Misadventure

It’s only money. If the object of life is to die broke, I’m well on my way. For $545 I could have bought a magnificent dinner on some rooftop restaurant for a few close friends or better yet, donated to a fund for saving the lives of bombed out children with medical needs.

But none of the above happened. Instead, I paid that money to retrieve my car after it was towed away for parking in a spot designated (in small print) for valet service owned by an upscale eatery called Elephantine.

I had met my two friends at the Laemmle theater in Santa Monica for a three o’clock showing of the new Christian Petzhold film, Mirror-3. All his movies are highly recommended.

In the last two works by this director, cars play an important part. In this current one, an accident kills the driver but his passenger escapes unharmed and that sets in motion the entire narrative. His previous film entitled Afire involves two men dying as they try to tow their own car. For me, it was a bad omen foretold.

Does anyone really believe in omens? After all, the Ides of March passed unremarkably. Synchronicity is another thing. As I was reading the word moth, a moth flew out of nowhere. It happens all the time. Not only moths but friends or relatives die or win lotteries at the moment they might enter your mind even though you haven’t thought of Uncle Max for eleven years.

We enjoy these random happenings as if portals to a place beyond. We crave transcendence. Surely, there must be another dimension, why else would my car be towed?

So there I was staring at the empty space where I had parked my car. By this time, Adele was about 15 blocks away but stayed on the line with me. Tamara was walking and graciously came back to be with me even as her husband Basil was waiting for her return. I thought I spotted Petzhold filming the entire human drama unfolding.

I was given a number to call. The police were very understanding of my predictament particularly when I played my age card and reliance on my walker. They arranged for a police car to pick me up. The officer was a model of human kindness as he first drove me to the police station to pay the fine, then to the towing place (which was closed) and lastly took me home.

Janice drove me to pick up my car this morning. Now, I have almost filled a page distracting me from my carelessness, from that elephant in the room.

 

 

Taking Back The Moon

The silver apples of the moon / The golden apples of the sun.

                                                     W.B. Yeats

The moon has always been the province of poets and songwriters. And now it is a destination.  No, not for low-housing, but as a base for further space travel. One hopes not for colonizing other planets.

Of course, we knew early on it was our satellite but wolves howled at it and troubadours pined under it to the point of lunacy.

For Somerset Maugham in The Moon and Sixpence, it represented the sublime. For Shakespeare, inconstancy. Eugene O'Neill saw the moon as a symbol of redemption in his A Moon for the Misbegotten. 

In Peggy's poem, Under the Unwed Moon, she wrote, The moon in the force of its pull releases the buried bones.

It also hit your eye like a big pizza pie. The moon can’t help it if it rhymes with June, balloon and sleepy lagoon. For Robert Graves in his book, White Goddess, the moon was the supreme muse; the feminine aspect which represented birth and the life of the imagination.

No argument from me though I was brought up thinking it was made of green cheese with cows jumping over to the fiddle of hi diddle-diddle.

Gilbert and Sullivan borrowed the moon in Trial By Jury.

     The moon in her phases is found the time, winds and the weather / You cannot eat breakfast all day nor put two Mondays together.  

Here G&S remind us that Monday is a contraction of Moon-day.

Again, in the Yeoman of the Guard, the moon belongs to lovers.

   It is sung to the moon / by a love-lorn loon ….. He sipped no sup, and he craved no cup /As he sighed for the love of a ladye.

In my day, which is close to prehistory, there was Les Paul and Mary Ford's rendition of How High the Moon and Audrey Hepburn singing Moon River. How many times did Frank Sinatra fly to the moon on gossamer wings? Cat Stevens walked to fame in Moon Shadow.

It's once in a blue moon that we get such as Beethoven's Piano Sonata Number 14, thirty years later renamed Moonlight Sonata. And then there was Claude Debussy's Clair De Lune.

That word lunacy has a troubled history. In the ancient world a full moon became the culprit for an unsound mind. It also got tied in with female menstruation which was a mystery to unsound males. Lunatic asylums were so named for millennia. It was Barack Obama, in 2012, who signed a bill striking the word from all legislation forever more. It wouldn't surprise if Trump restores it. 

Go ahead, let NASA circle the moon. From where I stand it still casts a spell, bitten, gibbous or full.

Emergency of Spring

Millions marching costumed as wildflowers emerge on city streets in exodus from the king’s bondage, his masked storm troopers, Middle East / Wing in rubble, he's desecrated the oval, eggs of Easter- yeast rising as an insurrection against depravity in an upheaval against the edicts of war as buildings fall with children huddled, like petal-closed buds, their unlived lives, a procession merging hands across America, of chariots swung low, tendrils, rhizomes, old and new testaments derived from testicles held in oath, phallic spires, erection-resurrection toward a promised place, pass the bitters, bless the wine, good eggs hard boiled go up the hill with Jesus, Moses and Jack and Jill to fetch and pitch nine commands and one for extra innings, take two for C.B. De Mille with his cast of thousands, no time for leavened bread, for corn rye sliced thin with seeds, but seeds, yes seeds for hope and homelands, for miracles, for turning cheek to cheek, think Fred & Ginger, think love against which hate has no answer cause Jesus don't like killing no matter what the reason for, the equinox is vernal, something to shout about, a havoc of poppies wearing April dresses, odes of them in terraced stanzas strutting their stuff from plots to flower pots to bombed and empty lots; let me hear that trumpet in the daffodil, the sax in the foxglove, what was dormant is now emergent...

 

Ladybug and Distant Carnage

 I'm walking in the park and now I reward myself with a gulp of cold water from a thermos. I have covered the equivalent of about 4 blocks with the help of my walker. This is my half-way point today. I find a bench with a back. No small thing. It's only  springtime but the living is easy.

My trusted walker does more than keep me vertically balanced. It has a pouch. How else could I have lugged this nearly 800-page book by Rebecca West?

I settle into a shady spot on this sunny afternoon half a world away from the atrocities of overhead missiles and drones. No sirens, no blasts. I have been sheltered my entire life from the daily struggle to survive. I can dial my reality. Now images of destruction, now commentary, but all at a distance. The remote in my hand is well-named. I can even mute toxic voices.

The story I’m reading is The Return Of The Soldier; a tale set in the English countryside between the two world wars. The soldier suffers from what was then called shellshock. Lives were squandered in that so-called Great War which was a crime against humanity. Deliberate slaughter is unknown in other species.

It is as if I am reading about myself sequestered in bucolic civility while across the water limbs are lost, children orphaned and telegrams are making widows out of wives. My life is spared, even charmed, by the cosmic crapshoot of geography.

After a few minutes, a ladybug lands on my page. She is a model insect to behold with six black spots enclosing a larger one almost heart-shaped in the middle on a reddish dome. I am transfixed as she struts across the margin. I understand this is a sign of good luck, as if I needed that affirmation. In mid-sentence she opens her wingspan and flies away. My version of shock and awe.

The beauty of this beetle has distracted me. Ladybugs are revered in gardens as a natural predator against aphids and mites. One can eat 5,000 in a lifetime. However, they, in turn, are the prey of birds and some larger insects.

Just when life seems pacified, I’m reminded of these conflicts unseen being played out in the grass, even underground. Should I take back what I said about wars among other species? No. Their cycle of predation is their ecosystem. We have no excuse. We have been gifted with ponder and the capacity to love while at the same time, cursed with anxiety and fear leading to domination.

The father of a 3-year-old alongside my bench, remarked on Rebecca West, which gave me hope yet for civilization. I thought of a book by the poet Ann Lauterbach called On A Stair which she said could also be pronounced Honest Air. I felt reinvigorated walking back. 

Baseball As Poetry

I’m told by friends, who don’t want to hurt my feelings, that they enjoy my blogs…. except for those about baseball. Of course I sympathize with their impoverishment and must also take up the challenge in remedial education.

Many great poets and writers have embraced the game. Among them are May Swenson, William Carlos Williams, John Updike, Marianne Moore, Donald Hall, Jack Spicer and Shakespeare. I just threw him in to see if you were paying attention.

To turn away from baseball is to reject your ancestry. Rumors have it that early man broke off a branch and swatted away an approaching rock thus giving birth to the rudiments of the game. The wood became a natural extension of an arm and the incoming missile could be the moon or any spherical celestial object. It is the paradigm for our defense against drones. When running, throwing, and catching were no longer necessary for survival they died as essential tools and became an art form or sport.

I can see this was too much of a stretch. It didn’t even convince me. Let me try again.

As if ordained by the gods themselves and brought down from Mt. Olympus, baseball celebrates Euclidean geometry. It turns a square into a diamond punctuated with three pillows, as safe stations, and a metaphoric home. The navigation around the bases is a hero’s journey, Odysseus-like. When home plate is finally achieved it is often accompanied by a cloud of dust to signify the arduous circumstances, with a god-like umpire passing judgement. Perhaps Zeus took pleasure in watching men fail. Sisyphus was not alone in futility. Baseball is so designed to reward a seventy percent failure rate with millions of gold pieces. Add to this, the divine correspondence of nine innings to our allotted decades on earth, with an allowance for extra innings here and there.  

Still not persuaded? Let me put it this way.

Can you hear it? The crack of the bat. The thwack of ball into mitt. The smell of green grass and hot dogs.  Baseball is so pastoral, so American, so deliberate and so inconsequential. Games will be won and lost, setting fans in anguish or jubilation, yet nothing will be really changed. Trump is still with us, the polar ice continues to melt and atrocities continue.

But here’s what changes: From opening day tomorrow to sometime in late October, a human drama will unfold without script. It is neither rigged nor predictable. An alternative narrative is enacted in real time, which makes more sense than this one we gnash our teeth over listening to cable news. The game of baseball offers the illusion, at least, of order, strategy and control. Every stance and swing will be scrutinized and the mountain of verifiable stats may not amount to a hill of beans for the uninitiated but to us the fan(atics) it is its own universe, a ritualized life and death, only to live again the next day regardless.

The game allows men of all sizes and shapes, beer bellies, hulks and shrimps, cerebral and instinctual. It attracts physically endowed jocks and bespectacled nerds. Harvard graduates are now general managers of several teams, trying to outwit their counterparts with new data, yet the core of the sport is an unquantifiable human element. What is more mysterious than a sudden slump or streak, not unlike a poet's writer's block? Even the dimensions of the playing field are inscrutable, with the precision of an infield contrasted with haphazard measurements of the outfield.

Baseball is our answer to the impermanence of life. It defines our seasons. There is an intimacy between pitcher and catcher in a shared fluency of silent gestures. Players are widely positioned spatially with anticipation coiled in their legs to dart at the instant of contact between ball and bat. And all this time the poet watches in the stands with time to ponder how life, itself, is simulated on the field.

Finally I am left with the nagging realization that I am really trying to understand why it is that I still care. The Bible says to put away childish things so I put away the Bible. At my age there is no messianic urge to convert the heathens. Rationalization is as hopeless as hitting a 100 mph fastball.

The 93rd Anniversary of Myself

Don’t make a fuss. It’s only a number. Furthermore, if mindless men in red states prevail, we will suddenly become nine months older than we thought we were. Happy fetus.

I have no memory of my day of birth. (It was 2 days after Philip Roth's and 9 days after Ruth Bader Ginsberg). I expect I was very busy that day taking my first breath and missing my umbilical time as a fish-like substance. Reports had reached me that Hitler was on the rise and I was to fear nothing but fear itself. The thought of eating apple sauce out of a Dust Bowl was not appealing at all.

Birthdays are a floating number. I contain each of my ninety-three years, some a bit more than others. The chronology doesn’t always behave. At age nineteen I was thirty-two and at forty-eight I was finally nineteen. My preference now is to be of no age which is to say, every age.

Here's what I have come to know. The best times are those outside of time when hours fly by unrecorded. Creativity and loving defy all measures of the calendar or clock. 

Being born on the equinox has endowed me with an even temperament. I hear Jung shaking his head that I must be repressing my shadow side. If my animus against all Trump-like substances isn't enough, maybe I am harboring some deviltry myself. It is true that I hate feta cheese and I've been known not to squeeze the tube of toothpaste from the bottom. 

In astrological terms I'm told I was born on the cusp of Pisces and Aries to which I say gurgle and bah.

As for infirmities, I can't think of anything more boring to talk about. So, I won't. I never realized how many body parts I have. Such a mechanism.

Did I ever tell you about the time I… Yes, you did, now be quiet. When all my stories have been told and shamelessly embellished it may be time to look out the window and marvel at this bush I have scrupulously overlooked now bursting with clusters of rhododendrons or that stump on my favorite tree, the result of overzealous pruning. The coral tree will soon be lit by red candles which I shall not blow out.

If I am running out of breath, I'm not yet running out of breadth. The imaginary candles I am blowing out on my imaginary cake do not signify the snuffing out of enlightenment. 

As a blogger I babble along with the proverbial brook though now and then I feel more aligned with the hush of it all. I have already told the world what to do and did they listen? No, they did not. Celebration feels unseemly as long as new wastelands are being created every day by unconscionable acts.

I have now lived almost as long as Poe, Keats and Plath combined, proving there is no divine plan in the allotment of years. My footprint barely registers but perhaps it’s okay not to succeed as long as one does it with an open heart. Born as I was on the first day of spring, I'd like to think I sprouted with the wildflowers.

Peggy died about 4 1/2 years ago. During my widowhood I have been blessed with a circle of loving friends. In her 100th year Peggy told me to go for it; and so I have. One woman, Adele, has become my late in life love. To be fully met in a caring and sharing relationship has added a needed dimension and joy to my daily life. My feet are on the ground but always at the ready for buoyancy.

I'm taking comfort in the words of A.K. Ramanujan, You can count all the oranges on a tree but never all the trees in a single orange. Who knows what juice still remains under the rind?

Notes on Near-Spring

 March is said to come in like a lion and go out like a lamb. For much of the world the lion hasn’t left. It is still a time of carnivores. Now, there is an urgency for spring to snuff out winter’s lease.

Spring is a season of commotion.  Are we on the brink or on the verge? A rapture of buds birthing not quite replacing the rupture and the rubble. To do honor to the fruit and flower we regard, with wonder, its full arc, including its spasm of farewell. The old rot and the new ripe.

Too bad our man at the helm has given the narcissus bulb such a bad name. (Amaryllis and daffodils are in that family.) He seems blinded by his own reflection in the mirror of the pond, covered as it is with slime.

For the rest of us, seasons signify becoming. When I write, my joy is in staying inside the poem or paragraph; not to finish but to luxuriate in the process before it becomes a mere product. Not even to stay but to meander, to hitch a ride on the bus to elsewhere. 

I'm an unmoored vessel sifting through my cargo for new seeds. The mystery is not in the still-life of succulents, but in the cycle of the speckled banana. 

I’m reminded of the way Peggy would write a poem. She could be struggling with some metaphysical concept and along might come a dog or a dog walker with an orange cap. That dog or that cap would enter into her poem, incongruently, which gave the poem an inclusiveness as if to say nothing is apart from anything else and that includes the outer with the inner, the head mingling with the heart. The poem, like all poems, is about the writing of the poem, the futile attempt to say the unsayable and the ecstasy of failing. Wisdom is in the unanswered questions punctuated by an exuberance of exclamation points.

We are creatures in motion even in our sleep. I have an idea and sleep on it. Something happens. I wake up imperceptibly changed, maybe a bit more luscious, like fruit.

Spring is a time to align ourselves with the rhythm of the peach and the melon. Because of bogus ripeness from sulfur dioxide the peach got bitten before its flesh was ready. With the melon I waited too long and had to hurry my devouring. A loving relationship has to do with discovering each other’s rhythms and disequilibrium, the struts and stumbles.

In the film, Woman In the Dunes, a man is seen collecting bugs which live in the shifting dunes. He is later trapped, like one of his specimens, in this habitat along with a woman who has made of it a home. The static world is always in motion like a movable sculpture, while the two of them find their own choreography living a shape-shifting life.