. Human complexity, morality, and a vision for consequences, are some of the issues stirred by this film. They all should give us pause.

I expect I’ll hear many dissenting voices for all this suggesting pistols at dawn. My preference is water pistols at noon. I may oversleep; my ears are still ringing.

 

 

 

Any Morning

Waking to breaking news,

a dirge of heavy words.

No bulletins heard on NPR

to navigate the shade.  

No heroic couplets

in the poem-of-the-day.

No gotcha to pierce

those shuttered minds.

 

I take refuge in the woods

reclaiming this street,

with a lurch of shrubs and stalks

on the verge of summer dresses,

their full spectrum is a quake

for my astigmatic eyes.

 

There is a peace in the havoc of Matisse,

a celebration around a stump

in a circle of what is

overlooked, the silent armistice

among a controversy of crows,

the song unheard

just beyond our reach, 

yet even as we feel the pulse

we're still not fluent in the words.

 

  

MAGA As Cult

Nine hundred eighteen people drank a cyanide-laced Kool-Aid and died in the Guyana jungle compound of Jim Jones forty-four years ago. Why? Because their pathological narcissist leader told them to.

Fast forward to now. Today we have about twenty percent of our adult population swallowing the same concoction of paranoid fabrications from the man with the red tie. Perhaps they yearn to be part of a story; but the narrative is false. The hollow man holds empty promises. He has tapped into the latent racism and loathing of aggrieved Americans which is a corallary of fear.

My dear friends Claire and Richard had joined the People’s Temple along with their two pre-teen children. They survived; their kids did not. The attraction grew out of a disaffection for all that ails America and the simplicity of authoritarianism. The enemy is out there and out to get us, preached Jim Jones, the charismatic cult megalomaniac.   

I had visited them in San Francisco during those years and was struck by the absence of any dissent. Word came from the top and was not to be doubted. Disputation was punished. Tyrants make no allowance for doubt.

If I may be allowed to plagiarize myself, I wrote a poem at the time with the line, Dying begins when doubt is forbidden. Doubt encourages the freedom to question which was clearly denied to them. When they did dare recognize their loss of autonomy it was too late.

I want to spare myself the taste of vitriol which the MAGA folks engender. How a sociopath has risen to sit in the Oval Office is the stuff of a trashy movie script which should have been shredded years back. But the more tragic story is the mindless millions who have abdicated their common sense and the precepts of this country.

In the jungle of the conspiracies and mendacities fed them, they threaten to overthrow our democracy in favor of a dictatorship, indistinguishable from 1930s Germany. Those for whom avarice is a virtue, may think the man with orange hair serves their purpose. In fact they serve his.