Olympic Games

It is common knowledge that baseball was invented when a caveman swatted a mosquito which had made a meal of his face. Basketball came about when an exasperated scribe crumpled a parchment out of the typewriter and tossed it across the room aiming at a wastepaper basket. But nobody can account for a human being giving Newton the finger vaulting through the air while twisting, rotating and somersaulting with agility, grace, verve, strength, flair and balance like these gymnasts. And then for some to leave in disgrace because of a wobble or a bobble.   

The perfection of these world-class athletes is of such a level I’d give them all a gold medal and send them home. I really don't want to hear about the near-champion who had her twizzle fizzled while I'm still having my razzle dazzled. They give us mere mortals a complex. After a week of watching, maybe I’ve had enough. The problem is they’re all too awe-inspiring and they're giving me a complex.

I would no longer dare try cutting the melon into four equal quadrants. This morning, I started to tie my shoes and could swear there was a Bulgarian judge over my shoulder taking off points for the circumference of my loop and another demerit when the aglet missed a shoelace hole on my sneakers. And then, God help me, it was revealed that my black socks don’t quite match, one of them having escaped from the dryer and replaced with a navy blue.

All this makes me think of another sort of Olympics that goes unnoticed in silent rooms where the poet dares a leap stretching toward a distant metaphor. Sometimes it falls clumsily or turns purple on the page. Risky business.

There is something faintly fascistic about synchronized diving or synchronized anything else. Truth be known I am a secret agent sent from some elsewhere where asymmetry is a virtue. I lean and limp. I stagger and I slouch. I don't always agree with myself. The right hand doesn’t know what the left one is doing. My left fingers will never know my left elbow. Dare I slurp a peach? Was that a piece of spinach on my tooth in the family photo?

I would have a counter Olympics where motley is the only wear, as the Bard put it. After all, weren’t the gods on Mt. Olympus famous for their constant squabbling? Zeus was nothing if not a mischief-maker. He would have cheered for each misstep and blunder, sent bolts of lightning in celebration for every landing not nailed. Look what he did to Icarus with the hubris to take wings.

Where but in this paean to perfection do we punish a splash? Here’s to the art of the stumble and fumble. The blemish that adds to the beauty. The inexplicable risk called creativity. The typo that improves the poem. The sandwich left out overnight that gave us penicillin. Taking a knee for the anthem. Damn the hundredth of a second that means nothing to messy humanity. The Hopi knew to include an imperfection in their pots, not to offend the gods.

As Putin never said to Mussorgsky, That's Godunov, Boris.

 

                     

 

 

 

 

 

 

Covering Up

My daughter Shari sent me photos of madrone trees on Orcas Island, with their magnificent reddish bark which peels off in strips revealing a vivid green. I'm not usually a tree-hugger but I'll make an exception here. Madrone is the Spanish word for strawberry tree. And speaking of bark and those squishy things called names....      

Certain words just roll off the tongue. You have to admire them for that. Too bad diphtheria and syphilis mean what they mean. But eucalyptus is there for the taking. In my next incarnation I want dibs on that name. Tall, with a unique bark and not-from-around here. That's me.                             

My first encounter with that smell was inhaling it from the vaporizer and here I am now communing with the bent eucalyptus right outside my kitchen window. You’ve got to love its peeling trunk so striated and weary-wise in its sloughing off. What are you trying to tell me, old tree? Or is that just g'day in fluent Australian from whence you came?

The best thing about eucalyptus is that it is the opposite of apocalyptic. The tree’s name is derived from the Greek meaning good cover. Eu (good) and calyptus (cover) so named by Captain Cook for its well-protected trunk.

I’m so tired of apocalypse (no cover) in which life on this planet is left bare, wasted, done. This seems to be Trump's notion of where we are today. He has a way of projecting all the chaos of his warped mind. We are, according to Testaments, Old and New, uncovered and subject to the four beasts or horsemen or some such nonsense. Maybe Donald is one of them, as pestilence foretold.

If this is a multiple choice, I’ll hug this tree of life with its mellifluous sound. The eucalyptus tree emigrated here (undocumented) from that hemisphere below which may be a portentous messenger. I expect the next hundred years to be an epoch of mass migrations with folks in equatorial or parched regions moving to more moderate zones and everyone thirsty for water.

Let us gather in the eucalyptus grove fully covered with the truth of climate change while the MAGA folk swelter waiting for the next fabrication from their liar-denier.

Being There

I’m so glad we had people like Barry Lopez to make up for people like me. My idea of camping out is checking into a motel with the windows open.  Lopez was one with nature. He endured the tundra of both poles as well as the blistering equatorial desert.

He sets up a tent in Cape Foulweather on the rugged Oregon coast, with a violent storm on the way. From there he walks into an old-growth rainforest to experience the sense of being lost and the spatial closeness. He contrasts this with the wide-open expanse of arctic regions where he lived with wolves or the fifty-foot waves he weathered between the Falkland Islands and Antarctica.

Lopez is an intrepid nature writer who confronts his elemental self and by extension invites his readers to their own discoveries. He is an essayist, winner of the National Book Award for non-fiction, and also author of eight works of fiction. His books erase categories. Tragically, a fire along the McKenzie River in Oregon destroyed 200 boxes of his personal journals.  Published in 2019, his last book Horizon reads more like a memoir recalling six of his past adventures. Adventure is the wrong word. His life was devoted to encountering harsh ecosystems, their history, which is our history and the struggle for survival.

Above all else he is a humanitarian who somehow delivers a message of peril for our planet and, at the same time, offers hope and a reverence for life.  His voice is both urgent and lyrical. He doesn’t just despair over clear-cut forests or land despoiled by fossil-fuel and mining interests. He subscribes to the notion that undisturbed land not only heals but can bring a distracted mind to a state of transcendence and release us to an awareness of the wondrous and salutary nature of the Other. Wondrous indeed were his witnessing a hundred kangaroos leaping in the Australian Outback.

He mourns for the damage done by Europeans to the Asian sub-continent as well as to Africa and the Americas owing to their arrogance and rapacity. He reminds us that violence to the earth begets a violence among ourselves.

Lopez shows us that constancy is an illusion. The Yupik and Inuit now live with an existential threat of an environment in transition. It has been widely written about but it can only be experienced by being there as Lopez does. His witness adds a new dimension. What is regarded as a dreaded phenomenon to scientists is a numinous moment in time to Lopez. How these people strategize their survival and the thousands of indigenous folks who fought extinction before them, warrant our first-hand attention. We have much to learn from them.

Centuries ago the Polynesians navigated over ten million square miles of the Pacific Ocean which astonishes modern seafarers. They not only built sea-worthy vessels but followed the patterns of migratory birds, knew the language of ocean currents and read the stars with the precision of our G.P.S. The people of Easter Island share the same tongue as those in New Zealand three thousand miles away.

Lopez’s reverence for life and his prodigious quest for historical sources are rendered with his felt language. One afternoon I pondered the sense of compassion I felt for Captain Cook and his first landing In Australia. I was prompted to do this by the bright riot of afternoon sunbeams ricocheting from the calm surface of the bay, by the distant clatter of dry eucalypt leaves roiled by the wind and the towering fair-weather cumulus clouds above, with their convoluted cauliflower heads. Together, these framed for me a Prelapsarian scene…I experienced a generosity of spirit in myself I cannot always find. An uncomplicated love of the world.

Through his contact with indigenous people from pole to pole, he was able to re-dream the world for us. Against our virulent xenophobia, he pleads for diversity, for hard listening to the aborigines and trampled people everywhere, the wisdom revealed in their storytelling. Their art aspires to converse, and such a conversation is imperative. 

Barry Lopez's voice embodies the human predicament and a fierce defense of our planet along with a certain poetic cadence aligned with the pulse of the earth.

Quake

The world doesn’t hold still for a minute and that’s not a bad thing. Biden’s release of his delegates quaked the political landscape yet whether it moves the needle for Democrats remains to be seen.

Let's go with the rumble. It pokes us awake from complacency with its seismic jolt. This is a moment on the precipice to gain a better view of the chasm, of what we have had and all we stand to lose. Democracy requires participation. Maybe that is what some of us have neglected. It is also a leveling experience; a good time to meet your neighbor.            -                                                   

Permanence has always been a construct. In fact, the ground under our feet is constantly shifting. When the turmoil feels familiar, we call it order but when displacements tap into our fears, we see it as chaos and yearn for those good old days which we misremember as idyllic.

The tectonic plates of our country are clashing along the old fault lines. Urban centers embrace diversity with a generally informed electorate while the rural heartland, with low-information voters, cling to the hands of time moving counterclockwise.  

Half the nation is becoming and evolving while the other half is buying into the illusion of stasis based upon old movies and the stale promises of a false prophet. There was a time we saw with child’s eyes, but no amount of erasure can alter our ignoble past.

Sunday’s news is a kind of baton passing. The old guard has yielded to a more youthful candidate. President Biden takes his place as one of our best, but he can no longer deliver his message with the needed vigor. 

There is a counter narrative to the MAGA, a zeitgeist with which we must align ourselves. Finally, we are being offered the choice with a woman of mixed heritage and new energy to meet the most unfit public figure in the annals of American history.                                                                                                                

Plenty of Nothing

As Alice said to the White King in, Through the Looking Glass, I saw Nobody, to which he replied, I only wish I had such eyes as to see nobody. Nobody is like Nothing.. And nothing's plenty for me. tra la.

In political terms, Trump is a man of no substance who is running to stay out of jail so he can play golf for four years while the country, as we know it, vanishes into the abyss.

The ultimate exercise in nothingness must be John Cage's 4'33'' marked only by ambient sounds and noiseless reflection. For some the silence was deafening. 

Shakespeare, that rascal, wrote Much Ado About Nothing but his nothing was a pun for No Thing, thing being the term for a phallus, at the time, the long and short of it. Nothing has quite a history. Where would we be without it?

Poetry changes nothing said W.H. Auden………but people die everyday for lack of it wrote W. C. Williams. Maybe that nothing which poetry changes is worth looking into.

There is a vast something in Nothing. It’s the absence better left unsaid or unsayable. Look for the meaning of a poem in among the words. The intervals make the music. The pause is pregnant.

When a friend needs our ear we are best advised to be quiet and reflecting. Just being present and silent allows the flow. All is nothing at all.

One of the problems with this world is our hunting and gathering of too many things. As the comedian says, I don’t want everything. Where would I put it? With our consumer brains we want, we grab, we accumulate heedless of consequence. The earth is scarred. The air is toxic. Our souls are not fed. 

At this age, my time is now to liquidate. No attachments, the Buddha said. Disowning isn’t all that easy. That Kwakiutl mask is still blessing the Hopi pots. I’d like to think those books on one shelf are in conversation with those on the other. Wittgenstein is busy deconstructing with Derrida and the Minimalists have little to say about it. Reluctantly I'll let them all go but invite them to my fantasy Thanksgiving table.

In the end we have the Nothing which is Everything. It has all been interjected one way or another. The album of life experiences is in my inner vault, that inviolable place which takes up no space, gathers no dust and is impervious to breaking news.

A Chance Meeting

This is a juicy book and not just because the author, Rachel Cohen, happens to have my mother's maiden name. It is a mix of literary gossip and odd associations as if the author lifted footnotes by their asterisks to a new prominence.

Imagine a dinner party with 30 literary and visual arts luminaries and you are the fly on the wall or perhaps in the soup doing the backstroke listening to them jabbering away.

Referencing one-hundred years from the mid 19th to the mid 20th century A Chance Meeting brings these poets and writers and photographers and artists alive on the page. After enormous research from diaries, memoirs and biographies she has found connective threads that became the tapestry of the American literary landscape.

We are treated to a stream of numinous moments such as Helen Keller remarking how, in Mark Twain's handshake, she felt the twinkle in his eye. We tag along with W.E.B. Dubois and his professor William James on their visit to Helen Keller.

Small gestures are carefully observed as Charlie Chaplin ducks into a Hungarian restaurant to avoid a crowd and stays for four hours studying a violinist whose body movements he will later use in a film. Joseph Cornell is arrested for loitering outside a movie theater. He was entranced by the lit booth of the ticket seller on an otherwise dark street.

We are brought along with Henry James Sr. and his eight year old son, Henry, as they have their daguerreotype taken by Mathew Brady. We learn that the self-conscious look on young Henry's face may be accounted for by a remark made a few days before by William Makepeace Thackeray concerning his nine button coat shown in the portrait.

We come to learn of the centrality certain figures played in gathering and supporting their contemporaries. William Dean Howells was such a man of letters. He edited the Atlantic Monthly and lent encouragement to Mark Twain, Henry James and Willa Cather.

Another person to whom his peers flocked was Alfred Stieglitz. His early pictures were seminal in elevating photography to an art form and his gallery in the first decade of the century was the first to show Matisse and Picasso in this country. Stieglitz could talk for eight hours at a stretch. Some visitors to the second-floor gallery would purposely come when he went to lunch just to see in quietude what hung on his walls. This juicy anecdote comes from his elevator operator who also revealed that the door was always kept open. After a Picasso exhibit in which 2 of 85 pieces were sold, Stieglitz offered the Metropolitan Museum of Art the remaining 83 for $2,000. They refused.

From Whitman to the Harlem Renaissance we get an inside peek at the passing parade; the same-sex loving relationships known as Boston marriages, the father-son affection between unlikely people to the grudging support, jealousies and rivalries. I come away from the banquet satiated and thank Rachel Cohen for the invitation.

Indeed there is a generative body of poets, writers and artists who together can be heard as an authentic American voice, a noisy conversation across the century, unique in its struggle to articulate the inclusive yawp of the newly-arrived, the blues of the underclass, the untamed frontier and urbane East. It’s the hum and the hum-drum, the all-of-it. 

Walking and Talking

           I love to talk to a man who loves to talk.

            Sydney Greenstreet in the Maltese Falcon

 

One of my favorite lines though I can’t remember what it has to do with the plot in this iconic noir movie. I also like a conversation with someone who likes to talk as long as they also like to listen.

Conversation is an art form, an improvisational wonder; sometimes a form of love between souls, a reciprocal union. It is a flowing stream with tributaries. Monologues are a killer; competing monologues are serial killers. Questions need to be asked and answers heard. It takes on a certain music of its own ranging from a bluesy sax to a cello. Two people, present for each other, is a kind of creation. Live deliberately, Thoreau wrote. Yet to be fully met spontaneously is a conjunction to be devoutly cherished.     

With all the verbiage accosting our ears on cable news there is rarely any room for an authentic conversation. Minds are seldom changed. It is assumed that there’s no audience for pauses and pondering. Talking heads say their piece and then a word from the sponsor. I would love to see two people open to an exchange and witness an imaginary light bulb going on overhead. 

In my sheltered ninety-one years I cannot recall ever being part of a duplicitous exchange like my imagined one between heads-of-state at Yalta or at a used-car lot. I don’t dare shop for a rug in the Kasbah. I have no guile in my bloodstream and no haggle.

As for walking these days I prefer winding paths probing my inscape. Roaming is what I do from the woods and dunes of my mind. Whitman’s open road allows for the unexpected, a wild orchid here and a stump there. Wallace Stevens lived about a mile from his job at Hartford Indemnity. He composed his poems as he walked. One rainy day he was offered a lift and accepted only on the condition that the driver did not speak. The inner voice needs to listen to itself.   

Metaphorically, walking the walk stands in opposition to talking the talk. Action vs. lip-service. In my sense, the two are complementary and each can be transformational. We live our convictions as we make art. Walking can be an interrogation  into shuttered regions just as the river of discourse leads to a discovery of an elsewhere of unimaginable visions.

Playdough , Pluto and The Whole Damn Thing

Playdough, she said and that got me thinking how I must Google Plato one of these days to refresh my credential as a pseudo-intellectual even though I recall his Republic disinvited me with my poetic license. Anal-retentive Plato must have moved a vowel and suddenly Pluto was on my mind.

Pluto has had many lives. Probably my first faint memory was of Pluto Water in my father’s drugstore. This was a laxative; maybe the one Plato used. Then there was the Disney dog in cartoons. However, in the chronology of the Great Ledger, the name goes back to Greek mythology. Pluto was the early name of Hades who ruled the Underworld. He got the short end of the stick when the universe was divided among the three brothers, Poseidon (oceans), Zeus (above) and Pluto (below).

Before any of that, but as yet undiscovered, was the planet Pluto. So named because it was dark being furthest from the sun. The first two letters of Pluto are also the initials of Percival Lowell, the astronomer who speculated in 1905 that there was a Planet X. Twenty-five years later Pluto was found and in 2006 it was un-found being drummed off the list and relegated to dwarf status. Imagine the humiliation. On the other hand it may be better to be the first among the B list than the least among column A list.

The other notable thing about Lowell is that in 1896 while pointing his telescope at Mars he inadvertently closed the aperture and swore he saw canals on the red planet which turned out to be the arteries on his own retina. However this spawned the fiction of H.G. Wells’, War of the Worlds and Ray Bradbury’s, Martian Chronicles. And then there is Elon Musk preparing his getaway on rocket ship X just in case. Make sure not to bump into Zeus.

Aristotle had it right. The world is indeed in flux. Planets come and go. We are shadows, merely, on Plato's wall. And words are as elastic as a glob of Playdough to be shaped as we will. We might discover canals on this parched land, hear water music and uncover sixty-watt bulbs in dark places.

When did you start writing poetry, the lawyer asked. When did you stop, I replied.

 

Loving Trump

Now that I have your attention…………….

I seem to remember how the poet Allen Ginsberg suggested we learn to love Ronald Reagan or, at least, find the Reagan inside ourselves and embrace him. Ginsberg led a poetry group at Naropa Institute in the mid-eighties in which everyone was asked to finish the poem with an opening line, I’m going to vote for Ronald Reagan because……………. My underwear is on backwards, said one student. Because my pen is running out of ink, said another …or because a squirrel came into my room yesterday.

Sorry, Allen none of these work for me with DJT. It’s a bridge too far.

I wonder if Ginsberg, ever the Buddhist, would preach the same message today. However, reaching for our interior Trump might require many hours of chanting to the wall in a loin cloth while inhaling massive doses of some intoxicating incense. We would also need a new set of gongs.

I wonder if Ginsberg thought Hitler was also lovable. True, Adolph did a great impersonation of Charlie Chaplin. A psychotherapist might praise him for not repressing his aggressive impulses. Go ahead, Adolph, get it all out. He appreciated Wagner's operas and was said to be a fair painter. Perhaps all he needed was an affirmation here and there.

Coming back to Trump, under deep drug-induced narcosis I'm trying to embrace the shadow side of myself. Maybe I, too, ran with scissors but I got over that in pre-school.

Now I’m reusing an uncancelled stamp and parlaying those three cents into a shopping mall and hotel where I act as a slumlord evicting poor families. Of course, the property I buy is on the Atlantic City Boardwalk …but that was all in a Monopoly board game where I found my true habitat between Baltic and Mediterranean. Yes, I love you for that, Donald, revealing the primordial greed and avarice to myself.

And yes, I probably insulted some ball players during the game with trash talk. But it was all from the couch yelling at the T.V. set. Thank you, Donald, for legitimizing my infantilism.

Is that enough? I feel myself coming back from the slime of my reptilian brain. Now I must take a very hot shower. Is it really fair to presume that we all have particles of Trump DNA infecting our soul? And if so, must we descend to our own underworld and learn to love it? No, but perhaps it is useful to own it as a cautionary note … and then grow up, gain some measure of enlightenment and compassion.

It’s too easy to demonize Trump as if he’s a visitor from outer space. The truth is he displays an aggregate of ignorance, arrogance, mendacity and malice, rarely seen in one individual, particularly in a public official. all human deficiencies most of us have outgrown and repudiated.