X thinks Y imperfect.
Y thinks X exaggerates.
X tells Y, “Why can’t you be more like me?”
Y replies, “You have no balance. You don’t know how to share. Life is a teeter-totter.”
“I’m walking down to the tavern for a beer and some darts. Want to come?” X asks.
“I think I’ll stay here and practice yodeling and yoga,” Y says.
Y Y = Light _ _ _ _ /\ = Teeter-Totter /\ _ _ _ _ X X = Heavy
Yes yes yo yes yah yes yep yoahza youp
Yo yo yes no nope never over my
Yes no yes no yes no yes no yes noup
Not nape nip empty nix obnoxiously
You not yes no not no yes but don’t say
Buttresses yeses yeses yeses but
No nepe no nupe no nipe no no no yea
Yes yepe yes yupe yes yipe yes yes yes what
Butting do note chairs yes accidental
Dominoes goldeneyes moonglow eyes no
This will never do we are losing ball
Ants ants ants ants ants ants ants ants solo
So long stays yes and yes gives no to this
So long goes no and no takes yes amiss
Turtle butterfly rock Petunia seashell ceramic pot candle wire stand Gas meter downspout blue slate red bricks green hose Blue wall with painted white wood door with window of six small glass panes framed Electric meter "Nutone" metal stove exhaust fan duct double spotlight wall fixture no bulbs wires grub green fern blue green blue fescue grass.
Chain link cedar planks Redwood boards bamboo Flower trash cans green yellow and grey Sheets glossy green laurel hedge golden chain bench Grapevine clothesline Wire pool cues hall chalk Ivy baseball bats raspberry Green wine bottles in yellow bin. Azalea if you've read this far. Canvas sails to you gentle reader and happy Fish nets. And may your day be free of commas and other fences.
Imagine Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man with a laptop…
“‘Why you’re . . . just like a book,’ she said, and I thought I caught a sarcastic note in her voice again.” Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man is with Liza, a prostitute, but what he wants is to talk to her. He finds her ellipsis revealing. She pauses, and she’s caught the mouse in a trap, even if she didn’t mean to. He mistakes her uncertainty for sarcasm: “I didn’t understand that sarcasm is a screen – the last refuge of shy, pure persons against those who rudely and insistently try to break into their hearts” (174), he says. Four pages of rant follow, and he makes her cry. But she’s his perfect audience. Had he a laptop, he would have pulled something up to show her. But was she being sarcastic, or was she reading him literally? What she says is accurate; he is just like a book.
“It goes without saying that both these Notes and their author are fictitious,” Dostoyevsky says in a footnote to the first page of “Notes from Underground,” which begins with “Part One, The Mousehole” (90). If it goes without saying, why does he say it? Another paradox. The typographical man develops a voice, even if he has nothing to say. Online, we feel a part of something, but of what? It’s enough to feel connected. In any case, these men do exist, in spite of this one being fiction, Dostoyevsky wants to make clear, and he wants to mark the difference between narrator and author. But in trying to distance himself from his narrator, Dostoyevsky adds another note to the pile.
I’m online again, going with the flow, superslow though, gliding, electri-gliding in the cerulean world of blues. “I’m so lonesome I could cry,” Hank Williams sang. But does he cry? He doesn’t tell us that he cries, just that he feels like crying. If only Hank had a laptop. How high the moon? He could look it up.
“Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness” (118)*, the Underground Man says. Later, Jung takes up this theme, that consciousness is born in regret, in memory. But how does man express his regret, which is his suffering? “The fall is into language,” Norman O. Brown said (257). What do we think about if we can’t remember anything? After reason, the Underground Man explains, “All that’ll be left for us will be to block off our five senses and plunge into contemplation” (118).
We were talking about the possibility that online culture diminishes memory because the “onliner” (i.e. someone online, not necessarily a reader, since one can go online without reading – but what is reading?) is constantly looking things up, one thing leading to the next, seemingly random. Nothing is memorized; the bookmarks are endless. If the fall is into language, browsing is free falling. But why all the notetaking in book culture? Can’t the readers remember anything? Non-literate people, McLuhan explains in “The Gutenberg Galaxy,” have much better memories than those born to books. Is there suffering being online? “The most obvious character of print is repetition, just as the obvious effect of repetition is hypnosis or obsession,” McLuhan says (47).
“I was so used to imagining everything happening the way it does in books and visualizing things falling somehow into the shape of my old daydreams that at first I didn’t understand what was going on. What actually happened was that Liza, whom I had humiliated and crushed, understood much more than I had thought. Out of all I had said, she had understood what a sincerely loving woman would understand first – that I myself was unhappy” (197). The Underground Man is stuck in a literate view. McLuhan: “The new collective unconscious Pope saw as the accumulating backwash of private self-expression” (308). The Underground Man’s literacy has turned him into an individual, and he’s nowhere to go. This is another reason he appears when he does; his point of view is his own beacon.
The sufferer comments. This is why the Underground Man “has appeared, and could not help but appear” (90), to explain why he has appeared. The browser joins the Internet commute, changing lanes compulsively but leisurely. Summer is near, and in the distance one can hear the Internet Highway and superfast modems melting across asphalt desks backlit with electric candles. A commenter interrupts the flow, but for the Underground Man with a laptop, comments are closed. Go start your own blog. I’m in the slow lane here. Go around me, he signals out his laptop window. Go around.
“I knew that what I was saying was contrived, even ‘literary’ stuff, but then, that was the only way I knew how to speak – ‘like a book,’ as she had put it” (179). The Underground Man is literate; Liza is not. But Liza intuits what the Underground Man must read. McLuhan explains the difference: “The visual makes for the explicit, the uniform, and the sequential in painting, in poetry, in logic, history. The non-literate modes are implicit, simultaneous, and discontinuous, whether in the primitive past or the electronic present, which Joyce called ‘eins within a space’” (GG 73).
“Enough,” the Underground Man says, but the closing footnote says there are more notes. “But we are of the opinion that one might just as well stop here” (203), Dostoyevsky says.
* My text (Signet Classic CT300, 1961, Seventh Printing, translation by Andrew R. MacAndrew), reads, “Why, suffering is the only cause of consciousness.” But I exchanged just this line for the Constance Garnett version of the line, which I prefer for its sole (solo) and soul homonymy (not to mention the suggestion of the sole of a shoe).
I’m online, browsing. I’m cruising for a new pair of slippers. I’m sitting on the love seat, in the living room, slouched down, my feet docked on the ottoman. My location is public, living room, slipping down, gliding for a new pair of slippers, my purpose public.
I enter “cruising slippers” into my search engine. I feel good. I’m plugged in, lit up. I’m online. My socials are open. The drones are swarming. I’m not alone. I twitter something fast: “Online slippers, what? Come on back!” Immediately, there’s a response.
I’m in a mood, an online mood. Mood indigo. What’s that? I enter “mood indigo” into my search engine. Oh, yeah, the Duke. I jump over to JazzStandards.com and click on the song, give it a whirl. Oh, yeah, the melody comes back to me, haunting. The piano notes sound like ice cubes clicking coolly in a cocktail glass.
“The Duke of Earl.” Who was the Duck of Earl, anyway? I enter “The Duck of Earl” in my search engine. It ignores the typo, corrects my search, thank you. I click on Urban Dictionary and start to scroll down. Some nice peer reviews going here, mostly thumbs up, a few down. Then an ad pops up: “Have you ever been arrested?”
I don’t like ads. I try to ignore the ad, but I can’t. I feel arrested. My mood shifts. I’m like a boat on the open sea, at the mercy of variable breezes. I open my facebook, enter “variable breezes” in my status and click. I get a few likes. Someone in Dansk says, “Breezing?”
Yes, that’s it, I’m breezing. I shift back to Twitter and enter “Breezing,” just the word, not even a period. No response. I’m not surprised. I don’t have that many followers on Twitter, but what’s a lot? I change lanes, back to Facebook, and enter “Breezing.” I have 500 friends. What time is it in Dansk, I wonder.
There’s a new tweet, from some cat in Belgium. I enter “slippers” into Google Translate: “pantoufles,” if I want a pair of French slippers, which I don’t, necessarily. I switch Translate into Dutch: “slippers.” Slippers in Dutch is slippers, same as English. Who knew? I enter “Slippers in Dutch is slippers in English, too” into Facebook. I get a bunch of likes and a few comments like it’s a joke or something, but I’m serious. I get a bizarre comment from some kid I went to high school with I haven’t seen or talked to in years. She claims she’s a lawyer of some kind. Probably under some kind of house arrest.
I open my search engine and type in “ottoman” and poof comes the story via Wiki: “Thomas Jefferson’s memorandum books from 1789.” Now there’s a trip, speaking of high school. I parachute out of Wiki and land back in my living room. I’m thirsty. I’m thinking of walking down to the coffee house. They have Wi-Fi there. What’s Wi-Fi? I don’t understand beyond having a general idea. I enter “Wi-Fi” into my search engine. What if we could see radio waves? I Tweet, “waves, pulsing.” I was going to tweet “radio waves,” but I didn’t. We can’t see these waves, at least I can’t, but I think I can feel them. Sometimes songs just pop into my head. That ever happen to you? Suddenly I’m singing some song in my head, not singing it, really, but it’s there, playing, playing in my mind, like my head is a transistor radio picking up the wave of the song. But if I try to sing the song, out loud, the words won’t come. A few might, but not the whole song, not unless it’s a song I’ve gone to the trouble to memorize, to commit to memory. This paragraph is too long for its purpose.
Location, living room. Purpose, slipping through time online for a new pair of slippers. Open: socials, check; three search engines, check; Wiki, check; my word processor, check. All systems go. Where does that term come from? I enter “word processor” into my search engine. What ever happened to WordPerfect? Do we process words? Do we perfect words? Mot juste. The word frozen. Justice.
I enter “All systems go” into my search engine. The dictionary calls the phrase cliché. Really? I don’t hear anyone using it much anymore. I enter “All systems go” into both Facebook and Twitter. Nothing, no response. Interesting. Maybe I should have typed, “All systems are go.”
I saw “Argo” not too long ago, on the Big Screen. What a trip. I had not been to see a film in some time, not in a big screen theatre. I had forgotten how big the screens could seem. We sat in the first row of the second section, not too close, in the front middle, so to speak. I like the front row. I like to slouch down and stretch out my legs. A message filled the big screen just before the lights dimmed: “Please put out your cell phone.” No, not right, “turn off,” it said. I did. I turned off my cell phone. I had thought I might maybe send out a few tweets during the film, but I thought better of it.
So to speak, thought better of it, all systems go. I should look these up. I’m bored with all that. I check out the news. First, the weather: slight chance showers. Slight, what is slight? Parse. Can you parse the showers, please? I tweet, “Parsing showers.” No one’s on Facebook. 500 friends and no one’s on. That’s a first. I check the news.
The news. I type “the news” into my search engine. I’m reminded of the scene in the Steve Martin film “Roxanne.” Charlie is strolling down the street and stops at a newsstand to buy a newspaper. He pulls one out and glances at the front page. A look of shock and horror pops up on his face. He scrambles back to the newsstand and fumbles in his pocket for another coin. He opens the newsstand and sticks the newspaper back into it and continues his stroll, his calm smile back on under his big nose.
1987, the year “Roxanne” was released. I just looked it up. But the thing is there are no newsstands anymore, no phone booths either, and mailboxes appear to be disappearing.
+++
Notes: This post is part fiction, part real. It was inspired by a conversation I really had last Friday afternoon over at Stark Street Station with some colleagues. I do have a Twitter account, but I’m not on Facebook. I didn’t think of tweeting during the movie. That’s not something I would do. In any case, my cell phone can’t do that, tweet. And I’m not really in the market for a new pair of slippers. I don’t even have an old pair of slippers. I don’t wear slippers. Meemin retweeted “Parsing showers,” over an hour ago. A good post takes time.
“A writer in the act of writing must fear neither his own words nor anything else in the world,” Heini tells Algin in Irmgard Keun’s “After Midnight.” Algin is considering writing a historical novel that will satisfy the stiff submission requirements of the Reich Chamber of Literature. The historical novel might be relatively safe because the players have passed. They’re not around to censure, and their story has likely already been told, documented, accredited. But one doesn’t always know what might get “a writer in the act of writing” in trouble. And a mistake is not an act of courage but of naiveté, inexperience, or foolishness. Writers may work with all three simultaneously, whistling while they work, no fear.
But “a writer who is afraid is no true writer,” Heini insists. But a writer unafraid might simply be risking nothing, have nothing on the line, no skin in the game, nothing to lose. Being fearless is not necessarily the same emotion as having courage. And Heini’s not talking about craft, because “perfection renders words unnecessary,” he says. Indeed, what the writer should fear is perfection, because “once criticism’s no longer possible, you have to keep quiet,” Heini explains (98). Perfection is only achieved through the destruction of all opposing values. But at that point, there’s no more discussion.
I don’t know if Keun was afraid or not while writing “After Midnight.” But she was certainly courageous. “After Midnight” has an interesting publication history. Irmgard Keun lived from 1905 to 1982, achieving early success as a writer in Germany only to see her books quickly burned. “After Midnight,” Keun’s fourth novel, was first published in 1937 by a publisher in the Netherlands. It was republished in German in 1980, and in English with a translation by Anthea Bell in 1985. I recently bought the Neversink Library edition issued by Melville House Publishing in 2011. It’s a short book, 169 pages including an afterword by Geoff Wilkes that provides both a brief but detailed biography of Keun and a short critical analysis that draws on research using letters and reviews from the periods discussed.
“After Midnight” is not a historical novel, and illustrates some of the strengths of fiction over documentary, of literature over reporting. Its tone is primarily satiric, but the narrative is realistic, looking at its own time, with some, but not much, looking backward, unable, of course, to see clearly into the future. If the writer knew no fear, the young narrator knows it: “My heart always stands still when I hear those speeches, because how do I know I’m not one of the sort who are going to be smashed? And the worst is that I just don’t understand what’s really going on. I’m only gradually getting the hang of the things you must be careful not to do” (63). This is the plight of the writer. The situation is urgent, a constant state of emergency on the dire road to perfection, a place not there.
The local nurseries and flower markets are loaded with starts, but I can feel the pink of the hard orange rose hips still sleeping, snoring in thorns, and hear the tiny golden broach just touching the iridescent crimson of the humming-bird’s throat.
Spring came yellowing in a green coach, wavy red-orange hair billowing out the open windows, the coarse driver spitting and spurring the horses to spirit, but the horses needed a rest already, apparently, and Spring slowed to a walk, not even a trot. Slug, slug, slug. One evening, a few weeks ago, we ate dinner outdoors – a false spring. I had lugged out the wooden table from the basement into the backyard, and we lit candles – it’s been covered with a vinyl table cloth since, to protect it from the rains.
And still the going is slow, the soil too wet to work, but I work it anyway, and the only birds following the hampered whirlicote, and a few Mew Gulls (never saw them before this far inland), sensing a lost trawler on restless water. Still, the apple tree is in fine form, drenched with blossoms and besotted with a few skittish bees. A little early for besotted bees, but there it is, Spring.
- Did you get my email?
- What email?
- I sent you an email.
- I delete all email before reading it.
- That doesn’t make any sense!
- Welcome to the world of Postmodern Poetry.
- But I sent you an email!
- Must we go through this again?
- Joe’s post titled “Notes on Experience, Story, and Voice” that was “Freshly Pressed” here has now been reposted at Berfrois!
- I think I need a nap.
- How many naps do you take in a day?
- As Dylan so eloquently put it, “Any day now, any day now…”
- Why does he have to say it twice?
Day One: A trance of rain, ear churn momute.
Day Two: Slide high noontide, sundersthorms plate.
Day Three: Moistly scattered sneers and a few frizzles.
Day Four: Chants of wrinkles, dartly cloudy and chowdery.
Day Five: Humility Poor Boy Talls, Barometer IPA 75%.
Day Six: Moggy, very low viability.
Day Seven: Topical air mass pew point, wind clam.
Extended Forecast:
A beast abuzz amidst the clovers: A is for Always Anxiously
Bees besieged in Beelzebub’s circles: B is for Bunched Bop
Ceding the bee’s sting: C is for Cut Care
Denuded dazed drone doodle: D is for Drilled Daffodil Dust
Each easy flower glowers, going crazy: E is for Eating Earwigs
Felled flies found in forged gyre: F is for Flounder Flour
Grease hopping aground bottom: G is for Goaded Garlic Gear
Heliotrope: H is for Standing Erect at High Noon
M ss ng n Act on: I is for Idling Slowly Down the Mississippi River
Jived, joed, and jellied: J is for Jump to Comments
Kitchen kelp: K is for Krilling
Los Angeles lovers afloat: L is for Lost in Ballona Creek Lowlands
Moneyed, honeyed, and schooled: M is for Marriage
Nonesuch wiser the nuncio nun: N is for Nauseous Napkins at High Tide
Only one occupied optative mood phone booth: O is for Obnoxious Ontology
Peeing peregrine on ice plant spears: P is for Pilled Paper Piece Work
Queued quacks: Q is for Quick Quiz
Read in rows: R is for Rubric Rust
Sew seven scarves: S is for Subsumed Existential Snow
T is for Tremulous Titbirds Telling Mother Father Will Be Late
Undertow: U is for Until Unction Snore
Vexed voice: V is for Verisimilitude
Who When What Where Why: W is for Wasted Window Father Watch
X’s not and no O’s
Yellow harrow and black and yellow bumblebees: Y is for Yielded Yelp
Zonked zone: Z is for zooming in and zooming out, buzzing, zooming, walking, talking, doodling at poems, scratching names with dates in wet concrete, riding the bus to the metropolitan zoo
- It’s spring! Don’t you just love spring?
- Winter will come again. It always does.
- The ice has melted. Like e. e. cummings said,
“in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious”
- It’s supposed to rain again tomorrow.
- But this is today! And we’re alive in this spring moment!
- A more responsible view is to remain mindful that the seasons are in constant motion, and anything can happen and usually does. In any case, from a universal perspective, there is only one season, a murkiness that lends itself to a contemplation of a dark void.
- Yes, but it’s spring! And I feel like hop-scotching and jumping rope!
- It won’t be long before the hurricane season will be upon us again, to say nothing of tornadoes. As Robert Frost pointed out, “Some say the world will end in fire / Some say in ice.” And he should have known; he was a poet. But I don’t see how it much matters, an end is an end is an end is an end, but all these literary allusions are just illusions to wile away the time until winter comes again and we cry out, “Winter is icummen in,” and you know the rest.
- Oh, you’re just an old goat!
Look at this wonderful picture I took last night with my cell phone of the moon glowing through the cherry blossoms!
- Reminds me of the time we went to see “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension!,” and they burnt the popcorn. Besides, you can’t fool me; that’s not the moon – that’s an electric spotlight in the parking lot of The Old Spaghetti Factory.
- Listen! I think I hear a whistle!
- I’m going to write a memoir!
- You’re speaking of flash fiction, I presume?
- No. I want to tell your story.
- My story?
- Yes, Joe says it’s the writer’s job to tell the stories of cats without voices, and you don’t seem to have a voice.
- Joe? Who is Joe?
- Joe is this really cool cat hep blogger at The Coming of the Toads, all about cool cat lit cult stuff, poetry and jazz, the ocean and deep silence. You would dig it.
- And is this Joe cat credible and reliable? What does this Joe do for a living?
- I don’t know. I think he may not have a life, so he doesn’t need to worry about all that. I think he might be a fictional character.
- And who is behind this fictional Joe?
- I’m not sure, his memoirist, I guess.
“The idea that everyone has a story to tell (which underlies the notion that anyone can write since all a writer needs is a story) is strictly correct,” Jenny Diski said, writing in the London Review of Books (7 Mar, 21) about Marco Roth’s memoir, “The Scientists: A Family Romance.” Well, Henry James thought so, anyway. Continued Diski, echoing James, “If you were born, you’re in there with a story.”
“Every talk has his stay,” James Joyce said. But does every story have a voice? Is the writer’s job to tell the stories of those without voices? Is the critic’s job to decide how long the voice’s stay is welcomed, if at all? Not if Joyce had anything to stay about it: “Why? It is a sot of a swigswag, systomy dystomy, which everabody you ever anywhere at all doze. Why? Such me” (FW, 597). But even if one has a story with an illuminating voice, should one talk? And once one starts talking, must one tell all? Well, maybe not all, there are time and space constraints, after all. Ah, and there’s the rub, what to tell, and what to withhold.
Memoirs, like all forms of writing, have narrators: is he, or she, reliable? What have they left out? And even if they’ve tried to put everything in, there’s the problem of point of view. Would the story tell of the same experience related from another’s point of view, someone else who was witness? A memoir doesn’t contain fictional characters, but real people, but to the reader who has never met them, they may feel and sound like characters. The characters speak, but are their words reliable? The memoirist creates a set, described, composed, like a family photo album, and adds tone, the attitude toward the experience, all drawn with words that suggest as well as denote. And there is that slippery, mercurial ball of memory we always seem to be chasing after. We might call that ball ambiguity.
And writing in the March 18 New Yorker, Adam Gopnik says, “Thanks to the Internet…anyone can write” (21). The assumption is that not everyone should. All these amateur bloggers serve up knuckle balls to the professional writer, though the proliferation of adult amateur softball leagues doesn’t seem to hamper the work of pro baseball players. How many family garages or basements sport bands? That they don’t all reach Nirvana doesn’t invalidate their experience, as much as it might hurt our hearing. Why is the amateur spirit more tolerated, if not enjoyed, in music, arts and crafts, gardening, cooking, and sports (golf, anyone?) than in writing?
Henry James, in his essay “On the Art of Fiction” (1894), talks about experience, and answers a question about whether or not one individual’s experience might be more valid and valuable than another’s when it comes to writing about that experience. James is speaking of fiction, Diski of memoir. But memoir might be the most flagrant of fictions, since it attempts to disguise its narration as truth. But what makes any experience worth writing and reading? For James, the more cloistered a life’s experience the more opportunity for close reading of that experience. The only requirement is that one pay attention: “The young lady living in a village has only to be a damsel upon whom nothing is lost to make it quite unfair (as it seems to me) to declare to her that she shall have nothing to say about the military…The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life, in general, so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it – this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education. If experience consists of impressions, it may be said that impressions are experience, just as (have we not seen it?) they are the very air we breathe. Therefore, if I should certainly say to a novice, ‘Write from experience, and experience only,’ I should feel that this was a rather tantalising monition if I were not careful immediately to add, ‘Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!’”
Maybe everyone has a story, but not everyone has a voice, but through certain kinds of experience one might discover one’s voice, the expression of which might be realized in writing. But the expression of one’s story might also be realized in music, nursing, or plumbing. Maybe the writer’s job is to tell the stories of those without voices. But a more instructive way of thinking about experience, story, and voice might be to say that the writer’s job is to reveal voice where story is found in any one individual’s experience (not necessarily the writer’s), so that a reader might enjoy a kind of reading epiphany, realizing it’s the significance of their own experience being reflected. The reader hears her or his own voice. One need not be a writer, or a reader, to experience one’s own voice. But first we must find our voice, and where will we find it amidst all the wrack and ruin, the dry brine, the commercialism and the consumerism and the garbage sloughing like wax dripping from our ears, and deep in our ears a muffled sound like gigantic iron church bells echoing? But if indeed that’s our experience, how should it be voiced, or should we keep it silent?
We might read something and question the author’s authority, the authority of his or her voice. But the author of the writing should not be confused with the speaker of a narrative. Even if the writer who tells us the “I” of her poems is indeed her own voice, and that is the reason she writes, to describe her world, her reality, using her own voice, we still might think in terms of author and narrator, not necessarily the same. How does the writer decide what to put in and what to leave out of her poems about her reality? That decision making is the process of narration. Because as authors of our own narratives, our own stories, we still create characters, even if we call those characters ourselves, as in the memoir. This is why I said above that the memoir is perhaps the most flagrant of fictions.
Maybe no one has a voice, and we are all voiceless. We might all have stories, but we are all helpless, writers and non-writers alike, to voice those stories. This is why we keep writing, why there is no end to storytelling, amateur as well as professional. Earlier this year, a couple of houses on our block replaced their sewer lines to the street. I watched the workers and the job progress. I had done this kind of work with my father, years ago, and I marveled now as I did then at the simplicity of the technology, which has not changed much over the years. “Just remember, shit runs downhill,” my Dad said, handing me the shovel to dig a sewer pipe ditch. “That it do,” he said, concluding his short story, the voice of experience slowly dripping off as he walked away to more complicated, but no more important, matters on the job.
Related Post: Correcting, Grading, and Commenting: Right, Wrong, and Indifferent
The Toads piece “On Prayer and Poetry” (upriver, Mar 2) has been picked up by Berfrois. Grab your missal and surf on over for a look-see. There’s also a heady essay posted today at Berfrois that opens linking James Joyce to Anita Loos’s “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.”
The Reader
and the
Paywall Poem
The Reader
and the
Wally Moon Foul Ball
The Reader
and the
Pool Hall Doggerel
The Reader
and the
K of C Third Degree
The Reader
and the
Professor Who Knew It All
The Reader
and the
Screwball PCH Big Sur Rally of 1972
The Reader
and the
Walled Out Surf Cove
The Reader
and the
Beer Hall Jukebox Sing-along
The Reader
and the
Union Hall Layoff Sign-up List
The Reader
and the
Baloney Sandwich with Mayo&Mustard on Rye and a Glass of Milk
The Reader
and the
Red Clew of Yarn Mystery
The Reader
and the
Fans with the Giant Red White and Blue Beach Ball
The Reader
and the
Short Tell It All
The Reader
and the
True Tall Tale
The Reader
and the
Tall Boy PBR
The Reader
and the
Plumber's Helper
45th Street, El Porto, mid-1970′s, looking north toward El Segundo’s Standard Oil Pier.
Behind this wall of paper lives a poem no subscription will reveal. The poem is invisible. No journal can hold this poem. There is no log-in, no fee, no access, yet the poem is free. The words spill into the paper like seawater over a levee. This poem must be imagined. Later, after the reader leaves this book-less library, a pinch of dry salt will be enough to recall this poem.
Moonishnessly
We were children then, when we settled on the moon, amid drifts of silver shadows. Our parents were still alive, down on Earth. We had no fear of flying, outside of airplanes, no fear of flying on the wings of birds, daily flights to the moon, one-way flights. We walked on the moon all night long, moonishnessly. And in the morning, covered with moondust, we climbed down to the blue ocean for a salt-water bath.
Today is International Women’s Day. A few of the books pictured above go back to high school days and were given me by my two older sisters (I grew up in a family of six girls). ”The River,” by Rumer Godden, was required reading at SBHS; the copy in the stack has my sister Shirley’s name in the inside cover. Shirley passed away a few years ago.
Susan and I lived near the beach in some courtyard apartments across from the writer Sylvia Wilkinson. I was in my first two years of teaching, in Venice. I showed Sylvia something I had written, and she said to Susan, “Tell Joe not to quit his day job.” But I never gave up on the idea of the novel and reading and literature and the whole idea of being a writer, whatever that was to come to mean. I got a corporate job, cementing the idea of a day job, but I don’t think one’s occupation necessarily prevents one from writing. What is writing? In any case, 30 years later I finally did quit my day job and finished the novel, having reworked it several times in different formats over the years. Interested readers can find a link to excerpts in the sidebar.
Sylvia had given us a copy of her 1977 novel, “Shadow of the Mountain,” thanking Susan for proofreading and the title. If I were to suggest books by women for International Women’s Day, I might suggest any of Sylvia’s books (I think she may have thought “Cale” was her best), and also “The Solitary Self,” by Mary Midgley. Both Sylvia and Mary warrant wider reading.
- I said a little prayer for you.
- Where did you send it?
- I tied it to the leg of a bird.
- Not how did you send it. Where did you send it? To whom did you send it?
- Oh, I leave that up to the birds.
What is prayer? When I was a kid, I learned the Catholic prayers, and believed Sister Mary Annette, who liked to quote Shakespeare, when she said, “Words without thought never to heaven go.” King Claudius is trying to pray, looks like he is praying, to Hamlet, anyway, and so Hamlet decides to put off killing him, for fear that if the king is killed while praying, he’ll go to heaven, while Hamlet wants full revenge, not to send his uncle to an unjust reward. What Hamlet doesn’t realize is that while Claudius’s “words fly up, [his] thoughts remain below.” Annette waxed literary, incomparable to none.
Impossible to know with certainty if the thoughts of others are wedded to their words, so I don’t know if I alone among Annette’s 8th grade class had this problem, but my rote prayers were recited much like Malachy McCourt explains in his book “A Monk Swimming.” He had misheard “amongst women” in the prayer known as the “Hail Mary.” But if his thoughts were behind his words, applying Claudius’s rule, I suppose Malachy’s monk swimming would have made it into heaven. If I had said “a monk swimming,” my thoughts would have been about the surf down the road from our church.
Salinger’s Franny gets caught up with prayer, and one day, her brother Zooey explains the alleged benefits of the pilgrim’s prayer to his mother, who has expressed some concern for what Franny’s getting into: “And the main idea is that it’s not supposed to be just for pious bastards and breast-beaters,” Zooey says. “You can be busy robbing the goddam poor box, but you’re to say the prayer while you rob it.” The argument of the pilgrim’s prayer, in Zooey’s explanation, seems to run counter to the “words without thought” school of prayer.
Hemingway’s characters are often caught in prayer, or anti-prayer. Consider the waiter’s version of the Lord’s Prayer, for example, in the short story “A Clean Well-Lighted Place”: “Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name….” And, “I don’t love anybody,” Krebs tells his mother in “Soldier’s Home.” “Now you pray,” his mother tells him. “I can’t,” he says. In the short piece titled “Chapter VII” in “The First Forty-Nine Stories,” a soldier caught in battle prays, “Dear jesus please get me out.” He makes promises to Jesus, bargains for his life, and “The shelling moved further up the line,” but “The next night back at Mestre he did not tell the girl he went upstairs with at the Villa Rossa about Jesus. And he never told anybody.”
What happens when Jesus gets prayers at odds, opposing viewpoints? Athletes often pray. A ballplayer will make the sign of the cross at the plate just before a pitch. Does this give the batter a kind of steroid-prayer advantage? But couldn’t the pitcher simply counter with a prayer of his own, just before delivery? Do the prayers then cancel out? But something has to happen to the pitch: call strike, ball, foul ball, base hit. But is this what prayer is supposed to be about? On the other hand, given the pilgrim’s prayer premise, why not position oneself in constant prayer? Baseball is a game of inches.
I pray you, is the idea of prayer to be always asking for something? But prayers are often made for the benefit of others. Praying for peace would seem to benefit everyone. We might pray for rain, or for a dry spell, for sun or shade, for our horse to finish first. If we have everything we need or want, should we then stop praying? But we might pray we don’t lose something, or that someone else gets everything they need or want. Is there ever enough prayer?
We pray for peace, health, safety, security. We pray for stuff. We pray that there be more stuff, and less stuff. Different kinds of stuff. Not everyone prays, of course, but if prayer is a question, surely everyone has a prayer at some point. What is gambling but a prayer, a prayer to the god of luck. John Cage said “…nothing is accomplished by writing, hearing, playing a piece of music } our ears are now in excellent condition.” Probably the same might be said of poetry. Not much accomplished there, either, and the most accomplished poets seem to know this, which improves the condition of their voice. Can the same be said of prayer?
Last year, New Directions published a small book collecting selections of Thomas Merton’s writing, titled “On Christian Contemplation.” For Merton, prayer seems to be a kind of poetry, but only after acknowledging a marketplace uselessness of both; and prayer, like poetry, might also transcend doctrine: “…ascending the slopes in darkness, feeling more and more keenly his own emptiness, and with the winter wind blowing cruelly through his now tattered garments, he meets at times other travelers on the way, poor pilgrim as he is, and as solitary as he, belonging perhaps to other lands and other traditions. There are of course great differences between them, and yet they have much in common.” Merton felt “much closer to the Zen monks of ancient Japan than to the busy and impatient men of the West.” He characterized these men as thinking “in terms of money, power, publicity, machines, business, political advantage, military strategy – who seek, in a word, the triumphant affirmation of their own will, their own power, considered as the end for which they exist.”
This does not mean that in prayer one escapes one’s responsibilities for putting bread on the table. This is a problem for poets, of course, too: “Simply to evade modern life would be a futile attempt to abdicate from its responsibilities [while clinging to its advantages. The way of contemplation is a way of higher and more permanent responsibilities] and a renunciation of advantages – and illusions,” Merton says.
The modern world presents problems for the poet and the prayer: “Can contemplation still find a place in the world of technology and conflict which is ours?” Peace, and wholeness, Merton argues, are not “the most salient characteristics of modern society.” No kidding. Yet, “What is keeping us back from living lives of prayer? Perhaps we really don’t want to pray. This is the thing we have to face.” But, if we do want to consider prayer, or contemplation, or poetry, how do we go about it? “If you want a life of prayer, the way to get it is by praying,” Merton says.
How does one pray? Merton says, “The best thing beginners…can do…is to acquire the agility and freedom of mind that will help them to find light and warmth and ideas and love for God everywhere they go and in all that they do. People who only know how to think about God during fixed periods of the day will never get very far in the spiritual life. In fact, they will not even think of Him in the moments they have religiously marked off for ‘mental prayer.’” And “mental prayer” is an awkward term, because we don’t pray with our minds, Merton explains.
But to return to the idea of uselessness, of prayer and of poetry, commercial uselessness, worldly uselessness: Merton says, “Christ does not control by power; further He does not control by law. This is one of the most important and neglected features of the New Testament.” Not everyone feels the need to enter into contemplation, prayer, or poetry, but that does not mean the need is not there, seeded within the individual soul. While at the same time one’s personal anguish might be so intense or one’s perspective so hurt as to call forth a dismissal of God and Christ and all the baggage one feels associated with the church and its people and prayer and what one sees to be the hypocrisy and futility of it all. So, “How does the theology of prayer approach this problem?” Merton asks. “Not by reasoning but by symbol, by poetic insight, leading directly to those depths of the heart where these matters are experienced and where such conflicts are resolved.”
On the other hand, one might want for something simple, a simple prayer, a simple poem. One shouldn’t have to google a prayer or a poem to enjoy the moment. To google literature, in a search for meaning, is to ruin a good meal. The same might be said for church prayer, church being the place where we google our souls, but any book might work, Merton says, and reading prayers out of a book, or reading a book as a prayer “is a good thing to do and very easy and simple.”
Why pray? “The real purpose of meditation is this,” Merton says: “To teach a man how to work himself free of created things and temporal concerns, in which he finds only confusion and sorrow.” Still, we might find ourselves bored with all of this, with the idea we are going to spend any time away from our busy schedules on something as trivial as prayer or poetry. We want to feel productive. We want to help others. We’ll go to church, appear to be part of some community, put some bills in the basket, sprinkle some holy water on our face, just in case there really is something to all the hocus-pocus. For the bored or busy, Merton seems to advise to not only get it while we can but where we can: “Learn how to meditate on paper. Drawing and writing are forms of meditation. Learn how to contemplate works of art. Learn how to pray in the streets or in the country. Know how to meditate not only when you have a book in your hand but when you are waiting for a bus or riding in a train.” One can pray “with few words or none…half-hopeless.” There are poems like this, or there should be.
There’s a chapter in the little Merton book titled “Silence.” Did Merton read John Cage? Merton says, “Whether the house be empty or full of children, whether the men go off to town or work with tractors in the fields, whether the liner enters the harbor full of tourists or full of soldiers, the almond tree brings forth her fruit in silence.” Another chapter is titled “Difficulties & Distractions.” One can’t escape all of one’s difficulties or distractions, even in prayer. Hamlet said he could bound himself in a nutshell and count himself a king of infinite space – were it not that he has bad dreams. Of this kind of tension, Merton says, “Do not strain yourself trying to get ideas or feel fervor. Do not upset yourself with useless efforts to realize the elaborate prospects suggested by a conventional book on meditation.”
“Everything good that comes to us and happens in prayer is a grace and a gift of God,” Merton says. “Even the desire to pray at all, and the attempt to pray, is itself a great grace.” Does this mean that God has ignored many of us, who may not feel this call to pray? Ah, but what is prayer? This claim of Merton’s rings true, pray or not: “The mere fact of having an opportunity to pray is something for which we should be deeply grateful.” Grateful, too, for the opportunity to contemplate poetry, to read, or even to try to write a poem.
There’s a wonderful poem included in the Merton book, called “Song for Nobody.” It seems to embody some of Merton’s idea of prayer:
A yellow flower
(Light and spirit)
Sings by itself
For nobody.
A golden spirit
(Light and emptiness)
Sings without a word
By itself.
Let no one touch this gentle sun
In whose dark eye
Someone is awake.
(No light, no gold, no name, no color
And no thought:
O, wide awake!)
A golden heaven
Sings by itself
A song to nobody.
Merton advocated contemplation in an age of distraction, where we might become free of anxiety and anguish magnified by the reckoning and wreckage surrounding us. And John Cage said nothing is accomplished with music, thus freeing our ears to all sounds. Cage said, “I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry as I need it.” Maybe Shakespeare’s King Claudius should not be trusted when he says “words without thought never to heaven go.” Words without thought may indeed be the lingua franca of heaven, thoughts without words the mother tongue of heaven.
I confess I do not know how to pray, not in Merton’s view, where one prays with every breath one takes. And I have typically prayed only with reason, and with words, and this seems the wrong approach. One should pray without reason, and without words. Prayer occurs in the act of contemplation, then it disappears. Poetry occurs in the act of writing, then it disappears. “A poem should be wordless,” Archibald MacLeish said, “As the flight of birds.” Relax, Merton says. Make a poem a prayer. If no one reads it, if no one wants it, maybe God will accept it. For readers who have read to the bottom of this post, consider it a poem; for those who have ignored it, it’s a prayer, one with far too many words.
1. Tell that boy to give me back my glass eye!
2. Oh, Flannery! Such a perfectly purply bleak tale of this sad potato sack of a young woman taken every advantage of as she struggles with her permanent defects physical and mental to walk in a world where we may engage and intercourse authentically with others.
3. A hoot and a holler in a hay loft!
4. Kisses sourer than vinegar.
5. I wonst knowd a woman just like that busy body Mrs. Freeman and she warnt free atall but was so cot up in everybody elses bizness but I will say she was probably free of her man but that woman wood knot bee welcome on in my kitchen, no sir we.
6. Poor Joy, I shall pray for you, that you got home safe and sound without your you know what. I do wonder, though, how did you ever get down that ladder? But you are such a strong girl. Keep it up, and you go, girl!
7. It’s about sin and redemption and people who wear their hearts on their sleeves.
8. Who’s Flannery tryin’ to kid here she ain’t never been up in no hay barn.
9. It sounds like Flannery is going to give us some pornography. Well, she does, in a way, with those playing cards of the bible salesman. But it’s all turned around. He’s the one who says she must say how she loves him. That’s backwards from what we are used to. It’s usually the girl must say this, and ask, will you still love me tomorrow? But this is no normal sex scene. What does the leg represent?
10. Yes, the kisses. First like a truck, then like tiny fishes sucking. It’s an absurd view, a distorted view, but the girl does lose it up in that barn.
11. You all missin’ the point here. It is tragic to have such a big nose, so he takes her nose and off he goes. So the tragic becomes comic. We must learn to laugh, even if we must cry to get there.
12. Yes, kind of. Sanctifying grace has fallen, and Joy has received a gift, the gift of grace. But we must be careful what we pray for. She was obsessed with her leg. Her leg was inseparable from her. It was her identity, her self-image, her poor but large and strong picture of herself that no one else saw, and so the gift she got was to be rid at long last of the leg.
13. She is her own antagonist, struggling against her self, but dynamic, for she changes from beginning to end, and all the others in relief remain static.
14. Look at the words, people! Mrs. Freeman’s “neutral” expression as she barrels down the road like a trash truck, Joy Hulga “lumbered” about like bats falling in a dugout, her leg made of wood. This is irony: textual and situational, and the one gives way to the other.
15. I think it’s about how Joy turns so sour on account of the hunting accident. That’s real. But then it becomes unreal, like a bad dream, like a nightmare, when Manley Pointer, the fake bible salesman, comes along. At first he seems real, though obnoxious, but then it’s obvious that he is there to do the devil’s work. He’s a cad.
16. No, no, no! He’s there to do the Lord’s work! For the Lord does work in strange ways in a Flannery O’Connor short story. Don’t you see? He frees Joy from her obsession with her leg.
17. I just want to say that I think Flannery is so courageous to try and write something like this.
18. Tell that boy to give me my glass eye back!
19. We all have our faults, but who would have thought a person can hope too much, and though ever hoping well, come to such ruin.
20. It was a very colorful story. I counted over 30 colors, and then lost count.
21. I’m reminded of the time my great uncle Leroy, this was when we was all still living down in Gulleytown, over the creek bridge and on out Smithy Road, up past the Gilclumps place, before it got so runned down after Olaf passed, and around the sharp curve where the railroad tracks veer off down toward the river where Charlene Apple lost control of her Mustang that year it rained so hard people said it must be the end of the world coming, and Leroy, suddenly one Sunday appears in church, though he had not stepped a foot near it in 40 years, and him with a tie around his big fat neck his face so red and bumpy like a fat spoiled strawberry and he’s holding one crimson red rose on a long stem and he walks up the aisle and you could hear a feather twist in the air as a mosquito flew near it and Leroy he stops at the third row on the left where of course in the aisle spot Mrs. Flanmph always sat, had sat every Sunday for the past 40 years, and Leroy genuflects and pauses and old Mrs. Flanmph won’t look nor budge, but Leroy gently insists his leg into the row and old Mrs. Flanmph she don’t move down but moves back twisting her legs sideways like a body does when someone wants by and Leroy steps over her and plops down and everything is still as a summer creek in the country and then Leroy hands Mrs. Flanmph his crimson rose and she looks at it for a good country moment and then takes the rose, and the uproar in that church like to wake the dead out in their graves and pretty soon people was dancing in the aisles and Preacher Justin he declared a good country pot luck supper later that afternoon back in the church backyard where Leroy cooked up his ribs for the first time in 40 years and all kinds of folks showed up to see what all the commotion was about and were told that Uncle Leroy and old Mrs. Flanmph were finally going to tie the knot. Thank you all for reading and commenting. Comments are now closed.
Related: Flannery’s Joy
Friedrich Durrenmatt’s short story “The Tunnel” concerns a young man, a student, on a train, commuting to school. The train enters a long tunnel, longer than the student recalls from previous trips along the same route. The student smokes cigars, stuffs his ears with cotton, his head in a book, and he’s wearing double glasses, clear and dark. He’s dimmed his senses, all but closed his doors of perception (26). The train is crowded. There is no light at the end of the tunnel, no end to the tunnel.
I had walked down to Tabor Space Saturday afternoon, but it was closed for a memorial service, so I continued over to Hawthorne, where hangouts are plentiful. I bought a coffee and sat at the rear of the shop, under a window through which I could see the clouds drifting east. I had my copy of John Cage’s “Silence” with me, and I had a small notebook, two pencils and a pen. I had my cell phone, and I had not forgotten my reading glasses. I did not have my laptop with me.
The coffee shop was crowded and noisy. But it was the kind of noise that drowns out my tinnitus. Somewhere, there was music. I sat at the end of a comfortable couch. There was a coffee table, and across the table from me was a young man, perhaps a student, with a laptop and small, white earplugs in his ears. He wore glasses. To my right, at the end of the couch, two more young men sat at a small table, both with laptops, both with earplugs. At the end of the coffee table, a woman sat alone with a laptop at a small table with her back to me, her plush black hair piled on top of her head in a twisted bun. And there were charcoal drawings on the walls, of bees, and one of a rooster. From my view at the end of the couch, the woman’s bun seemed to flair up and blend into the rooster tail drawing pinned to the wall.
I drank my coffee, read some in “Silence,” made some notes, checked my cell phone to see if Susan had texted or called. A guy with a laptop and earplugs across from the woman with her hair in a bun got up and left, and another guy with a laptop and earplugs quickly took his place. That’s when I began to think about Durrenmatt’s short story “The Tunnel.” Then the woman with the hair bun got up, packed her things, and left, but another woman quickly took her place. And this new woman also had a hair bun, identical to the first woman’s, and she sat in the same chair in the same position, her back to me, her hair bun mixing with the rooster’s tail in the drawing pinned to the wall.
That’s all. I read, drank coffee, gazed out the window at the clouds continually changing shape. I made some notes for a blog post with a few doodles. I drew a beehive hairdo that spiraled into clouds above a tunnel.
Count up 12 books from the bottom in the pic to the left (a stack of books mostly from the mid-60s) and you’ll find “The Fall of the House of Usher,” a book of short stories by Edgar Allan Poe. I spent a 9th grade weekend copying out longhand Poe’s tale “The Pit and the Pendulum.” Never mind why, but it was a punishment I rather enjoyed.
Six books from the bottom is “The Time Machine,” H. G. Wells’s forecast for long term care for the human race.
Eight books up you’ll find Jerzy Kosinski’s “The Painted Bird.” I was in 10th grade Home Room class sitting behind a friend who was reading furtively in a paperback I didn’t recognize. I asked him what he was reading. He gave me the book, but asked that if caught with it I would not tell where I got it. We didn’t know one another that well, though later we became good friends. He had substantially more stock with the authorities, was a genius. But he seemed concerned that I might be traumatized by the reading experience. Some critics now suspect that Kosinski was traumatized by the writing experience.
I wrote a paper in 10th grade arguing that Melville’s “Pierre, Or the Ambiguities” contained more social insight than “Moby Dick.” Unfortunately, I can’t fine my 10th grade copy of “Moby Dick”; fortunately, though, I can’t find the 10th grade paper I wrote, either. I still have the Rhinehart edition of “Moby Dick” we used at Dominguez Hills.
That Sherlock Holmes “Memoirs” used to have a partner, “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.” It’s a mystery what happened to it.
I remember first reading “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” in high school, but I can’t remember what grade. But I remember wondering about a scene where Leamas is shaken by a near miss on the highway. Is he less shaken by the near miss than by the recognition that the near miss has shaken him?
I can’t find my 9th grade copy of “Two Years Before the Mast.” I can’t imagine anyone wanting to borrow it. In fact, a couple of weeks ago, we were moving some things around, sort of spring cleaning, impatient for spring, and we wound up with a couple of bags of used books we decided to take down to Powell’s. They took about half of them, but I was surprised they took as many as they did. Do literary influences wane over time? What else can’t I find? All the Steinbeck books gone, but I know where they went. All four original Salinger books not to be found, though three have been replaced. The early “Walden,” “On the Road,” but also replaced.
I don’t suppose anyone reads Asimov’s “The Human Body: Its Structure and Operation” anymore. If we want to know something about the human body, we google it. But who thinks of the body as an operating system? It’s like talking about books as physical objects, and as if their mere presence might have an effect on us, like a gravity, the experience of influence.
Related Posts: Reading influences and Henry Miller: more on reading influences.
silent quicksand was a poetry and art magazine at El Camino College in the early 70s. I don’t know how many issues came out before folks moved on and it folded, but I don’t think many. I have copies of issues # 2 and # 3. I had three poems appear in the Fall 1973 issue (# 3). When I told my old high school friend Tim at the time about it, he said there was no quicker way to obscurity than appearing in a college literary magazine. That was of course before blogging came along. In any case, I thought it was cool then, and I still do, that two of my poems shared a page with Stephen Jama, one of the ECC English instructors, who became for a time a friend and mentor.
Below is an image of issue # 3 and below that an image of issue # 2:
I was reading, at the time, the Beat poets, Corso, Ferlinghetti, Philip Lamantia, and of course Ginsberg, and King of the Road Kerouac, and Gary Snyder, and I remember reading Diane Di Prima, and I read Henry Miller and Anais Nin and all along John Cage, and Whitman and William Carlos Williams, and, having started with folk music, I was now getting deeper into jazz, and I read “Blues People,” by LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka). Still other influences included the Rexroth translations, Hugh Kenner’s “The Pound Era,” Donald Hall’s “Contemporary American Poetry,” McLuhan and Norman O. Brown, and de Beauvoir and Sartre, and Camus. In seminars we still read Dos Passos, Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Joyce and Beckett.
One night, I went with Jama up into Santa Monica to see a live production of Beckett’s “Endgame” at a small theatre, and another time we saw Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape” at a small troupe theatre in Hermosa Beach. I saw the humor in Beckett. I had a sense of humor about it all, the literary quicksand. That was all before my foray into what Han Shan called the red dust. It’s not easy keeping one’s sense of humor where the quicksand is so quiet and deep, but I had my sense of humor there, too, and I hope I still do:
“jazzskin” is an old, handmade chapbook (1973, 17 pages – click on photos):
The “poetry occurs” idea is a riff off John Cage, whose book “Silence” (1961) begins with “The Future of Music: Credo”: “Wherever we are,” Cage says, “what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating.” In his essay “Experimental Music,” Cage underscores the idea that noise is everywhere and attempts to control it create other hazards, but, he says, “One need not fear about the future of music. But this fearlessness only follows if, at the parting of the ways, where it is realized that sounds occur whether intended or not, one turns in the direction of those he does not intend.” When I was working on “jazzskin,” I felt, as I do now, the same about poetry that Cage felt about music. But Cage was not a jazz fan. He apparently thought jazz was about having a conversation, for which he preferred words.
Related: Jazzskin, a post, and “JAZZSKIN” a poem (follow link or see “About” page).
…from an old notebook, around 1988:
The Myth of Syllabus
I once spent a lot of time going to a lot of meetings where I took a lot of notes but also doodled a lot. Sometimes my neighbors showed an interest in my doodles, but not often. Over time I developed a disregard for the term a lot. A lot is used a lot as support for an argument, but a lot of the time a lot is too imprecise to properly fund a decision. Nevertheless, a lot of people got away with using the term a lot a lot.
Apart from its imprecision, a lot is unpalatable. A lot lifts off the tongue but cuts itself short, unlike alas, aloof, or aloft, which all seem more complete and satisfying. A lot carries no drift.
A lot of people think a lot is one word: alot. What’s a word? Speech flows, a syllable stream, often alotadoo about nothing. Punctuation helps, but punctuation is a kind of stop animation. A lot of the time, punctuation can only approximate the real speed of speech. Writing is divorced from speech. We are taught from a young age to separate our tongues from our eyes, the quicker to read. Poems often use stop animation technique to slow readers down, to get the reader to mouth the words, to taste the words, chew them. Words become salt water taffy in the poet’s mouth. A lot of poets suffer bad teeth, yet poetry is not fast food. A lot of poets are poor.
A lot tells an amount, but how much is it? Lots and lots. Compared to what? A lot of the time a lot is used with the time: a lot of the time. There seems to be some connection between a lot and time. A lot of the time the meaning of a lot is understood from context. It rains a lot in Portland, but still, there are a lot of different kinds of rain. A lot of the time, I think it’s raining, but it’s not wet outside. Those are good days to get a lot of yard work done.
What’s the opposite of a lot? Is there an antonym for alot? Alittle. In “Silence,” John Cage’s book that I come back to a lot, there’s a little story about a couple who live in Alaska. Someone asks them if it was very cold last winter. Not too cold, they respond, only a couple of days, they explain, did they have to stay in bed all day to keep warm.
Then again, a lot of the time, memories go awry, amiss, askew. While I read a lot in “Silence,” I had not recently read the little story about how cold the winter was, so I thought I’d better look it up. I glanced through “Silence” a few times, but I couldn’t find it. I then thought it might be in John Cage’s book “A Year From Monday,” and it is, on page 138, but there’s no mention of Alaska, and there’s no couple, just “a woman who lived in the country,” and there were more than a couple of days, “three or four days,” she says, but she does say “we had to stay in bed all day to keep warm,” so maybe that’s where I got the idea there was a couple. It’s a very short story: 44 words total.
Not a lot, but sometimes (maybe that’s the antonym) a lot is allot, as in allotment. I’ve reached the number of words allotted for this post. Not a lot.
– I’m starting a new cat blog!
- What’s it called?
- “Mkgnao! Mrkgnao! Mrkrgnao! Gurrhr!”
- You’ll need a good copy editor.
– My blog is going to be about the cultural life of cats, very literary, you know, but not stuck up, kind of down home, back to the roots, folksy, backyardsy, and music, lots of musical licks and likes.
- Oh.
- Check out my first post! It’s a photo post! The text will read, “Dude! Check out the size of these speakers!” It’s to make older readers, you know, from the 60’s and 70’s, feel welcome.
– You never know where an idea for a good post might come from.
– I happen to know a very competent copy editor, a copy chief, in fact, a ruthless prescriptionist.
- Toothless? Did you say something about a toothless copy editor? Great echo in here!
…from the 4th chapter of Joyce’s “Ulysses,” as Bloom prepares breakfast, his cat lingering by:
Another slice of bread and butter: three, four: right. She didn’t like
her plate full. Right. He turned from the tray, lifted the kettle off
the hob and set it sideways on the fire. It sat there, dull and squat,
its spout stuck out. Cup of tea soon. Good. Mouth dry. The cat walked
stiffly round a leg of the table with tail on high.
–Mkgnao!
–O, there you are, Mr Bloom said, turning from the fire.
The cat mewed in answer and stalked again stiffly round a leg of the
table, mewing. Just how she stalks over my writingtable. Prr. Scratch my
head. Prr.
Mr Bloom watched curiously, kindly the lithe black form. Clean to see:
the gloss of her sleek hide, the white button under the butt of her
tail, the green flashing eyes. He bent down to her, his hands on his
knees.
–Milk for the pussens, he said.
–Mrkgnao! the cat cried.
They call them stupid. They understand what we say better than we
understand them. She understands all she wants to. Vindictive too.
Cruel. Her nature. Curious mice never squeal. Seem to like it. Wonder
what I look like to her. Height of a tower? No, she can jump me.
–Afraid of the chickens she is, he said mockingly. Afraid of the
chookchooks. I never saw such a stupid pussens as the pussens.
Cruel. Her nature. Curious mice never squeal. Seem to like it.
–Mrkrgnao! the cat said loudly.
She blinked up out of her avid shameclosing eyes, mewing plaintively
and long, showing him her milkwhite teeth. He watched the dark eyeslits
narrowing with greed till her eyes were green stones. Then he went to
the dresser, took the jug Hanlon’s milkman had just filled for him,
poured warmbubbled milk on a saucer and set it slowly on the floor.
–Gurrhr! she cried, running to lap.
1. I
2. I
3. I
I
I
my
us I I
I I
I my
I my me
my me
I I
I
I
I
me
my
my
I
my
me me
I
I my my
myself
I
I
I my
me my
I
I
I
I
my
me
me
me
The above, expunged page is from Three Novels by Samuel Beckett: Molly, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (First Evergreen Black Cat Edition, 1965, Seventh Printing). Page 161 was selected not quite at random (I liked that it begins with the numbers), though any page might work, to illustrate, in concrete poetry style, the proliferation of personal pronouns throughout Beckett’s text. The excised page, each pronoun appearing in its place from the original page, the surrounding words cut, makes for an effective and lovely concrete poem expressing one of Beckett’s themes, the individual immersed in white space, floating. Although an equally provocative reading might suggest that each pronoun is a separate individual, each reaching out for another. Try reading the concrete poem aloud, pausing between words just for the time it takes for your eye to locate the next one.
The new, old Rolling Stones film, “Charlie Is My Darling,” played at Portland’s Hollywood Theatre this past weekend, and we joined a mellow crowd of folks carrying beers and popcorn into the main auditorium, most of us probably able to claim that we had been raised on the Stones.
The Rolling Stones of 1965 were born before the outcome of World War II was certain. Mick was born the week of Operation Gomorra, the Allied bombing of Hamburg, Germany, the firestorm that literally sucked all the oxygen from the air, killing 40,000, injuring another 40,000. Keith was born that December, the week Eisenhower was named the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe.
Time was on their side, and ours too, as we settled into the revamped seats to view the revamped film. But time for what? One thing that seems to have died in the war was the notion of patrimony, if only temporarily and sporadically, that one might be born with guarantees, warranties. In its place would come a new wave of egalitarianism. It bartered with time, but still, what to do with it? Over in France, the question was considered existential, but for the Stones of “Charlie Is My Darling,” touring Ireland in September of 1965, the question hardly seems to have created a crisis.
“I am not a musician,” Charlie Watts, the drummer, and Bill Wyman, the bassist, both insist. But that’s a simple argument of definition, for what is a musician? They certainly were not musicians in the sense of the classical pieces tied to their seats in a symphony orchestra. But “I just play music” is the rejoinder of the actor, the musician who takes the stage in front of an audience wanting to feel real time, feel alive and in motion. Thus Mick says he’s acting. Music becomes an act, and part of the act is the audience. There’s a scene in the film when a small crowd takes the stage, and an Irish boy grabs Mick’s microphone stand and takes the helm. But he’s not acting, or is he? It’s today a funny scene, full of dramatic irony, for we know what they don’t. It seems almost staged, improvised, but expected, at the same time. What does the audience want, the Stones are asked. To get close, to touch, to be part of the moment. To be in time with the band.
Time is tight, sometimes, but as time goes by, we don’t always feel so constricted, but nor do we feel time “creeping in [its] petty pace,” taking its leisurely time, but still we feel we’ve time “to wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?,” and time to wonder if blogging isn’t such a waste of time, but time can be impatient with us, or we with time, like the bartender in Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” who simply wants to go home, and calls out repeatedly: ”HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME.”
Time is real. What to do? Rock around the clock.
The film release comes in time for the Stones 50th anniversary year. It would be fine if their 50th anniversary tour gigs were as simple as the ones in “Charlie Is My Darling,” the stages low and thin, the instruments and amplification unhyped, the audience small and close, the band members close to one another, no catwalk for Mick’s jagged moves, playing venues like The Hollywood Theatre.
Alas, too much time has passed, and with it, too much innocence.
In the film, though 1965 does not seem like some ancient time, one is startled to see how young the Stones look and how old things seem. They travel by train, and the camera captures some splendid Irish countryside. When they do fly, it’s in a prop plane. The audiences are young, of course, but casual and quick interviews with bystanders show they were well-known, if not popular with everyone. There’s a fun and impressive scene where sequestered in a small hotel room with a piano Mick and Keith imitate Elvis and Fats Domino. Charlie pounds a bit on the piano, too. They had all gone to school on this stuff. And there’s another instructive scene where Mick and Keith are shown making up a song, the others following the process, getting it as they go – yeah, not musicians, though; they just make up songs. Mick downplays the lyrics and intellectualizing any of it. Maybe, but this too is all part of the act. What is their audience not satisfied with, Mick’s asked. Being controlled by the older generation, he says. And why do they feel that way? Because they’re dissatisfied with it.
The thin stages, the notable riffs, Mick’s antic catlike, moody body language, the minimal amplification and Charlie’s simple drum kit, were all easily enough to activate and satisfy the audience’s rock and roll impulse, both in the film and in the Hollywood Theatre. This could be the last time. Every time, any time.
What to do, and why not a few songs, an hour upon the stage, or in front of the stage, or, years gone by, in an old movie theatre? Susan sat next to me, I could hear her softly singing, and I could feel her chair rocking.
Is there any expression more ephemeral than the tweet? Tweets are like mosquitoes, they bite and you have to scratch, and they fly about in swarms. Of course, you don’t have to go out into the twittering evening. There are many species of tweets but all have a short life cycle. Tweets are tiny. Large tweets are called blogs.
Of the many species of tweets, the wry with a twist is perhaps one of the most coveted. The topic hardly matters, but the more mundane the subject often the better to surprise with the wry. It’s as if to say, I could go on about this, but your attention warrants only my slightest swat. But when these fail, the tweets about brushing one’s teeth with a tube of diaper rash ointment because you couldn’t find your reading glasses, for example, or the photo of the morning bagel with cream cheese, and you were sure the baker was trying to send you some covert message, the wry is treated like a bad pun, noses in the air.
I have nothing to tweet, and I am tweeting it, and that is Twitter, as I need it, to do damage to John Cage‘s “Lecture on Nothing,” but it does seem appropriate to some twitterers. If one truly has nothing to say, who will listen? But if we begin with the admission, perhaps something of interest will follow. For having nothing to say, and saying it, is having something to say, after all.
Speaking of follow, Twitter’s format permits a kind of democratized social media, where one can follow without fear of being followed or be followed without fear of having to follow back. Is this freedom? One can lock one’s tweets, as Emily Dickinson did. But the mass of Twitterers follow more than are followed. There’s a crossover point, somewhere, a kind of demarcation separating the pro twitterer from the amateur, the popular from the wallflower, but which can occur at any level.
But what’s got us all atwitter this morning? Just this, an article followed from a tweet, “Librarians of the Twitterverse,” by James Gleick, in a post at the NYR Blog. To whit: probably (at this point) over 200 billion tweets have been imported into the Library of Congress, where the hope is to create a file that can trackback every mosquito in the swarm, and their every bite, an everyone’s Diary of Samuel Pepys.
But where to begin, now, if not then, letting the future worry about them and then. What do we look for in a tweet, in a blog post? Most of what we see is a kind of cat twitter. But that’s ok. Like Buckminster Fuller said, or might have said, if he knew about Twitter, 1,000 people should tweet, and one will come up with a tweet good enough to retweet, but you never know which one.
So, who to follow, whose tweets or whose blog posts. Here at the Toads we’re always on the lookout for something clear and concise, purposeful and meaningful and reflective, though we also enjoy the quixotic and the chaotic, the wry with the sad, the happy with the bubbly. It’s seldom so much what’s being said, but it’s always about how it’s being said. I’m always adding and subtracting from my blog feed subscriptions, somewhat capriciously, a fickle reader, yet there are a number of blogs I follow regularly, and when I see there’s been an update, a new post, I go directly to it. What is it about these blogs that keeps me going back to them?
This morning I want to pass along a blog I discovered recently that surpasses the average for its lucid and honest prose and lovely style. It’s called “Small Fires.” I hope you check it out. Reading the posts, I get the feeling here is a writer, someone who seems at ease with words, though not always with the subject, for some subjects are not easy, but whose ease puts the reader at ease. How does she do this? I don’t know.
But to close on the quixotic and the chaotic, another cat cartoon:
– I joined Twitter! Check it out, my first Tweet!
“Sitting under apple tree looking though wintery bare branches waiting for birds tweeters jay flickers titmice owl or the occasional squirrel” – exactly 140 characters including spaces.
- I notice you are not partial to punctuation.
- I already have 5,000 Twitter followers! And a bunch of Retweets!
- All birds, you say? Might want to rethink giving away your location.
- Cats of the future will read my tweets at the Library of Congress!
- I don’t doubt it for a tweet-second.
