Untitled Work

 

Untitled Work


is written by

columnist

Mac Gander


Professor of English and Journalism at

Landmark College

Putney

Vermont


He

writes

on

writing


Earlier Untitled Work columns are now archived as


Untitled Work,

First Folio

here



Scratch Tickets and Crack Houses


I moved into an apartment on Western Avenue about six months ago after living for about a decade in what passes for a gated community in Brattleboro, up on a hill with swimming pools in some of the lawns of the houses. It was a nice big house with an acre of grass to mow, but this new place has a backyard, too, with apple trees, a good spot to let my dogs take a romp, it’s not so bad. The morning traffic is noisy but I grew up in Manhattan so it feels a bit like home to me.

One night in late spring, after I moved here, I went to the 7/11 to pick up some dogfood and I noticed the panoply of scratch tickets behind the counter. I was kind of restless and it was late, and the young woman behind the counter was sort of hanging with this guy I had met before who used to break-dance and make money for it but fell on hard times, so we started to chat and I asked about those tickets, how they work, and then I bought a couple of them along with the dog food and some milk for my morning coffee.

I split the tickets, let the girl behind the counter scratch one to split with the break-dancer guy while I scratched the other, and the funny thing was that my ticket was a bust but they hit $100 and I told them to split it. It was good fortune for them—a lot of unexpected money--and the break-dancer guy bought a pack of Marlboros immediately along with some stuff for the house where he lives that he had been needing.

I got kind of hooked. If you come from the same class as me you probably haven’t ever played tickets or the lottery, except maybe as a stocking stuffer at Christmas, so you may not know this, but they are really well-designed. I wonder what algorithm they use to create them, but every ticket makes you think you might be a winner since the numbers are so close, and some of the prizes are big enough that it would change your life to win one, unless you already had money.

I decided to let myself become addicted to them for a while—I’ve stopped now, but there was a period when scratch tickets littered the floor of the screened porch in this new apartment I have with my dogs. I wanted to see what it was like, to live with that sort of desperate hope for big money, a big score. 

The thing is that it is a kind of excitement to scratch them, murmuring “big money, big money” under your breath as you do, and when you hit a score it is a real rush, you don’t think about how much you had to spend to get to that result. And of course, all the money goes to education.

That last sentence was intended to be cynical. I think it is really interesting that a lot of the money that goes to education in Vermont comes from scratch tickets and the lottery. It is far better than a tax on people who actually have money. Create an addictive and easy form of gambling, one that anyone can do at the end of a hard day’s work at shit wages when they buy their beer and smokes, and then use their cash to educate their kids. The algorithms are really well-constructed, and the tickets are designed by marketing experts. It all works pretty well.

I bought my last tickets last night. I have been planning to write this piece for months, and I let myself go to the addiction, probably lost $500 in that time though I hit a lot of good luck, but no big money. I bought three silver ones last night for $15 and hit $30 on one of them, cashed out and bought food for my dogs, some paper towels, and some milk for my coffee. I am done with it now, but I learned a lot. It seems like an evil thing to me.

After I cashed in the ticket I brought my stuff home, took the dogs out, fed them. Then I sat on my porch for a while listening to the commotion at the crack house across the street. It is strange to live across from an active crack house. I mean, it is a dope house, really—heroin is probably the main commodity—but I am sure they have crack, too. The light is on all night with the music going, and people come and go with a sort of regularity that makes it seem like the late-night window at McDonald’s. 

Every once in a while some decompensating person will wander out on to the street hollering or screaming, and sometimes the medical folks will show up with some cop cars, but mainly the cops seem to be just watching it, leaving it alone, though I know they know about it. Oddly, though, they have a speed trap at the Congregational church just a klick or so up the avenue, so I do get wakened by blue flashing lights most nights, some speeder or drunk from Connecticut or New Jersey usually.

At first it amused me—a kind of urban movie for a Manhattan kid after so many years of suburban life. Then one night a friend of mine dropped me off at my place after a couple of drinks downtown. It was garbage night, so I was putting out the trash after she left me on the curb, and then I noticed that she hadn’t left, that she was actually walking across the street to go up there, so I dropped the pail and hustled over to intercept her, saying honey what the fuck are you doing. 

She fell into my arms, thanking me and sobbing a little bit, and then she got in her car and drove home. She kicked heroin addiction ten years ago, raised a couple of fine young men, works two jobs to make her nut. A moment of weakness. Glad I was there to catch her.
But how fucked up is it that we have crack houses all over town that the cops can’t close? It was an amusement park for me for a while, watching these folks come and go, sprint up those lighted steps and then sprint back down to their waiting cars. Something to write about besides sparrows at the bird-feeder. Now I feel differently. Another evil.

Scratch tickets and crack houses. Maple syrup and artisan cheese. A constant stream of gleaming new model SUV’s up I-91 each Friday night. What a strange reality we inhabit, this colony of the gleaming cities to the south, where we trade reduced sap and sweet summer produce for money, and guns for heroin. 

It is one thing to read about it, to live in one of the houses on a hill, insulated in some fashion from the reality of things but still caring, send that check to Morningside, care about social justice, live a good and decent life. It was not until I lived here that the reality became clearer to be—became visible. Our Vermont. 








Scorpion Bowls


John and I want to watch the basketball game so we move from our table over to the bar at the Asian place—he calls it the bomb-shelter, and it is, in a way, he’s shy socially and he likes safe places—and there are these two guys sitting at the end of the bar, obviously working guys, making their way through Scorpion Bowls, which is the easiest way to get tanked up at the Asian, like nine bucks for a two-person drink but you can just do one of them yourself if you want, not something I have ever tried. 

So these guys are getting tanked on Scorpions and this woman comes in, about my age, still kind of pretty but very thin and a bit haggard, and she has this way of keeping her short-cut auburn hair over her face so you can’t really see it, and she sits at the bar between us, these two groups of guys, and orders an astonishing amount of food—enough for at least four people. 

John and I are engrossed in the game—it’s a re-run of a game we didn’t see, with a lot of interesting commentary, and our only intention is to talk about basketball, a love we share, after a long day for each of us writing. So this woman kind of strikes up conversation with the Scorpion Bowl guys, I’m not really listening but they are going back and forth, and it is obvious that the guys are getting hammered, but they are easy-going enough, just kind of stupid. 

You can see the woman is educated and that she has traveled—she makes a couple of foreign references as our lovely Chinese waitress, really one of the sweetest women I have ever known, browses through some international channels looking for our station. The woman is kind of working to have some sort of sustained conversation, and the guys are just garrulous, prattling on about this and that, but it’s all fine. It’s not like it is sometimes where you see a guy or a couple of guys in a bar and park them away in your mind, knowing that there’s some trouble there, keeping an eye on them just to keep track of whatever path they might decide to take. 

I’m pretty exhausted anyway. No reason to get into it, but it felt good to just be talking basketball with someone who knows the game like I do—so I am not really paying much attention until I hear the guys asking the waitress if she ever played beer pong. Now her English is quite basic, and she is not really following them, just smiling and being her sweet self, but then one of the guys makes a really racist comment about Chinese people. The waitress doesn’t pick it up—or if she does, she just keeps smiling—but that woman does, and she starts to shake her head kind of fiercely and mutter under her breath a little. It’s almost like a moment where one would intervene, except nothing really is happening—stepping in would just escalate things and I am in no mood for a dispute.

Then things seem to settle down a bit, we’re all eating or drinking, this cast of strangers at a nearly empty bar, and when a commercial break comes I go outside to have a smoke. It’s pouring rain out there so I stand on the porch and watch these torrents of water streaming down, occasional bright flashes of lightning and thunder, a slow procession of cars and trucks rushing on the rain-slick street. I’m not thinking about much, just looking at the way the lights glisten in the rain, and then I finish my smoke and head back inside.

When I get to the front door the woman is just coming out so I hold the door for her, of course, and she thanks me, and then as I start to go in she touches my arm with her hand and looks in my eyes and says thanks, thanks, like she means something I can’t understand, and I can see she is in some sort of trouble. I don’t know what it is, and don’t have anything to say much except sure, no problem, and then she keeps moving and heads off into that pouring rain, just dressed in a blouse and slacks, getting soaked right away and wandering off into the dark.

When I get back in the two guys are chortling about something, Scorpion Bowl laughter, and I see that the waitress is holding this big wad of twenties—really a thick wad—and she looks a little bit lost and confused. My friend John is a cool guy but basically impervious to social signals, so he just is watching the game, so when I take my seat beside him the waitress comes over with this wad of bills and asks in her fragmented English what she should do, the woman just left $160 on a $30 bill, and all her food is still sitting there getting cold. 
Before I can say anything the waitress kind of rushes across the restaurant to the door in this very quick, graceful way she has, and I watch her while she looks out into the night to see if that woman is still in sight, but she’s not. She comes back to where I am sitting and says “I will just put in envelope”, framing it partly as a question and partly as a decision. Yeah, I say, that makes sense. It’s not like she can’t use the money—she works 14-hour days and sleeps in the basement of the building—but she has honor and dignity, and of course it is the right thing to do.
The two guys are pretty surly and churlish by now, and I can see that the waitress wants to cut them off but doesn’t want to make things worse. You can tell that they know that they somehow did something wrong—that something they had done drove that poor woman into the night and caused her to leave behind all her money—but they are confused about what it could be and they are acting in a way to show they don’t give a shit if they did something wrong, does anyone want to make anything of it? I’m cool with that, it’s not my business and they’re not dangerous—I’ve lived long enough to know the difference between dangerous guys and drunken fools.

Even so, when the game ends and John and I start to get ready to go, the waitress asks if we will stay, a drink on the house—she’s all alone in the place except for the chef, who is cooking up a storm for take-out in the kitchen behind the bar—so of course we say sure and sit for a while longer until the two guys finally head out into the night to find whatever destiny they have. Then we leave, and John and I part ways, and I head back to this apartment where I live these days with my two dogs.

It’s a strange life, really, since it is the first time I have lived alone since I was 18—four decades now—and after four months I still am getting used to it. I get inside, pretty drenched from the rain, and settle the dogs, then change my t-shirt and shorts. It is still pretty early—a long night ahead—but there’s no one I can really call, it’s not like it is a crisis or anything. 

And I am thinking a lot about this woman. Who knows what her story was, though it is easy enough to make one up—depression, life events, maybe living alone within walking distance the way I do in one of the old houses they turned into small apartments in this strange, quasi-urban landscape on the edge of town. I am thinking that I wished that I had stopped her and just asked if she was OK. I mean, I would want someone to do that for me. But I didn’t see it quickly enough, and god knows what help I might have been anyway, except it was easy to see that she was just really lonely and a little bit on edge, the way people get sometimes.

So I am lying in bed with a book—I’ve been reading Lowell a lot lately and I have the first version of his Notebook on my lap—and I am thinking about this woman and how hard the rain was falling, our first real rain in weeks. I really should have done something. If I see her again at least I will say something, offer an overture. Life can be really lonely. Then I remember this conversation I had with this younger friend of mine, old enough to already have lived a very hard life, but still young enough to be figuring the game out. 
Everybody is sad, she said. Isn’t that true? Sure, I say, I think that’s probably true. I quote Emerson to her, most men lead lives of quiet desperation, etc. And she’s like, I know, I know, but it is so strange really. I mean some people have really hard lives, she says, and I murmur I know kiddo, I know, but she’s on a roll and says, you look at some people and you think they have to be happy, like they’re married and they have a house and jobs, they have a nice white fence around their yard, but really everyone is sad, it’s just more obvious sometimes. 
I’m thinking of this moment, this flash of revelation this sweet young woman had sitting on the couch with me a couple of days before while she was doing some work for school, and how we talked about it for a while before she got her stuff together and left. The light was dim in the room that night and the dogs were curled at the foot of the bed, calm and snoozing, and I could hear the soft hum of traffic on the avenue outside my open window, a cool June night. It feels the same tonight and the dogs are calm, but the room feels amazingly empty to me, like a desert I have to cross in order to get to morning.

Then I think of something another friend, a gifted poet, said to me a few days before in one of our occasional long telephone chats. She’s going through a rough patch, a broken-off affair and a young former student of hers, a really gifted poet, is terminal with cancer and due to die within a month, someone who is like a member of her family to her. I just want to be sad, she said, not crazy. Then she said it again. I just want to be sad, not crazy. It’s an odd phrase really—it seems like so little to hope for—but there is a sort of accuracy to it that I like, and I find myself turning to it often as I wrestle for sleep. 

It would be nice to be able to say that night while I fought in and out of sleep that I came back from my struggles with something to show, but it was just a long, restless night. No revelation or cathedral rising in the mist. Just a restless night.

When I was quite young—I had turned 12, spring of my 6th-grade year—my poor, mad father, still hale and strong then, decided that it was time for me to put away the boy’s adventure books I had been reading and sink my teeth into something real, so he gave me Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus and The Stranger. My dad was a great guy, but he had a very tragic sense of life, a 1950s downtown existentialist who was hard-pressed, when death finally faced him, to find anything to believe in. Odd stuff to share with a boy whose main dream in life was to play shortstop for the New York Mets, but of course I desperately wanted to please my father in any way that I could, and I was a sharp kid and assiduous reader, so I made my way through the books and came away with the main idea, which is that life is meaningless and we must bear it. 

In the way that a naïve young reader would, I thought for a long time that the authority of Camus’s last line—“one must imagine Sisyphus happy”—lay in the story itself, that it was a sort of analysis of the meaning of the myth, and that Sisyphus was, in some way, happy. I know now that this is not the case. He was being tortured. In fact, he was being tortured for all of eternity, for every moment of every day and night, without any surcease or comfort. Camus’s point, of course, is that while Sisyphus faced a life of unending toil and torture, we must imagine him happy because the alternative is so terribly dark.

And we have these moments—when I woke the next dawn new robins were singing in the apple boughs, and I made some blueberry muffins for a friend who would visit later and spend a while. The possibility of connection—of some sort of human contact—is so frail and imperfect that one cannot rely on it, and yet it is possible, and it is hard to know what else there is beside it. 

I wish I had stopped that woman as she fled and asked her if she was doing 

No, Tell Me How You Really Feel, Lol


Someone recently asked me this question: What does it feel like to be a poet? I found the question interesting, in a savage sort of way, and I wrote what follows in response, and then I wrote the poem that appears at the end of the essay. 

The great novelist David Foster Wallace, who killed himself unexpectedly a few years ago, has this commencement speech that has been anthologized. In it, he starts with this story: two young fish are swimming along, and they pass by an older fish, who says "how's the water?" The younger fish are slightly puzzled, but then one of them says, "It's fine." They pass on, and then after a couple of minutes one of the younger fish turns to the other and says, "What's water?"

I feel a bit like that, answering this question, since writing poetry is so deeply embedded in my sense of self that it is very hard to untangle it--when I read this question, it almost seems like you have asked me to answer "who are you?"

I will get personal in a moment, but I want to start with a bit of framing. So what if the question was "What does it feel like to be a stone mason," or "What does it feel like to be a concert pianist?"

The stone mason might say that he wakes at five, gets his gear together, makes sure that the stones he has ordered are on their way and that his helper is all set, puts on his thick gloves and makes sure than his stone hammer is close by, and then works really hard for the next eight hours. He might also mention that he studied stone masonry, and knows a variety of techniques for building a wall or stone terrace that he has inherited from the past, and also that he is applying this knowledge to the current job in a very specific and thoughtful way.

The concert pianist might say that she gets up early and sits down at her instrument to practice scales for a while, to limber up her fingers and arms and legs and feet, and that she then runs through the pieces she plans to play again and again, for hours, working sometimes for a long time over a particularly difficult passage--let's say she is playing Rachmaninoff in a few days--until she gets the sound and intonation she is looking for.

So part of what it feels like is that it is just really hard work. Fucking hard work. It's a job, not a hobby. It does not pay, and almost no one reads poetry anymore, at least not seriously. Right now, writing this answer, I am doing the equivalent of playing scales and limbering up, since I have a piece I know I want to work on, but I am not quite ready to get into it. I am still waiting for all the stones to arrive, and I have not quite yet figured out the design, but I will soon. And then I will work for several hours, and when I am done, I will have 12 lines, or 50--not sure yet--and I will have finished the job.

Poetry is a funny art, because anyone can say they are a poet. I have brushes and watercolors, and I used to live in a house with a piano. But no one would ever think I was a painter--if I said I was a painter just because I slap paint on paper as a form of recreational therapy, no one would take me seriously, or if they did, they just would be being kind. When I lived with that piano, I used to bang on the keys sometimes, try to pick out a song. Was I a musician? No. I never have studied drawing, and I never learned how to read music, let alone actually play an instrument.

But one thing that has happened in our contemporary American poetry scene is that anyone can style themselves a poet, because if you can type, and write a little, and then break up what you write into lines, you have written a sort of poetry. This is partly because we don't know what counts for value in poetry anymore--there is really no way of seeing what will last, in a way. And there are so many MFA programs and little magazines and prize contests that we essentially have an industry now, of sorts. Are all these people poets? Maybe--I don't want to be the one to say no. But is everyone with a piano in her house a pianist? Maybe not.

For me what it feels like to be a poet has two dimensions. The first is technical. I have been writing poetry with serious intent for about 40 years--I started with a poet-teacher when I was a junior in high school in 1974, who turned me on to people like Berryman and Merwin and Wright. Since then, I have worked hard to master the craft, with some of the best teachers of the modern era, including Robert Fitzgerald, who taught me form, and Seamus Heaney, who taught me to pay attention to syntax and the smallest word, and George Starbuck, who created space for me to find my own voice. For me, sadly in a way, real life took over for about 20 years, 1995-2005, when I worked as an organizational leader and burned everything I had ever written. But through all of that time, I have seen poetry as a technical craft--a very difficult one. 

A technical craft requires two things: attention to form and attention to the tradition within which one works. So part of what it feels like to be a poet is that one is continually studying poetry, the art and form of it. For the past year I have been working to really master the iambic line--the fundamental line of poetry in English, usually with four stressed syllables, which goes back to the Old English line (I learned Old English from William Alfred, though I was a terrible student at that time, preoccupied with other things. One cool thing about Bill Alfred was that he had taken a vow of celibacy, and Faye Dunaway was one of his closest pals.).The greatest poets—let’s say Shakespeare, but most others as well--could write in iambics without thinking too much about it. Getting one's skill to the point where you can use that fundamental line in ways that are original and versatile is just hard work, but I am getting there.

That's the form part. But one must also have read, and been informed by, everything good that has been written. That's a lot. I don't read much contemporary poetry--mostly just the work of friends, and I have quite a few friends or acquaintances, contemporaries who were in classes with me, whose work shows up in the Norton Anthology, not name-dropping, just saying that it interests me to see what they do that has enabled them to get into the canon, at least temporarily. And it’s not always clear to me. Starbuck and Delmore Schwartz were both dropped out of the most recent Norton, how fucked up is that, lol.

I had an acquaintance who writes poetry--a skillful but mediocre imitation of Robert Frost--who mentioned once that he was so glad he never had to read Milton's "Paradise Lost" again. I just nodded--I mean, I didn't care what he thought. But if you have not read Milton regularly--and I don't care that much for him, really, though the language and artistry is magnificent--you just don't know what it feels like to be a poet, since everything in our tradition is in some ways covered and shaped by him. It's like saying you don't read Dickinson or Whitman, in the American line—it’s fine not to like them, but you have to have read them closely to know what it feels like to be a poet. We write within a tradition, and we either know it, and try to find our place within it, or we basically are controlled by it and incapable of being original or of writing anything that will last.

So that's form and tradition--what it feels like to be a poet is partly being really serious about studying the art. Now let me talk personally for a moment.

Being a poet, for me at least, means having the driving ambition to make works of art that will last, that will stand up to the test of time. The poet and critic Randall Jarrell wrote in a review, maybe of Frost's Collected Works, that a poet is someone who stands out in rainstorms all their life, and if they are struck by lightning a few times, they are a good poet. If they are struck by lightning say twelve or twenty times, then they are a great poet. 

It is just a metaphor, but I have taken it to heart. Part of what it feels like to be a poet is to stand out in rainstorms, waiting to be struck by lightning. And this is really hard work, for me at least, since the storms are storms of the heart, and while part of poetry is pure observation, and part is form and technique, the part that might make one great is the ability to endure the lightning storms of the heart that enable one to make something lasting and meaningful. Yeats' great poem "The Circus Animal's Desertion" says that poetry starts by climbing down the ladder to "the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart," and I think he is right about this, in the same way that when Frank Bidart writes, in an elegy for his mother: "If it resists me, I know it's real. / I feel too much. I can't stand what I feel." Ultimately poetry, great poetry, comes from an intensity of feeling that can be hard to bear--but without it, all you have is mush. 

Form, tradition, and the lightning storm--this is the world I experience in what it feels like to be a poet, but there is one other thing, too, which is vital I think, and that is the friendship of other poets and writers. A few weeks ago, I worked incredibly hard on a piece, standing in the lightning storm, using all the form and tradition I have available to me right now, shedding a couple pints of blood on the page. When I was done I sent it to two of my trusted readers, and one of them, the male poet, a really brilliant guy who speaks fluent Urdu and has done the best translations I have seen of Ghalib's ghazals, nailed it in his response: he told me that the first half it was seeming like a kind of derivative Raymond Carver tale of existential loneliness, but about the middle it took a turn that seemed unique to him, like something new and fresh in the language. 

So I learned from him how I could make the piece better, but much more important, that the wounds I had endured while writing it might have been worth it. I sent it to a gal friend, too, and she reminded me that the last song we have written always seems like the best song ever written, a gentle way of saying that it still needed more work, but that she had really read the damned thing. When I summon the energy and time, I will re-write it--but without those friends, I am not sure I could even bear to look at the piece again, just toss it on that old bonfire.

Friends matter, within the hard context of the art--they tell you when your craft is off, they remind you of the pieces of tradition you may be imitating too much, or missing, they tell you what you should be reading, and they give you the strength to continue on. So I will end with two examples of this.

I just finished a suite of poems--they are mainly in blank verse, and some have off-rhymes at the end, a lot of formal experiment, and they also are heartfelt. One friend read them and immediately directed me to a recent New Yorker story by Murakami, which had the same theme--Scheherazade--but of course was so much better, and we traded some comments about the courage it takes to try to climb Parnassus--and it was like the way someone hands you a bottle of water while you are running a marathon.

Then another friend, someone who did this amazing vocal reading of a long poem of mine and then illustrated it, sent a very encouraging comment on the same set of poems—I had styled them in the title as “Six Dawn Poems, After Frank O’Hara’s ‘In Memory of My Feelings’”—and she said that O’Hara, one of the great mid-20th century poets, and one of my faves--would have probably liked them. Maybe she is right, and maybe not, but I respect the hell out of her intellect and artistry, so that made me think, well yeah, keep going, don't give up yet.

And that is part of what it feels like to be a poet--that it would be so easy in a way to just give up, but that giving up would also be a sort of death of the soul, like destroying the meaning of one's identity. My friend, the guy who translates Ghalib, said to me once that we will not know for at least 100 years after we are dead whether we were any good or not. This is a hard truth of what it feels like to be a poet. Many great poets were never acknowledged or even published in their life-time--Blake, Dickinson. Much great poetry was not seen as such when it first appeared. 

Most contemporary poets are worried about publication—it’s part of being in the industry--but that never has worried me much. What does trouble me--what seems the hardest thing about what it feels like to be a poet--is that it is never possible to stop thinking that one just isn't good enough, that one should give up the art and craft, because it does take pints of blood and makes me crazy in a way. But I do think poetry matters, and for better or worse, I am a poet. So I have to keep on the job--in fact, the load of stones just arrived, and I have a concert tonight. Better get to work.

……

And at the end of the period of hours in which I wrote this essay, I wrote the following poem, which is not for or about anyone but the muse, that element of oneself that Stevens called “the interior paramour”—not a person, the muse is never real, only ever a projection, but then of course you know that if you have read this far. The cold heart, medical condition trope at the end is stolen from Milosz’s last poem, “Orpheus and Eurydice.” And of course you will catch the reference to Whitman at the start, and Cal is Robert Lowell and John is John Berryman, and that riff is cribbed from Lowell’s very late poem to Berryman. And maybe you can see how, for me, even to think of being a poet means that one must have read these folks closely, among so many others, in the same way that Milton read everything that had been written in the Western tradition, and then Blake read all of that and Milton, too, and then Ginsburg read Blake and the Upanishads, and on and on. Parnassus is a slippery slope, littered with bodies—Clare, Smart and Cowper, Coleridge and Dowson, Kees, Schwartz and that sweet man George Starbuck (that’s cribbed from Roethke, dear.) But one must attempt the climb. 

Late Poem, For the Muse

A naked bulb still shines, the last in the chandelier, 
And lilac petals scatter like blue snow-flakes on the door-step, 
Left from last year’s harvest of sweetness, the wind that raged
And the open book, pages you can’t read anymore
Though they still have your name in them.

Waiting for the iced fire—if you could have waited—
That’s Lowell, hun, and I like you in that red dress,
Poor John’s wave on the arched bridge 
Over the Mississippi, Cal’s insight—humor—
And then this desk I can’t set up—all I have

Is my bare hands, a pile of awkward stones
And the stone house to build again…
But we’re playing out tonight, baby, we’re on the road
And you glimmer in the mirror like the sweetest
Taste there can be of the meaninglessness

The empty sky bestows, so how can I be hungry?
They did it to you, she says, and I still have the tape
But can’t tell if it’s a recording or that adhesive
Keeping my wrists shut, but I like it
The way we like the thing that destroys us and keeps us sane. 

Let’s get out baby, the sun is shining and it’s spring—
Let’s skip this town, take a drive
Where no one will find us, not even our souls,
Let’s make daylight shake open and kiss the dark night blue
Until it is as sweet as the river we swim in, the black water…

That’s nice babe, she says, but I have to go, girl
Climbing a mountain, that’s my name and you can’t follow,
Our twinned hearts are cold—it’s like a medical condition—
And you can keep the lilacs—they look cute on you—
And maybe I’ll drop by again tomorrow, why not?





Letter from Costa Rica


This essay was written during a brief stint teaching writing to Landmark students during a study abroad trip to Costa Rica earlier in January.

I wake at dawn most mornings in Monteverde. It seems foolish not to, with so much strange and unfamiliar beauty surrounding one, and the promise of strong fresh coffee waiting on a table near the bed. Today is the last dawn I will wake here—we leave for the Caribbean coast in a couple of hours. As always, the sky is grey with low misty clouds, and the air is cool and mild, wind gusting and settling again in the trees, shaking the branches.

I’ve always been fascinated by the notion, which I find best expressed in one of Borges’ short pieces, that it is not infrequent in life that one does something for the last time, often not aware of it until later, if ever. Today I know that this is the last time I will wake at dawn in Monteverde—that even were I to return to this place, it would be a different place, a different trip, and I would be different, too. 

Photo caption: Sunset in Monteverde

In this piece of Borges that I am remembering, he describes running into an acquaintance of his at sunset on an avenue in Buenos Aires, and talking for a while, then parting with the promise that they would see one another soon again. He watches her walk away in the late light, waving to her, not knowing, he says, that the broad avenue she crossed was actually the River Styx, since she would die soon after and he would never see her again.

Nothing so melancholy as that today, of course—we’re all anxious to get to the beach, and I am sure our 8-hour bus-ride will be filled with laughter and occasional complaints, filled with life. Still, it is interesting to come to the end of one’s time in an unfamiliar and compelling place.

Yesterday I walked with some students along a tree-top path through a reserve in Monteverde, eight bridges crossing rivers as we walked, putting us into the jungle canopy at times. In a way, we were walking through the jungle, surrounded by dense flora and fauna, but the path was broad and well-paved, and if one looked to either side, into the jungle itself, one could see that none of us had any idea of what it would actually be like, to try to make passage through the thick vines and undergrowth and uneven terrain. 

I walked ahead for a few minutes, thinking in silence, and then came around a turn in the path to one of the bridges and found a large group of tourists, maybe thirty of them, all looking up through binoculars and cameras at something high in the trees. It was a comical sight, in a way—slightly surreal to see so many people after walking in solitude for quite a while, and to see them all so frozen and rapt in the same pose. It was a spider monkey. One could see him sitting there, obscured partly by leaves, his long, thick black tail hanging down. I looked for a while, then made my way through the crowd to the other side and continued on.

As I walked, I thought of Walker Percy’s great essay, “The Loss of the Creature,” written in the 1960s I think, in which he discusses our loss of direct contact with nature in the modern age. He starts with a trope about tourists at the Grand Canyon, all of them coming up to the observation point with their cameras to snap a few shots and then move on, and contrasts their experience with what it must have been to first come on the canyon as a traveler in that wilderness, the unutterable awe and wonder it must have been to first see that grand and terrifying sight.

It is like that, always, here. We are surrounded by jungle and wildlife, and it is extraordinarily beautiful, but our encounter with this natural beauty is mediated—by pathways and signs, guides and guidebooks, our ubiquitous cameras and cell-phones. It is possible to be critical of this—the tourism part of “eco-tourism” is, in the end, mere tourism, not the direct encounter with nature that one may wish. Yet Monteverde, and Costa Rica’s economic development program as a whole, is a fine and noble experiment, and certainly one sees no better alternative if we are to preserve nature and live in a sustainable world. Vermont has a great deal to learn from this place. And yet…

When I was a boy, maybe 14 or 15, I used to hike with a friend into some wilderness near my summer home in Green River. It was called Deer Park, and it consisted of a few thousand acres of undeveloped land, accessible by an old wagon road that was impassable to cars. There had been a settlement there in the 1800s, abandoned like so many small and fruitless farming communities in the migration west and then the Great Depression. One could still find cellar holes and abandoned cisterns, but the forest had quite taken over again, and after an hour’s hike one could feel far distant from any habitation.

I thought of this place the other day, chatting with a student about snowmobiling—I had hiked up there again a few years ago to find the landscape utterly transformed by trails in the VAST system, a network of grassy highways through the woods. But in the time I am thinking of, one could feel quite alone in the forest there.

We would camp by a beaver pond and make a fire, eat the sandwiches we had brought and read to each other from H.P. Lovecraft—it was a kind of fad with us—as darkness came on, trying to spook each other, and then sleep in the open under the stars. One night, not long after we had turned in and the fire was burning down, we heard a long, unearthly call, almost a howl, full-throated and then quavering until it died away. We did not know what it was, and we were terrified, as if we had managed to summon one of Lovecraft’s age-old monsters from beneath the earth. We waited in fear a long time, but the sound did not come again, and finally we slept.

Later, of course, I learned that we had heard a loon. Loons still nested then in that part of Halifax, in southern Vermont—it is forty years ago now. And I think about that night, that experience, as I prepare to leave this fine and noble place, and wonder what world my daughters will inherit, and if they ever will have the chance to encounter nature in such an unmediated way, as the spaces still left to us to do so become fewer and fewer. 
 



Education, Training, and Oppression: 
The Fate of Learning in the Digital Age


NB: This is the first of two pieces on education and contemporary American society. It focuses on the structure of public education and the impact of this structure on children who have challenges complying with it. The second piece will examine the impact of the digital revolution on teaching and learning.

When I present to educators on the topic of learning differences, I emphasize how vital it is to engage multiple perspectives or frames of reference in order to gain a rich rather than one-dimensional understanding. I picked up this habit during the years I worked as a journalist in my twenties—that idea that you need to hear a story from all sides, and that the true story only begins to emerge after you have done this.

I tend to focus on ADHD, since it is our current epidemic—11 percent of school-age kids have been diagnosed with it at some point. I like to lay out several different approaches. History provides one guide: what we know call ADHD was first labeled a “failure of moral development.” 

Social and educational policy is interesting: the social legislation related to ADD in the area of Medicare, Supplemental Security Income, and Special Education in public schools all changed around 1990 to expand coverage to ADHD. Between 1990 and 1993, the number of people diagnosed with ADHD in the US expanded from about 900,000 to 2.1 million. The disorder had been incentivized.

The clinical or psychiatric perspective holds that there is a chemical imbalance in the brain—a problem with transmission and re-uptake of dopamine, a neurotransmitter related to a broad range of functions and feelings, like satisfaction, motivation, and focus. This imbalance reduces the ability to stay focused and motivated, and to inhibit response to novelty and stimulus. Stimulant medications substitute for this missing chemistry, and function for people with ADHD the way eye-glasses function for people who are near-sighted.

Researchers in cognitive psychology who are interested in creativity provide another perspective. ADHD and creativity have been rarely studied, but the core deficit in ADHD—a failure to inhibit distraction—has been studied in relation to creative and divergent thinking. It turns out that the worse you are at inhibiting distraction, the better you are at tests of creative and divergent thinking. The research on this score is conclusive.

I also offer them a Marxist perspective—and I always make the joke that English departments are the last bastions of Marxism in the US, for whatever reason, and that I am an English teacher. But I am not really a Marxist, just a former journalist who still teaches that noble craft, but this thought experiment is worth considering:
The post-industrial American capitalist society in which we all live, which is ruled economically by a very small number of individuals who control most of the wealth, depends on compliant workers who are able to sit or stand still for long hours in narrow spaces performing routine and mundane tasks that are so dull as to numb the mind.
Because of this, we have engineered our educational system in the public schools to assure compliance and the ability to sit still for a long time while experiencing and performing mundane tasks. We test the ability to comply with these mundane tasks, and those children who do not comply—who have trouble sitting still, who don’t do well on the tests—are drugged into compliance with our new social order.

It is just a thought experiment, I say. I don’t stand behind it. I’m just a journalist. To be honest, I don’t have the whole story yet. No one does. But it is the case that ADHD, which in clinical population studies shows up at about 3-5 percent of those tested, when using rigorous and traditional criteria, the same used in the seminal MTA study we cite to justify all of our approaches to ADHD, now is assigned as a medical diagnosis to 11 percent of our kids. 
Since ADHD is diagnosed in three boys for every girl, that means that about 15 percent of males between ages 6 and 17 have been diagnosed with ADHD, and maybe more. In some states the number is almost 25 percent. About two-thirds of these kids are given medications that have the side effects of causing anxiety, insomnia, loss of appetite, sometimes depression, and a strong correlation with loss of growth height. Medicated kids wind up shorter. Really? Really.

Steven Hinshaw, who operates inside the ADHD clinical frame of reference, has demonstrated a strong correlation between the adoption of No Child Left Behind laws regarding school regulations and high-stakes testing, and the incidence of ADHD diagnosis. The surge in incidence of ADHD from 7 percent in 2003 to 11 percent in 2013 comes from CDC figures. I’m not making this up.

The reality is that some people are more distractible, more prone to go with whatever is before them than to stay focused on a goal. Losing track of time, losing one’s keys or wallet, being bored with a mundane task and putting it off, failing to turn off the engine in time to get a good sleep, or to turn it back on in time to wake—these all are real challenges. 
The genetic research suggests that about 30 percent of us have genetic markers connected to some degree of difficulty with these kinds of capabilities, and the factor increases with the environment of one’s upbringing—not just parenting, but also poverty and disadvantage.
But is having trouble in school really a medical disease? 

Right now, in the United States, it is, and we treat it as such—mainly with medications that, when we pull them out of the benign gloss of the psychiatric world-view, are actually controlled substances that in another context are called speed or amphetamines. I don’t have any difficulty in seeing the merit of allowing adults to use any substance that will help them do their work or live their life, or endure their life. I am libertarian when it comes to substances. 
We should legalize all drugs, given that the most dangerous drug of all—alcohol—is legal. It is the only drug that causes complete black-outs and it is the cause of far more deaths each year than any other drug. And it is promoted as a college way of life and a strong associate of athletic activity. This Bud’s for you. Right.

So I have no difficulty with the idea that any adult might use stimulant medication—and of course there should be some regulation of any medication, as with alcohol and tobacco, and now weed in some states, even with adults.

But it is difficult not to think that we are drugging our children into compliance rather than providing them with the educational system that would allow them to flourish and be themselves.

The great psychiatrist and anti-psychiatry prophet, Thomas Szasz, said that the two most vulnerable things in this world are these: children, and liberty.
 
Szasz was flawed in some ways. I do not think he saw the ways in which the right medications administered in the right ways could save lives and mend souls. I believe in this dimension of psychiatry, and am grateful for it—some of the people to whom I am most close are well because of it.

But a world in which nearly one out of five boys is diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder because he can’t sit still or learn long division, and then medicated, is a very sick world. And it is our world now. 


Dear Father

Dear Father,
Since I finished the book that June, more than a year ago now, I have not written any new poem—just some prose and some lines and scratches that at best seem self-indulgent to me. My voice seems flawed in some fashion, though the prose is fine. You did teach me how to write.

This great project I’m embarked on feels sometimes like a requiem to me, I’m not sure why. Having the students take the lead in it feels good to me. I guess I got that from you, that feeling of never being quite so interested or engaged as when talking to some very smart younger person. They are beautiful in any case, and it nourishes me to think that perhaps we may make something meaningful together.

I’m not sure why it is always 3:00 AM when I talk to you. It used to be in terror—the blank night—but I’m calmer now, or my heart has numbed as if anesthetized, I’m not sure which. You’d like my new dog. He’s lying where I sleep as I write this, a funny little fellow, quick and smart and very sweet, with a black ace of spades on the middle of his back, buried in his thin white fur—you have to rub his back to see it, and he likes it.

I like the project, the idea of actually, finally, after three decades, taking on the mantle of poet again, sad as that may sound to you—it does to me at least. “Flawed words and stubborn sounds”—that’s Wallace Stevens. But I am giving it a try, Friday the 13th and Valentines Day. I like the resonance of it, and at the least it feels like an unwritten section of the Wizard of Oz, since I have all the characters, and all we need is courage, a heart, and a brain.

I can’t tell if I am the Wizard, or Dorothy. Both of us wants to get back home. Maybe I am both.

I lied about going to your grave the other day. I was out in Green River so long I didn’t think anyone could understand my absence unless I lied about it—how strange is that. So I said I had gone to your grave, but really I was just reading my work in the cold empty house for a couple of hours, with the dogs prowling around. I can’t stand to visit your grave—that tiny little stone, that small box of ashes. The irony of the graveyard, the picnics we used to have there when I was a boy. I guess I hope I will be scattered there too someday. Why not.
I don’t know about the poetry, or even the prose for that matter. It’s funny that you were so indifferent to poetry, well-read and brilliant as you were. You were always so kind to my work even though I knew it was never a medium you cared for. The one thing you always suggested is that I not revise so much, try to please others by perfecting the line in some fashion. Like what you told the Marlboro students that last time you spoke to them: “I know you. You have good hearts. Follow your hearts, and all will be well.”

I’m like that with the younger folks I am working with—the cowardly lion, the tin man, the scarecrow. There really is no legacy one leaves, is there—nothing meaningful—beyond the way one has touched other people. A bunch of words in a book—what would it matter of they were bound and sold instead of living free in the scattered pages of this basement I inhabit with the dogs? But they have good hearts, and they are brave, and smart, and kind, and savvy enough to pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. Maybe I am Dorothy, but when I click my heels I don’t wake up. I’m still in Kansas, or Oz.

So much time has passed, and I have not really talked to you like this before, have I? We never really talked—strange, that. You were a secret. Nijinsky said “I speak in rhymes because I am a rhyme myself”—I saw that quote in one of Bidart’s poems. I am as secret as you ever were, maybe even worse, and sometimes it feels to me as if the only way I will ever understand myself is by finally understanding you, which won’t happen of course. There are so many things I wish I could finally ask you now.

The old poems seem so ragged to me now—I don’t know why I can’t make them better, but it seems beyond me. And to write something new in lines, to write something true, and beautiful, seems beyond me. Sometimes I think of joining an order, or one of those monasteries where one does not speak. I’m serious—don’t laugh. And I can hear you saying, well if you think that is what you need to do right now, of course I will support you…ho ho…you were kind of a dope in that way, always trusting the best instincts of your broken children. No, that’s not fair. You were kind of a saint in that way, always letting us be fully ourselves, the best gift you had to give, I guess.

It is strange though, that when I want to write a poem tonight all I can think to do is finally write a letter to you now that you have been dead for seven years. I could write a sonnet in ten minutes—I’ve gotten really good that way. My rhymes are good and I finally am getting the iambic line down. Last June I wrote nothing but sonnets—it was a funny way to spend the free time I had then. But I could not start a new book, apart from the prose things, which are good in their own way—I think you would like them—but they just are prose. And the sonnets, just five-finger exercises really, although a couple of them are almost good. And I have no new book in me that I can find, just postscripts to the book I made.

I called it “Waiting for the Light”—cliched title, right? Originally it was waiting for the light to change—like standing on a street in the rain. Maybe I’ll go back to that. When I finished it, it felt like my life’s project, but now reading it—I don’t know. This project, this reading I will finally do in Brattleboro, feels like something necessary, to let the book go. But again, I don’t really know. I’m just walked in the woods in the dark. At least I have not burned the book yet. I sometimes miss all the poems I burned—you were still alive when I did it, but only barely alive, those last years you lay in bed staring at the ceiling.

I wonder why, when you gave so much to so many people, when so many people felt loved by you, felt close to you, felt connected to you, that you could never open your heart. You were as sealed as a letter to be opened after one’s death, but now that I open it I see the pages are blank. And even so, I am writing this letter back to you, to tell you that I love you, and that I’m doing fine. The weather here has been bad lately, and I have two dogs now—they are each good dogs, you’d like them a lot. It can feel lonely of course, but that’s our fate, and if I learned only one thing from you, it is that one must bear one’s fate and try to do the best one can, so that’s what I am doing.

Sometimes I imagine a world in which I might now you, where we might sit down and talk, finally. It would be spring and we would be at the mill in sunlight, the forsythia in bloom by the fence line. The sky would be open, not shuttered, and the talk would be easy—it would be so lovely and so strange, but we would tell each other everything in our hearts, and the sun would be shining like gold around us, the dogs at our feet drowsing easily in the new warmth. My silence, this silence I have been locked in for so long, would be its own sort of poem, and at some point I would read it to you, just casually, amidst our chat about weather and the sports, and you would say to me, really that’s quite good.

Rest easy in your grave, my love, my father. All these words, these poems, were for you in the end.
Mac




True Story with Metaphor

This is a true story. I came home late afternoon Friday after a brutal week—mid-term grades, 60 papers to read and answer, students in crisis—wanting nothing more than a nap and a bowl of pasta before bed. My small new dog, Sammy, part cattle dog and part blue-tick hound, was clamoring for a run but I had no energy for it. Then my daughter came home with a friend, and they were going to take a run so I suggested they take the dogs with them. They did.

I have two dogs. Seamus is big, old, with the thickest fur—a northern dog. Sammy is not yet two, and he is still learning how to be a good dog, though I know he will get there. Running with the two of them is a challenge, since Seamus, who can go off leash in the woods, lags behind, while Sammy runs ahead and would run to Burlington, I think, if we let him off the leash. When the girls came back from their run it was getting dark, and Seamus was not with them. They had forgotten to look behind to make sure he was keeping up. 

I sent them back out to walk the loop in the woods where they had run, and then my wife and I headed out as well, splitting up on two different paths where they forked. I felt a sense of crisis. Seamus is a dog with very deep emotional intelligence, but he is not very smart, even for a dog—the kind of dog who is always knocking things over and then apologizing—and we never have let him roam on his own for fear he would be lost. 

He also is my boon companion, who stayed with me the years my father was dying, kept me safe when he and I lived alone for a while because I had gone crazy, and helped to nurture me back to a sort of health. I got the second dog because I know, in a very deep way, that I will outlive Seamus, and when he is gone I will need a second dog with whom to mourn his passing, since in my time with Seamus I have become part dog myself. 

So walking in the woods without a flashlight, calling out his name and whistling, I felt a mad sort of anxiety. For a while I could hear my daughter calling in the distance in one direction, and my wife calling in the distance in another direction, but after a time—it was hard to know how long because in the dimness I had no sense of time—all I could hear was silence and then an occasional rustling when a breeze stirred up.

I used to be terrified of the dark—I could never sleep without a light unless I had someone lying next to me. Living with Seamus cured me of this, and so it was interesting to find myself in the increasing darkness, on a poorly marked path, without any sense of fear—just this anxiety that Seamus was lost and anxious himself, and that I needed to find him soon, before darkness fell entirely. 

There is a point along the loop I was walking where it turns back around the other side of a long stretch of wetlands with a small stream running through it, and this part of the path runs below a series of houses that one can see up the slope, about a hundred yards away. Coming back this way, it is easier to see where dwellings are, but much harder to see the path. I realized that at this point it might be best to get to the road—that we probably had exhausted the woods—but in the darkness I missed the first turn up to the road and had to soldier on through terrain that I rarely walk and that seemed uncertain to me.

The path I was on traces the lines of the suburban development where we live, and in daylight I can look up through the densely wooded slope and recognize the houses of my neighbors, but as it became completely dark itself for the distant lights of the houses, filtered through the pine trees, I lost any sense of how far I had gone. It seemed that I had been walking a very long time. 

I had given up calling for Seamus. My whole effort, which felt desperate to me by now in a way that was partly ironic and self-reflective (I was still enough within myself to observe what I was doing), and partly real and intense (I felt a sort of rising panic), was directed toward finding the lights of my own home, second from the last along this path, where I might locate my way back up and we could all re-group and make new plans for finding Seamus. 

At a certain point it became clear that I had passed my house—I had somehow missed it. There still were houses up the hillside, but their lights were unfamiliar to me. I had lost the path, too. It seemed to me I had veered too far to the left—I was on the edge of the swamp, and with a wrong step I found my left leg knee-deep in the muck, and I jerked away and fell, banging my right arm against a small boulder. 

I stopped, took hold of myself. It was clear that the path was to my right, so I veered back that way and found myself in a dense thicket of small pines, the branches and needles whipping softly at my face. There still were lights of houses far to my right, and I felt certain I was in a new area—a different development, one I had not been in before. I started to turn back, but with that direction seemed even darker to me, and I reasoned that by fighting my way forward, I finally would find a path up through the woods and that there would be a road there, and I could find my way home.

I put my arms up before my face in something like the position a boxer uses to ward off blows, elbows cocked, forearms guarded my face, and trudged forward, making each step deliberate. It was absolutely dark by now. My progress felt very slow, and I was worried that I would reach a point where the houses would end and I would be entirely in the woods, with no idea of how to find my way back.

Then, far-off, I heard my daughter call my name, and then my wife. They were ahead of me, and to the right. They kept calling, and I shouted back, “I’m here!” “I’m here!” I realized that if I turned to the right and marched steadily up the slope, I might find myself in an open field. I did this. It took a while. When I emerged, I could see two flashlights in the distance, on a road, and I realized that I was in the field that separates our next-door neighbor from our own house. I was very close to home.

I walked down the field to the road, where I met up with Lynne and Michaela, and her friend, and they were all laughing. Seamus had returned home, evidently quite soon after we had all gone looking for him. My wife had hooked up with the girls and when they got back to the house—about 45 minutes before—Seamus was there, patiently waiting by the front door to be let in. We all walked back to the house in the darkness lit by three flashlights, laughing and joking about what a fool I had been.

I was terrified, I said. I thought I was in an entirely different neighborhood. I felt like if I kept walking I might find myself in Narnia.

Next time, let’s lose Sammy, my daughter said. The dog barks and nips at her, and it irritates her. 

When we came in, Seamus was waiting for me, tailing wagging, his face looking up in what always seems a smile to me, though who knows what dogs think. 



Summer’s End

When Gerry called it was a Monday afternoon, late summer, and my mother took the phone. He was in great spirits, and he wanted to thank her, and all of us, for the wonderful weekend he had had in Green River, those warm summer days at the end of August. Swimming in the cool green pond again, after so many years, dozing in the sun after a swim, playing touch football on the lawn--and the food was great, the crisp grilled chicken and the potato salad, just as ever, so salt and sweet. 

The croquet match—he had only watched it, but he loved how Russ and Liz played together as a team against Clayton and Isabelle, and the way that the dusk settled on the lawn as the food was served. Good food—the steak and chicken were great, and the potato salad…it had just been so wonderful to be back there again after several years away. Everyone was still alive. 

It was just great to be back with you all, he said. To be with the kids especially. It was just a great weekend, and I hope you can get back down to the city someday, too—you can always stay here. Then he started to sound tired. It was just a lovely weekend, he said. A great weekend.

Gerry was my godfather. I called him Uncle Gerry—it was a remnant of my childhood days when I had several uncles, old frat brothers of my father’s: Uncle Bobby, Uncle Tommy, and Uncle Gerry. One of the conditions under which my parents got married—a working-class Italian Catholic gal marrying a seventh-generation WASP guy—is that I would be baptized in the Catholic church. I was—I get to skip purgatory and go straight to hell. 

They got married in the Catholic Church, too, up in Westfield, New York, an event to which one of my mother’s uncles, on the Sicilian side, had to be furloughed from prison to attend. His nickname was Westfield Jimmy and he helped to run the rackets in that part of New York and Pennsylvania, on Lake Erie. 

I’m sure it must have been an interesting wedding, with my father’s side of the family—early American settlers from the landed gentry of England—and my mother’s side of the family, all first generation Americans from the great wave of immigration that took place at the turn of the last century. 

I am not sure what all of this meant in my life, except that Gerry was a poor moral guide for me, and also a wonderful godfather in many other ways. That he wrote all of us out of his will in the end had more to do with the fact that he was a hopeless drunk deceived by other, distant family, who took him in during his last days, than it does with the love he provided when he still was occasionally sober, or not too drunk.

And it was not a great weekend. It was a dream. It was one of the strange, odd events that happened in my family during the period when my father was dying—Gerry had not been to Green River for years. A confirmed bachelor, back when we still used that phrase, he took up in later years with a slightly younger woman who taught dance and yoga, and was perfectly pleasant and, I think, good to him, except that when they visited and got drunk together they would fight in ways that were really quite ugly to see, and finally my parents stopped inviting him north. My father’s lung cancer made this easier, in a way—he wouldn’t see anyone, toward the end. When Gerry called to thank us all, he had not been to Vermont for almost a decade.

Why does one write these things down? In Robert Lowell’s poem, “Epilogue,” the last poem in his last book, he wrote: “We are but poor passing facts, / Warned by that to give / Each figure in the photograph / His living name.” It is the sort of line one memorizes without intending to. 

I don’t know what dream Gerry had, that night before he called my mother to thank her, but I like to think it was as real as anything else might be. It always makes me sad when I think of it—how happy Gerry was that day, remembering in his drunken way the brilliant and light-filled dream he had had of being with us all again.

Isn’t this strange to remember? Poor Gerry. He was a lost child, sent to boarding school at Hackley when he was just a boy—seven years old. His father had had quite a great deal of money, and then several wives who drained his fortune. I remember one time when I was ten I was allowed to stay home from school so Gerry would drive his father’s boat with my mother and me around Manhattan Island, the last time before the boat was sold in some divorce settlement. That was a fun time, coming around the lower end of Manhattan to see the Statue of Liberty in the distance and feel the salt water on my face as we bounced through the waves.

And it was always fun with Gerry. One time my folks left my brother and me with him for a few days on a ski vacation, and it was good. We were young. The first day, driving out to Hogback Mountain on Route 9, Gerry picked up a hitchhiker—it was still the 1960s, when you would do that sort of thing—and then ran out of gas on a curve in the road, a blind curve. He asked the hitchhiker to get out behind us down the road to slow the traffic, but the fellow picked up the first ride he could get and left us, so the traffic kept coming by fast. 
It was like Gerry to do random acts of kindness like that, and then to be betrayed by them. I’m not sure I remember how we managed to get some gas, but we did, and skied at Hogback that day and for a few days after, and it was a wonderful time. 

I was twelve and my brother was eight. I did most of the cooking, and Gerry told a joke about a group of hunters who had agreed that one of them would cook until it got so bad they couldn’t take it anymore, and then the next guy with the second shortest straw would take the skillet. The joke goes like this: the guy whose lot it fell to cook finally got so fed up with the chore that he fried up some moose shit and served it. The other hunters tried to eat it, gagging, and then one of them finally says “This tastes like moose shit.” Then a pause. Then he says: “But good!”

We handed down that joke over time, and my daughters know it. “But good!” And there was something beautiful in the transgression of it, that Gerry told us that joke when we were so little. I wonder how much of that joke—I wonder now, writing this, how much of that joke was about Gerry’s experience of his life. 

So many stories. The time I drove with him back from Vermont in a borrowed Fiat convertible, a tiny car, the October sun melting all around us, until we got a flat on the Merrit Parkway and it turned out that the wrench in the car was metric, and did not fit the bolts. Finally someone helped us and we got on our way again, returning to Manhattan in darkness. 

The time I decided to cash in my plane ticket after I had gotten half-way around the world and landed in Manila, so I could stay there, and I called Gerry instead of my folks to cash it in for me and send me the money. He put the money in the wrong account, so the check I sent him bounced. I still owe him $1200. I suppose we’re even on that thing about the will.
There was one fall in 1966 when my grandmother was dying and my dad went to Connecticut every weekend, so he couldn’t use his Giants tickets. Gerry and his girlfriend at the time took me to each game. We had end zone seats, in the old Yankee Stadium, and when an extra point came our way and everyone surged to it, he would make sure I was safe.
It is the end of summer now, too, and the grown-ups are all gone. I dreamt about Gerry the other night. We were in that walk-up apartment on Horatio Street where he had lived for five decades, and for some reason there was an enormous flock of birds in the small garden outside his window—goldfinches and chickadees, some blue jays crying, all swirling about in a sort of dim light, as if it were early dawn. 

It seems not entirely implausible that the world we inhabit in our dreams has its own reality, and is not, perhaps, any more false that this world of the senses we inhabit waking. Perhaps it is even the case that there is a true world, beyond our imagining, that these two worlds of our sleep and our waking gesture toward sometimes, the way a structure rises in the mist. 
I am not sure whether I am awake or sleeping as I write this. I am holding a photograph in my hands. I dreamed this photograph, but the paper I hold is tangible. The sun is brilliant so the focus is imperfect and all the characters are bleached with a sort of whiteness—though maybe that’s because it is a very old photograph. 

The water is running over the dam by our home in Green River and we have just opened it again that weekend—it is April. It is the coldest water, filled with snowmelt, and the trees are still bare, but the sun is brilliant and warm. Gerry has just wakened a few minutes ago and now he is sitting under a stream of water on a rock that backs up against the dam—which is broken now, it fell apart in a flood a few years ago—but we used to call it the Whale Rock, and he is sitting on it, and the water is pouring over his head, almost like a baptism, and he is laughing—we all are laughing so hard, and soon we will eat some pancakes and take a walk up Gallup Pinnacle to see the view to the south. 


The Language of the Tribe
 

We watch a video-clip in which Marshall McLuhan explains to a group of college students that they are faced with the choice between civilization and literacy, or tribalism and what he calls “rock.” It is something like 1968 or 1970 in the clip, and in my classroom, 2014, we are talking about the third revolution in writing language, the digital age, and how it relates to the first and second revolutions. 

The students do not know what McLuhan means by “rock.” They know it is a word for a kind of music, although they have a much more nuanced vocabulary for music now than existed in the 1960s, when rock is what it was. I play a live version of Jimi Hendrix’s “Machine Gun.” I think that this song is what McLuhan means when he talks about tribalism vs. civilization and literacy vs. rock.

My students like it a lot when I play clips like this. It is like a bridge between them and me, me a neo-Luddite, my head filled with words and books, and they with their images and sounds, the acoustic world (as McLuhan termed it) in which they have grown up as natives. It is fun for them to imagine that even though I am making them read bits of Homer and understand Walter J. Ong’s concept of primary orality, I was once like them, grooving to Jimi in a dorm room filled with smoke. 

Then I explain how in 1969 there are two discourses regarding Vietnam, the discourse of the editorial pages of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, and the discourse of Jimi Hendrix’s “Machine Gun,” and that in McLuhan’s view one of these discourses is literate, visual, and civilized, and the second is acoustic and tribal. It’s starting to make sense to all of us—including me, it’s a new course and while I put it together I’m still learning as we go.
What we’re really focused on is Socrates’ indictment of writing in Plato’s Phaedrus, where he tells the Egyptian myth of Thoth. Thoth brings a number of wondrous new things to the Pharaoh, including the invention of the written word, but the Pharaoh (and Socrates) reject writing because it will destroy the capacity of memory, replacing it with mere reminiscence, and also substitute empty knowledge for wisdom, and tiresome discourse for original thought. 

Socrates rejected the advent of writing, the freezing of knowledge and wisdom—the writing down of the Odyssey—in favor of the language and wisdom of the tribe, passed on through speech, gesture, and memory. Gutenberg won, of course, and here we live today.

 I am asking my students to apply Socrates and McLuhan to the current moment, this third revolution in the nature of the representation of reality in language, where an acoustic world, a world of moving and static images and sound, seems to have gained the upper hand on print and reading.

Study English, I tell my daughter, my students. We will always need scribes! I think this is true. Written language is not going away. Neither are viral videos or websites devoted to cute pictures of cats. 

What does this all mean, I ask my students. What would Socrates say about the acoustic world we have created, this new orality? I love asking questions to which I do not know the answer. 

The late essayist George W.S. Trow wrote in his “Pilgrim’s Progress” about growing up in the shadow of his first memory, the end of World War II, and how there was a sort of hush, a sort of solemnity, a sense of completion, a sense of goodness, but not a sense of celebration or hilarity, just a hush and dignity and solemnity that in some fashion formed the pattern of his sense of the adult world as a child.

For me, this same moment was the assassination of President Kennedy, the grief and mourning, the solemnity, the grainy grey-and-white images of the endless funeral procession, a whole nation united in the grey of late November in a sort of shock and sorrow, a sort of dignity coupled with bewilderment.

Trow suggests that the next generations, those that came after his and mine (he was born in the 1940s, I was born in the 1950s), instead experience their own cataclysmic moments—the explosion of the Challenger, brought live to schoolchildren across the nation; Columbine and the death of the idea that school might be a safe place; 9/11 and the death of the idea that anyplace was safe—through the frenetic, high-intensity, hyperactive media of contemporary television and, now, the internet. It is the world McLuhan predicted, but increased exponentially in terms of intensity and noise, with an equal decrease in signal, in meaning. 
Perhaps this is so. I kind of like Jimi Hendrix myself, and tribalism, and I’m not certain that the virtues of civilization have been all they’re cracked up to be, given that we are destroying the planet quite quickly, mainly thanks to the technologies that writing affords us to make. I’m not sure what I think, myself, but I do know that I enjoy teaching, and I am looking forward on Monday to seeing what my students think Socrates would have to say about the digital revolution. 

The Battle of the Somme River and the Story of Atlantis
 


This poem is largely drawn from James L. Stokesbury’s A Short History of World I, published in 1981, and from The Story of Atlantis, by W. Scott-Elliot, which I had in the third edition, published in 1913. I have used the actual language of each work as found poetry in the service of a conception focused on the nature of time and history, and the seeming inevitability of war and mass slaughter as an occupation of our species. I have intentionally used italics in confusing ways—passages from these two works may appear in either italics or in regular type, as may my own additions to the text, based on my work as a journalist in the 1980s, when I was in my twenties. 

I offer it here, in this space, as my best attempt at a gesture toward the 100-year anniversary of the start of the Great War, the consequences of which still permeate our lives in every way. 

I.

There is no limit to the resources of astral clairvoyance
In investigations concerning the past history of the earth

A time will come as certainly as the procession of the equinoxes,
When the literary method of historical research
Will be laid aside as out of date—

A record of the world’s progress
During the period of the Atlantean Race
Must embrace the history of many nations, and register 

The rise and fall of many civilizations.


II.

It was 1984 and I remarked how Sarajevo
Seemed a strange place to hold Olympics
During the trench warfare between Iraq and Iran,

The young men running to catch the bullets,
Empty handed, they didn’t need weapons.
I was alone that year, I could taste the flavor

Of a time that had ended, the irony of the year
Cocooned up in star wars and the end of the cold peace,
So young I imagined nothing better—


III.

The Somme is an unimpressive little stream,
About halfway between France 
And the Flanders coast. 

It had no strategic significance;
Joffre chose it for administrative convenience:
The French and British armies met there.

The British soldiers who attacked the Somme in 1916
Were the finest body of men Britain had ever put in uniform,
Volunteers who had eagerly answered the call to defend their country

And what they perceived as the virtues of Western Civilization.

They had enlisted locally, with friends or working pals,
Some as young as fifteen, or as old as fifty, lying to get into the fight.


IV.

Tulsa in 1921, or Armenia in 1915.
November 25, 1963.
The skill and beauty of forgetting.

In addition also to the blank period in the past,
There is a blank period in the future.

After the fact it appeared as if all the generals involved
Had been blind fools, or worse, had cast their men into battle
Without any feeling, callous to their losses.

This was hardly true.


V.

The conceptions contained in The Story of Atlantis
Were typical of a time fascinated by the occult
In a period when science and magic contended,

A time of innocence, really, Larkin’s “MCMXIV,”
A child-like innocence that pervaded Western culture
Irrevocably destroyed by the Great War. 


VI.

We now come to the Toltecs. The greatness of these empires
Is a matter of history, or at least of tradition
Supplemented by such evidence as is afforded

By magnificent architectural ruins. 
The average Red Indian of America is the best representative today,
But of course bears no comparison with the race at its zenith.


VII.

The Somme had until now been a quiet sector.
The Germans had ample time to build their lines,
Three deep, and their dugouts in some cases 

Were thirty feet underground, all but impervious
To even the heaviest fire. About 210,000 years ago
When the time was ripe, the Occult Lodge

Founded an empire—the first “Divine Dynasty” of Egypt—
And began to teach the people. The British employed
Imaginative deception plans and did manage to convince the enemy

That the attack would probably come a bit farther north.


VIII.

It was 1984. They had been training for a year,
And had gradually been filtered into quiet spots in the lines,
And it was 1984 then, so I knew everything I needed to know.

At the right moment the guns would shift from a general
To a zoned barrage, firing on a given line and then lifting
And moving forward slowly at intervals.

I do not say that the one thought ensues 
as a natural consequence of the other.
The memory of nature is in reality a stupendous unity.


IX.

Egypt must now be referred to, and this consideration
Must let in a flood of light
On its early history—purer surroundings for the White Lodge

Were needed, Egypt was isolated and thinly peopled,
And therefore Egypt was chosen. Undisturbed by adverse conditions
The Lodge of Initiates for 200,000 years did its work.

It was 1916 before they got ready to move into the Sinai desert.
Everything now went wrong. 


X.

In 1986 I sat on top of a school-bus at a revolution,
Then walked several miles home in a twilight so perfect
For a long time it seemed dense with meaning.

If the system of water supply in the City of Golden Gates
Was wonderful, the Atlantean methods of locomotion
Must be recognized as still more marvelous.

Eventually I caught a cab and he took me back to Del Pilar.
Haig scheduled his grand assault for June 29, 
And the preliminary barrage began three days earlier,

Thousands of rounds of shells, the attacking troops filtered
To their forward positions, so many of them just from school,
And then the weather turned bad.

And when Marcos finally left, my proprietor, Lucky Lee,
Said when the great tree falls the monkeys scatter,
And my friend Ghani broke his wrist fighting them off

At Malacanang Palace, one of the last goons to leave the sunk ship.
Finally it cleared at 7:30 on the morning of July 1
The great attack began. I am sure my friend is dead by now.

The shellfire, falling on enemy positions, was to shelter them. 


XI.

It did not work that way. Most units got through
Their own wire all right, but almost immediately
Things began to go wrong—the German wire was uncut

In most places, and the German machine gunners
In their deep dugouts had survived the bombardment.
Taken together these were absolutely catastrophic.



XII.

A custom which differs considerably from our own
Must be considered next—their choice of food.
They discarded the flesh of animals, while the parts

Which among us are avoided as food,
Were by them devoured—and the blood they drank,
Often hot from the animal. But it must not be thought

That they were without the lighter,
And to us, more palatable,
Kinds of food. The seas and rivers provided them…


XIII.

The cold war Olympics in Sarajevo were better
Than the next olympics in Sarajevo, of which
I have a sort of crude memory, bodies & snipers

And though this was almost exclusively a metropolitan British battle
The experience of one imperial infantry formation
Was particularly tragic. So powerful indeed 

Must have become these explosives in later Atlantean times—
In 1914, Newfoundland was a thinly settled frontier land
Of fishing villages and lumber camps—at the outbreak of war—

We hear of whole companies of men being destroyed in battle
By the noxious gas generated by the explosion 
Of one of these bombs above their head, thrown there
	
By a sort of lever—at the outbreak of war
The colony raised a thousand men, and on July 1
They were in a reserve trench

XIV.

They went over the top. When they got out of their trench
They had several bands of British wire to get through,
Then no-man’s land to cross, then the German wire.

There was no barrage. It was mid-morning.
They had to go about half a mile in full view 
Of absolutely undisturbed German machine gunners.

The monetary system now must be considered.
Small pieces of metal or leather stamped
With some given value were, it is true, used as tokens.

No Newfoundlander cleared the German wire.
Having a perforation in the centre they were strung
Together, and carried at the girdle. 

No man was entitled to fabricate 
More of these tokens than he was able to redeem
By transfer of goods in his possession.

Of the 752 soldiers who rushed the wires
All 26 officers and 658 men were dead or wounded.
The tokens do not circulate as coinage does.


XV.

A beautifully wooded park-like country surrounded the city.
Scattered over a large area of this were the villa residences
Of the wealthier classes. To the west lay a range of mountains,

From which the water supply of the city was drawn.
On the summit of this hill lay the emperor’s palace and gardens,
In the centre of which welled up from the earth

A never-ending stream of water, which flowed in four directions
Through the four quarters of the city…

There were flowers everywhere. The air tasted like water.


XVI.

War. Phrases about war. Misrata stands with you, Benghazi!

The cold wire strung so tight thrums with your blood,
Children of the abyss. We came back but the house was empty,
They had taken everyone. I think they all are dead.

It will be remembered that the government under which
The Rmoahals came into existence
Was described as the most perfect conceivable

For it was the Manu himself who acted as their king.


XVII.

Even that was not the worst calamity of the day.
After crossing the first German trench line, the 10th battalion
Of the West Yorkshires, not stopping to mop up,

Was caught on a rising slope from front, flank, and rear.
In a long day, pinned down in that fashion,
The battalion lost 22 officers and 688 men.

A battalion normally had from 700
To 800 men. This happened on July 1, 1916.


XV111.

In these early days no image of the Deity 
Was permitted—the sun-disk was considered
The only emblem of the godhead, 

Used in every temple, a golden disk
Being generally placed
To catch the first rays of the rising sun

At the vernal equinox
Or at the summer solstice.
But the sun-disk did not always remain

The emblem of the Deity.
The image of a man—an archetypal man—
Was in after days placed 

In the temples
And adored as the highest representation
Of the divine.


IXX.

By nightfall, the British army had suffered
57,470 casualties,
More than 19,000 thousand of them

Killed, and in most places
They had not even reached
Their first objectives.

XX.

Small wind, gnats rising on a small river.
In 1984 I knew everything. We have all gone 
Through these evil days, and the experience

Makes the character we now possess.
The toll was enormous. In the battle
Of the Somme River the British Army

Had sustained 420,000 casualties, the French
Had lost 195,000 supporting them, and the Germans
650,000 stopping them. Three languages buried in one grave.

At the end of the war, very early on the morning of the 11th
The Germans filed into Foch’s railway command car.
The ceasefire came into effect at 11 o’clock that morning.

But a brighter sun now shines 
Than that which lit the path
Of our Atlantean forefathers

The Manu will come again



Manhattan Babies Don’t Sleep Tight 




Everyone wore red and black that year. I had just moved back to Manhattan after seven years away. That fall Rodin’s huge work, “The Gates of Hell,” had been installed at the Metropolitan Museum, and since I had no work in those first weeks, I used to visit it almost every day. There were people sleeping on the street, almost any street one went there was someone sleeping, wrapped in a garbage bag or covered with newspapers. I'd fallen in love with a young poet whom I had known at college and I would visit her place on West End Avenue. Sometimes hookers would bring their customers to the small terrace around the front door and give them blow jobs there. It was long time ago, and Manhattan is different now. Better in some ways, I guess, but it was an interesting time. I have no sense that the human toll of suffering has changed since then, but the island where I grew up has been well-sanitized by the wealth that now inhabits it.

What is strange is that this was a time in my life when I felt that I had some direction, as if I was coming into my own. I worked for three years at Newsweek magazine, the most adult job I've ever had, in a way—the place was run by adults--and I was pretty good at it too, rising through the ranks. Who knows what kind of life I would have had if I had stayed.
One time I was assigned to work as a reporter on a cover story about pornography. I became quite expert. This was a strange experience. I interviewed a husband-and-wife team who had started out doing live shows in Times Square together and then gotten into film, though he was not as employable as she was. We met at a restaurant near the Museum of Natural History the day before Thanksgiving, so they were blowing up the floats for the Macy's Day Parade on the block outside as we ate pizza and pasta and talked about what it's like to fuck for money on screen. It was like a scene from one of Woody Allen’s movies before he left Mia Farrow for Soon Yi. “I get paid for fucking my wife,” the porn guy said, chortling with laughter. They called themselves the Bobbsey twins of porn and she had just gotten a photo shoot for Playboy, she'd made it big. She invited me over to hang out for a while after we finished our interview and the food but I begged off. I wonder what it would have been like to go with them. She gave me a good long hug as we said goodbye, her husband eyeing the two of us like a Mafia enforcer. 

Later that same fall when I was still working on the story, my lover and I went to a party at the Palladium to celebrate the release of a new sort of couple’s movie that Candida Royale had produced with her husband, a guy named Per from Sweden. He was a good deal younger than she was—his father was big in the industry in Europe. She’d served her time as an actress, a hundred films or so, and this was a sort of break for her. It was a large, packed party, and a lot of people from the porn industry were there. I met a lot of folks. We hung out for a while with Gloria Leonard's daughter, who said she was in the industry like her mom, but behind the camera. She was in her early 20s. We smoked some weed in an alcove. I had no sense of boundaries in those days. I wasn’t really a journalist, just a mediocre young poet who happened to have found work as a reporter. It was interesting to interview the actresses that one could also see performing on big screens all around the club, rock music pulsing, a heavy insistent beat. Here they were in clothes, and there they were on the screen. It was 1984.

It's strange to think of that time so long ago, when I vacillated between Manhattan and Manila before finally I came back to Vermont and started the life I have now. It would have been a very different life, had I stayed in the city. At the party my lover threw for me before I went away Mark Whitaker was there--he later became the editor of Newsweek—and also Jonathan Alter, another classmate from Harvard, and the circle of friends was a real one, in its way. Then I went to Manila and lost my way. I turned my back on that life and married a girl. A pretty girl. A street-girl—homeless. She was eleven years younger than me. 

I didn’t marry her at first—I came back and spent a summer going quite mad, caught between two worlds, neither of which belonged to me. The first night I slept with my Manhattan lover after landing from the 24-hour plane ride I called out the wrong name as we made love in the dark. In the morning she told me she had taken a lover, too. We were still in love with each other, but we were both very proud. In the end it all was shattered, and then this happened, and then that happened, and now I am fifty-seven, sitting in the dim space of a country home, writing these words. I have no regrets—why would I? My destiny has been fortunate for the most part, and the hard times I’ve seen have nourished my soul.
But in the moment I remember now from that strange and brutal summer, after she and I clearly would never again be together, after Manhattan seemed no longer to be an option for me, I went to visit a woman I’d spent time with when we were in the creative writing program at BU a few years before. She was in Toronto now, working on a Ph.D., a medievalist. She knew Latin and Old English and Old Irish, and she was interested in magic. She taught me that the word for whiskey in Old Irish, from which it derives, meant water of life. I had completely fallen apart, taking a bus for many hours to reach her city, almost naked and undone emotionally. I spent three days there cooking for her--we joked that I was a slave-boy from Venus, totally vulnerable. We slept together, chaste now, an Arthurian trope, a sword between us like a spell. 

We had been good together, a few years before, but I was fixated on this girl I barely knew, whom I had left behind with friends and all my money in Mindoro, and I was trying to reassemble myself so I might have the courage to go back to the Philippines and find her. We drove up north into the Iron Range, a cold, grey bleak terrain littered with lakes, and stayed in a cabin, lying side by side on a small hard bed. She took a photo of me there, which she sent to me when I was in Mindoro again. She said that I looked almost honest in the photograph, and she wished me well in my marriage. 

In August, not long before I would leave again for Manila, I visited my friend Andy in Washington Heights and we stayed up late – it was a hot night – and we found ourselves on a street outside his apartment building that backed up against a park. There was a small creepy guy with a shopping cart that had a television in it and a couple of other things—he was living on a bench there--and then there was a guy who lived in the basement of the apartment building who called himself John of Gaunt. He was disheveled and lean, with a long beard streaked with grey--a Vietnam veteran. He wore fatigues. It was unclear whether he was mad, or just pretending to be mad. In either case, he had a great line of patter, and Andy and I were pretty mad, too, at that time. We talked for a long time in the humid heat and haze under the street lamps, with the tree-leaves spreading over from the park wall white and dusted in the dim light. This was a time in my life when it did not seem strange to me that I would be hanging out at four AM on an empty street in Washington Heights talking to a madman. Later my life became normal again, but I have never lost the sense that what is normal and what is strange are really one thing.

In reality, sometimes I think it has been my fate that what is strange is familiar to me, and what is familiar and ordinary seems strange. I don't know. I've lived in different places and experienced some strange things, and what seems normal is not normal and what is strange is not strange. I know at least that much. It’s all just one thing. The small fact of our life on this planet for a few minutes between eons amounts to very little in the end and one knows this. We all know this. We don't live like it but we know it. We know it. There's no way not to know that’s what it is. 

If I remember these moments of my life, they don’t matter – they don't matter – but still I can almost taste the way the water felt in Ontario that day we dipped into the cold lake before I made some dinner for Claire. She was lovely in a hard, Victorian way, and she could recite most of Yeats’ great poems by heart, in a low, throaty voice that was one of the most beautiful things I have known in my life. We swam in those cold waters under a grey sky. A few days later I took a plane to Manila, and I never saw her after that. 

Snake Skins 


My wife has been confined from her usual athleticism by a broken foot, and we’re on a college break, too, so she has directed an orgy of housecleaning, years of accumulated boxes and so on coming down from the attic and up from the basement in this home we have made together for so many years now. Our older daughter, just graduated from college, has been helping sometimes, and last night as we were all going through boxes and watching Croatia play Brazil, she found a ream of old photographs in a box I have probably not noticed for two decades. She handed them to me, and I could see that they were what are left of the photos I took in Manila during the People’s Revolution in 1986.

It was impossible for a mediocre photographer like me to take any good shot of the thing, in that pre-digital era when film and developing cost real money, so you only could take a few shots, no selfies. The crowd was huge, four million strong hanging out like a block party on the broad avenue called EDSA, and my focus was poor. It was a cheap camera, a Pentax 1000 I had picked up at a discount place in Kowloon along with a small manual typewriter, and while I had a zoom lens, it was not a very good lens. As I looked at the photographs it felt impossible than any of it had ever mattered. It did, of course, but the time is so distant now that meaning has been threshed from it in my repeated revisitings over the years. I think “hypostatized” is the technical term. 

Still, in the mix of photos I also found two snake skins—collected at a different point but somehow mixed in with the photos—and also the one photo I ever had of Ghani, the Marcos hit-man I met at an Ihaw-Ihaw the day after the revolution. And it was wonderful, on this misty Vermont evening, how quickly the photograph of Ghani leapt to my memory and accorded with it, the thin pencil mustache, the smirk that substituted for a smile, the red bandana worn pirate-style, the dark aviator sunglasses like a third-string CIA operative in the Vietnam era. 

I once had a pair of those glasses, too, smoky gray, and I used to wear them at night when I wandered barefoot on the Manhattan streets when I was 18. I would walk from Riverside Drive up to Broadway and then down along the avenue watching the whores and pimps and dealers, and then I would walk back home again on West End. I don’t know what I was trying to prove, or what any of this means now. I was just young and I felt edgy sometimes. But the two snake skins with the photos seemed salutary. How many skins have I shed, over these many years, and which still cling to me? What more do I have to shed? 

Still, seeing Ghani again and holding the image in my hand brought one memory back, hard and keen. We were traveling together, living under cover for a while after the revolution. Ghani was hiding from the new forces of righteousness that had taken over the capitol, forces I had supported with all my being, and I was hiding from my life. 

I had been out of touch with home for a while, and then the phones were down during the Revolution, so when I called my father after the show was over, I had a lot to say to him, but he interrupted to tell me that he had decided to leave my mother. It was a strange time in my family. He seemed a great deal more preoccupied with what was going on in his own life than anything happening in mine, so we didn’t talk long. 

Then I called the woman I had been living with in Manhattan before I left, my lovely poet friend, but her grandmother had just died and she was very angry with me for having been out of touch for so long. She also had a new lover, though I did not know it at the time. I had a new lover, too, whom she did not know about--a street-girl named Diana whom I fed and sheltered, and later married—a different story, and her name was actually Lorna, not Diana, although I did not learn that for six more months.

After these phone calls it seemed to me that traveling with Ghani made more sense than anything else I could imagine at that point. I was still young, and very stupid, but I had a great deal of courage in those days. I am three decades older now, and not much less stupid, but it is nice to remember the courage I once had. Sure, I said to Ghani, let’s go. We took a bus down to Batangas from Manila and then took a ferry across the bay to Mindoro. And then we were both hiding out in places where there were no telephones and no electricity. Far from Manila. Under cover.

After a couple of languid days in San Isidro, which had the most amazing long white beaches on Mindoro, Ghani said we should go to Calipan, where he was from. It was the capitol city of Mindoro, a backwater on the west side of the island where no tourists went. There were five of us in my traveling party, Ghani and Diana, whom everyone called Diang, and then Joey, Ghani’s cousin, who was a university student and came to play chess with me and talk literature, and Boyet, who had served with Ghani in the Philippine Marines in Mindoro in the war against the Muslims and came to carry our bags. 

Ghani knew a guy named Bembot in San Isidro, who later became a friend of mine for a while, and Bembot had a banca that he could drive, and he would set us up with food and drink. Dante, who also became a friend later—a small, scrawny fellow with almost no teeth, who slept on the floor and worked for food, a kind of distant cousin—came along as the boatman. 

And I was like a British colonist in the 1800s, with all the money to fund this expedition. I was very intent on spending the money I had left. I was going to go native when the money was gone. It seemed like a plan. I was basically crazy at the time. And I liked Ghani—he had a sort of ruthless integrity to him that I admired, since I lacked this quality myself. And I had fallen so hard for Diang that I wound up doing anything for her, letting my love for her first change my life in irrevocable ways, and then forgiving her for breaking my heart.

I still had the Pentax 1000 at this point, so I know there are some photos from this voyage lying around in some box or other in the basement, but I am not looking for them. I lost the Pentax a couple of weeks later—I left it hanging on the back of a chair after a drinking party, and a small-time gangster named Anting took it and sold it. He later taught me how to play table tennis, and I got really good for a while. We used to play every day, and then drink some beers. I didn’t like him very much, he was an oily and dangerous character, but it was my fault for leaving the camera on the beach. I couldn’t hold it against him.

So I don’t have any photographs of this expedition close to hand, apart from this one shot of Ghani, but I remember the day very well. We started in mid-morning, in brilliant sunlight, and Mindoro bay was calm. A banca is basically an outrigger canoe with an engine, and Bembot’s was sleek and quick. We had brought mangos and papayas, and rice and dried fish, and some rum and coke, and all good things, and as we rode along the bay I could feel any life I had ever led before dissolve in the war stories and jokes Ghani and Boyet were telling and in Diang’s soft warm skin on the seat beside me. 

Calipan itself was dreary, small—just huts and a few stilt houses, and some cinder-block dwellings where the rich folks lived, and a couple of sari-sari stores, and Ghani was surrounded by the village children wherever he went. At a certain point he disappeared for about an hour—he never said why, but I assume it was either family or business, or both—and then we wandered the unpaved streets for another hour or so, until the sun grew low and it was time to head back around the point for San Isidro. It was about a 90-minute trip, and we all were ready for some dinner.

I probably would remember this day in any case, since it marked a strong instant in a process of change that turned my life in a fundamentally new direction, one that has led, in seemingly inexorable and fated ways, to this present moment, but I remember it particularly because it was one of a small handful of occasions on which I might possibly have died. 

As the sun set the wind came up, and the ride back was a great deal rougher than it had been coming out. Mindoro Bay is a large expanse of water. You can’t see Batangas from the Mindoro shoreline. The winds were blowing very hard as we came towards the point that separated the western shore of the island from the northern shore. Everyone was joking as water splashed in over the banca—a nervous sort of joking. We were all getting quite wet, and the water was cold. Bembot did not join in. He was working hard at the rudder. Then the engine quit, quite suddenly. We were adrift. 

A banca makes great sense when it is moving forward and the outriggers provide a sort of balance, but it is basically a canoe with an engine on the back and a couple of hollow logs attached, riding low in the water. It was easy for the waves, which were quite large by this point, to push it sideways. Joey and Boyet were set to bailing, while Ghani and Diang and I chatted nervously in the middle of the boat—actually, I was nervous; Ghani and Diang were both at home with danger--and Bembot and Dante worked on the engine.

It seemed ok for a while, but the engine would still not start, and after a time the waves had begun to push us, quite quickly, toward some jagged rocks sticking out from the water about two hundred yards from broken shoreline, a cliff that had fallen apart into the water. It would be a very difficult swim. The water was deep around the rocks. I thought I could probably make it, but Diang did not know how to swim, except in a rudimentary way. The waves were high. Everyone grew quiet and Bembot said something in Tagalog to Dante, who had been cheerful until now, but was now quite grim as he talked with Bembot. 

Then Dante scampered over the back of the boat, his feet angled out so they could rest on each outrigger—an almost impossible gymnast’s position. He opened the engine and did something with it, and then Bembot pulled the throttle again. We were bouncing up and down, soaking in sea water, and the rocks were quite close, and as I remember it, the sky had gone dark in that nearly abrupt way the sky would fade when the sun went down in that latitude. And then suddenly the engine kicked on, and Dante got hauled back into the boat by Bembot, and we were on our way again.

Out of deference to me, I think, no one remarked on the event once it had ended. I gave Dante an American Winston and he took a long pull of rum, then settled back to his duties. We were just about half an hour from home, and the bay calmed after we rounded the point. Everyone was taciturn. It had been a long day. 

When we got back to San Isidro we had pork adobo and rice, and shared some rum. There was a fire on the beach, and we sat around it and talked for a while, and then Diang took me back to the nipa-thatched hut where we lived in those weeks, and I held her in the dark and we whispered in bed with my pidgin Tagalog and her pidgin English as our exhaustion took us. 

After she fell asleep I lay beside her and listened to the house lizards give their guttural taaak-urrr calls. I could hear the waves washing on the beach, quiet and distant. It seemed to me that in some fashion I had escaped from drowning, though perhaps not in a literal sense. I felt as if I was in exile. I felt as if home was a word I would never learn to speak again, as if I were utterly adrift in the warm, moist darkness, listening to a stranger breathe lightly beside me and the lizards make their calls, oddly soothing, and foreign to anything I ever had known before.




Doc Humes and the Invisible War 


We moved into the Hampshire Street apartment in January, 1977, not long before the great blizzard of that year crashed into Boston and shut Harvard down for the first time in its history. I was 20 and my brother, who was 16, had been living with me since the previous summer, something that seems odd now in retrospect, but that at the time seemed to be normal enough.

After my sophomore year a group of us had decided to get an apartment and live off-campus the following year, and in the summer my friend Rick and I rented a place on Ellsworth Street with our girlfriends Cindy and Emily, and when events at home in Manhattan got very complicated it seemed that having my brother Jim come stay with us and be part of the housing plan for the fall made a sort of sense. Rick and Cindy didn’t mind—they were easy-going. We all were, and Emily had the best heart I’ve ever known. She was always nice to Jim, even when he was bad-tempered. 

My brother and I were close, though four years apart in age, and he was in some trouble in the city, so a change made sense to me. It is strange to think that I was actually able, at 20, to sell the idea to my father and mother. Of course, Jim had been living more or less on his own for a year, and the other options weren’t great, either. It worked out in the end—we’re in our fifties now, with jobs, wives, and families, so it is hard to say a different course would have been better, though it did kind of change the way I experienced my undergraduate years, in ways that make me feel some regret when I think of it.

That summer on Ellsworth Street Cindy and Emily each had regular jobs, and Rick and I worked whenever we got a call from the agency—one time we had the chance to clear out a warehouse for Charette’s and brought home a hoard of tubes of oil paint and brushes, which Rick used, he knew how to paint. 

When we were not working sometimes we would sit at the kitchen table and write together on our electric typewriters with rolls of brown paper we had gotten from another job, channeling Kerouac and listening to the Dead while we smoked weed and imagined we would be famous soon. My brother, who had lost a lot of money he had been fronted for a drug deal when he got set up—the reason he left New York—fit in pretty well. We would go jogging sometimes.

In the fall we moved into a place on Western Avenue off Central Square with my other room-mates, the second and third floors of a house, and for a short while it worked fairly well, and then naturally it fell apart. Emily and Cindy were living in dorm rooms at Harvard, and the five guys trying to keep a house together were not very good at it, though it was a nice big house. My brother got into some trouble for sharing acid with a friend at the experimental school where he had been placed, and the two-week suspension caused him to lose interest in academics again. 

In mid-November, one of the housemates, probably Rick, brought a much older man to the house for a visit. His name was Doc, and he was extraordinarily charismatic, with long grey hair and a full, unkempt grey beard, and clear eyes that were piercing when they happened to rest on you, and a deep, resonant voice. He had the presence of a prophet—a failed prophet, of course. 

Doc had co-founded the Paris Review after the war, and written a couple of fine novels in the 1950s that were out of print now, and the night I met him I had taken some acid, so when he started to talk about the massive conspiracy that ran our government and the internal war for control of nuclear weapons, which sometimes would be run out of their silos and detonated in the atmosphere, I followed along as if compelled.

Listen, he said, as the long rumble of a jet taking off from Logan airport ran over the house, rattling the windows. Can’t you hear them? What, someone said—we were all sitting in a circle around his feet. The missiles, he said, can’t you hear them? Don’t you know about the missiles?

His voice was incredulous in the last question, in a way that seemed so authoritative that it nearly compelled belief—he was all of our fathers’ age, like the cool father we did not have. He looked like King Lear before the play started.

Doc explained the process—how some factions within the government wanted to start a third war, and other factions, working to prevent this, would send the missiles off to be detonated harmlessly. He had a good line of patter, and since I was tripping it left me uneasy, but also unconvinced—when I told Emily about it, lying in bed with her the next morning after I finally came down again, she said that it sounded like he was just crazy, and of course she was right, and I agreed with her. 

Unfortunately my best friend, Rick, and my brother, turned out to be easier sells on the patter, so by December the house on Central Square was a kind of site for Doc’s version of insanity, and I decided to move my brother and me out. The place was a wreck by that point in any case. 

This all is a true story—Doc Humes was a real person, who inhabited my life and that of my brother for a period of about four years in the 1970s and early 1980s. His daughter, Immy, a sort of acquaintance, created a kind of record of his life a few years ago, a documentary film, and a website, in a way for which I don’t blame her, since I know how desperately one may wish to rehabilitate one’s parents as part of the process of making sense of one’s life. But he had a very bad effect on my brother, who was the most vulnerable in the group, and his teachings and influence were not very healthy for other friends. 

So Jim and I moved into this place on Inman Square that January. Doc had been arrested by then—he had a warrant from New Jersey, for some reason, probably trumped up—and he was in Billerica. Another classmate, John, came along with us. He had come to Harvard for hockey, a goalie, and then wrecked his knee and gotten hooked on painkillers, but he was better now, and a good friend to my brother. We were all just mainly smoking weed, and of course I was taking classes in things like Milton and Old English—whatever the fuck I was doing that lost year, I would have to look at my transcript to remember. 

So we’re in the place at Inman Square, which has two big bedrooms, a big living room, a huge kitchen and a bathroom off the kitchen with a great big tub, and a really nice deck that overlooked downtown Boston—probably worth a couple million now, though we had it for about $500 a month back then and Inman Square was a little rough, in a Boston way. 

The Blizzard of ’77 has come and gone, and I was in classes, and then this girl I knew from high school—the first girl I ever made love to--drops out of Andover and takes an apartment just a couple of blocks up Hampshire Street. I can see her window from my window. 

My brother is not really in school anymore—I guess he goes sometimes, but it is not clear—and John has left Harvard now that he can’t play goalie anymore, so mainly they hang out and listen to music, and I am going to classes from time to time, and staying some nights in the dorms with Emily, but a lot of the time I am hoping to see Becca, sitting in a chair from which I can see her window, and occasionally she will come over and we’ll chat. I am still in love with her—or with the idea of her, first love, this beautiful and extraordinary young girl who broke my heart when we were in high school. We had both been very young. It was beautiful and also pointless—what could I have expected? First love and other sorrows. 

This one night, Becca comes over. No special reason—maybe she was bored. Maybe she wanted to see me. I never knew. Each time I saw her I would fall in love again. 

We hang out for a while in my bedroom, talk about whatever we talked about, just hanging out, killing time. John and Jim have done some acid—actually, John has been doing acid every day for at least three weeks, he was on some sort of program—and by now they are also full believers in the cult of Doc, so every time a plane takes off from Logan and we hear that long, low rumbling in the sky, I can hear them become excited and distressed outside my door, like a primitive tribe. They think they are witnessing a war in the sky.

We can see downtown Boston from our windows in the living room, and the aircraft warning lights on the Hancock Tower are the most prominent feature, a stack of three flashing red lights on each of three towers, or maybe four—I can’t remember now—but from our windows they are the main things that one sees.

Becca and I are talking in my bedroom when suddenly we hear a sound of genuine distress from outside our door. John has become afraid, and he is crying and calling out—he has just figured out that the flashing lights have a pattern, and that the pattern is calling the missiles back dow. He is certain that Boston will be obliterated in minutes, maybe seconds, and he is trying to get someone to call to tell them to stop the holocaust.

Becca and I both come out to see what the matter is, since John is in real terror by this point and my brother is huddled on the couch, in his own world, and when I ask, John explains that the missiles are going to fall—pointing to the lights he starts to shout that they are calling the missiles down, that they broke the code and now the missiles are going to fall. He is sobbing and crying, and I don’t know what to do.

Becca goes over to him and sits down on the floor next to him. She touches his shoulder. Those are just airplane lights, she says. They are just warning lights. She starts to stroke his back, the way you would calm a wounded animal. 

They don’t mean anything, she says. They just flash on and off. Warning lights. 

Really, John asks. He has started to calm down. Becca strokes him on the back a couple more times, stronger now, roughing him a little. Sure, she says. I would not lie to you.

Ok, John says. He is still sobbing—a big strong guy, he looks like a small child. Really, he asks again. Yes, Becca says, firm in her voice. 

She moves her small fine hand from his back, still sitting on the floor next to him in the dim light, and places it against his cheek so he will turn his head to face her. His tears touch her hand. 

Yes, Becca says. Yes, she says. I promise you.

Ok, John says. It’s ok now. He is still sobbing, softly now.

Good, says Becca. She looks at me--I can’t read what she is thinking. It is what I always have loved about her. She is absolutely unknowable to me, a mystery. 

She looks at me and then down at the ground, and she is still stroking John’s back until finally he lies down and she can move away. 

I am just watching. In a little while she will leave and I will not see her for three years, and then I will never see her again. But for a moment—in this moment—the world seems flooded with meaning. 




Inman Square 


We moved into the Inman Square apartment in January, 1977, not long before the great blizzard of that year crashed into Boston and shut Harvard down for the first time in its history. I was 20 and my brother, who was 16, had been living with me since the previous summer, something that seems odd now in retrospect, but that at the time seemed to be normal enough.

After my sophomore year a group of us had decided to get an apartment and live off-campus the following year, and in the summer my friend Rick and I rented a place on Ellsworth Street with our girlfriends Cindy and Emily, and when events at home in Manhattan got very complicated it seemed that having my brother Jim come stay with us and be part of the housing plan for the fall made a sort of sense. Rick and Cindy didn’t mind—they were easy-going. We all were, and Emily had the best heart I’ve ever known. She was always nice to Jim, even when he was bad-tempered. 

My brother and I were close, though four years apart in age, and he was in some trouble in the city, so a change made sense to me. It is strange to think that I was actually able, at 20, to sell the idea to my father and mother. Of course, Jim had been living more or less on his own for a year, and the other options weren’t great, either. It worked out in the end—we’re in our fifties now, with jobs, wives, and families, so it is hard to say a different course would have been better, though it did kind of change the way I experienced my undergraduate years, in ways that make me feel some regret when I think of it.

That summer on Ellsworth Street Cindy and Emily each had regular jobs, and Rick and I worked whenever we got a call from the agency—one time we had the chance to clear out a warehouse for Charette’s and brought home a hoard of tubes of oil paint and brushes, which Rick used, he knew how to paint. 

When we were not working sometimes we would sit at the kitchen table and write together on our electric typewriters with rolls of brown paper we had gotten from another job, channeling Kerouac and listening to the Dead while we smoked weed and imagined we would be famous soon. My brother, who had lost a lot of money he had been fronted for a drug deal when he got set up—the reason he left New York—fit in pretty well. We would go jogging sometimes.

In the fall we moved into a place on Western Avenue off Central Square with my other room-mates, the second and third floors of a house, and for a short while it worked fairly well, and then naturally it fell apart. Emily and Cindy were living in dorm rooms at Harvard, and the five guys trying to keep a house together were not very good at it, though it was a nice big house. My brother got into some trouble for sharing acid with a friend at the experimental school where he had been placed, and the two-week suspension caused him to lose interest in academics again. 

In mid-November, one of the housemates, probably Rick, brought a much older man to the house for a visit. His name was Doc, and he was extraordinarily charismatic, with long grey hair and a full, unkempt grey beard, and clear eyes that were piercing when they happened to rest on you, and a deep, resonant voice. He had the presence of a prophet—a failed prophet, of course. 

Doc had co-founded the Paris Review after the war, and written a couple of novels that were out of print, and the night I met him I had taken some acid, so when he started to talk about the massive conspiracy that ran our government and the internal war for control of nuclear weapons, which sometimes would be run out of their silos and detonated in the atmosphere, I followed along as if compelled.

Listen, he said, as the long rumble of a jet taking off from Logan airport ran over the house, rattling the windows. Can’t you hear them? What, someone said—we were all sitting in a circle around his feet. The missiles, he said, can’t you hear them? 

He explained the process—how some factions within the government wanted to start a third war, and other factions, working to prevent this, would send the missiles off to be detonated harmlessly. He had a good line of patter, and since I was tripping it left me uneasy, but also unconvinced—when I told Emily about it, lying in bed with her the next morning after I finally came down again, she said that he was just crazy, and of course she was right, and I agreed with her. 

Unfortunately my best friend, Rick, and my brother, turned out to be easier sells on the patter, so by December the house on Central Square was a kind of site for Doc’s version of insanity, and I decided to move my brother and me out. The place was a wreck by that point in any case. 

This all is a true story—Doc Humes was a real person, who inhabited my life and that of my brother for a period of about four years in the 1970s and early 1980s. His daughter, Immy, a sort of acquaintance, created a kind of record of his life a few years ago, a documentary film, and a website, in a way for which I don’t blame her, since I know how desperately one may wish to rehabilitate one’s parents as part of the process of making sense of one’s life. But he had a very bad effect on my brother, who was the most vulnerable in the group, and his teachings and influence were not very healthy for other friends. 

So Jim and I moved into this place on Inman Square that January. Doc had been arrested by then—he had a warrant from New Jersey, for some reason, probably trumped up—and he was in Billerica. Another classmate, John, came along with us. He had come to Harvard as a goalie and then wrecked his knee and gotten hooked on painkillers, but he was better by now, and he was very good friends with my brother. We were all just mainly smoking weed, and of course I was taking classes in things like Milton and Old English—whatever the fuck I was doing that lost year, I would have to look at my transcript to remember. 

So we’re in the place at Inman Square, which has two big bedrooms, a big living room, a huge kitchen and a bathroom off the kitchen with a great big tub, and a really nice deck that overlooked downtown Boston—probably worth several million now, though we had it for about $500 a month back then and Inman Square was a little rough, in a Boston way. 

The Blizzard of ’77 has come and gone, and I was in classes, and then this girl I knew from high school—the first girl I ever made love to--had dropped out of Andover and takes an apartment just a couple of blocks up Hampshire Street. I can see her window from my window. 

My brother is not really in school anymore—I guess he goes sometimes, but it is not clear—and John has left Harvard now that he can’t play goalie anymore, so mainly they hang out and listen to music, and I am going to classes from time to time, and staying some nights in the dorms with Emily, but a lot of the time I am hoping to see Becca, sitting in a chair from which I can see her house, and occasionally she will come over and we’ll chat. I am still so in love with her—or with the idea of her, first love, this beautiful and extraordinary young girl who broke my heart when we were in high school. We had both been very young, what could I have expected?

This one night, Becca comes over. No special reason—maybe she was bored, no better offer. Maybe she wanted to see me. I never knew. Each time I saw her I would fall in love again. 

We hang out for a while in my bedroom, talk about whatever we talked about. Nothing sexual, or even affectionate--just hanging out, killing time. John and Jim have done some acid—actually, John has been doing acid every day for at least three weeks, he was on some sort of program—and by now they are also full believers in the cult of Doc, so every time a plane takes off from Logan and we hear that long, low rumbling in the sky, I can hear them become excited and distressed outside my door, like a primitive tribe. They think they are witnessing a war.

We can see downtown Boston from our windows in the living room, and the aircraft warning lights on the Hancock Tower are the most prominent feature, a stack of three red lights on each of three towers, or maybe four—I can’t remember now—but from our windows they are the main things that one sees.

Becca and I are talking in my bedroom when suddenly we hear a sound of genuine distress from outside our door. John has become afraid, and he is crying and calling out—he has just figured out that the flashing lights have a pattern, and that the pattern is calling the missiles back down, and he is certain that Boston will be obliterated in minutes, maybe seconds, and he is trying to get someone to call to tell them to stop the holocaust.

Becca and I both come out to see what the matter is, since John is in real terror by this point and my brother is huddled on the couch, in his own world, and when I ask, John explains that the missiles are going to fall—pointing to the lights he starts to shout that they are calling the missiles down, that they broke the code and now the missiles are going to fall. He is sobbing and crying, and I don’t know what to do.

Becca goes over to him and sits down on the floor next to him. She touches his shoulder. Those are just airplane lights, she says. They are just warning lights. She starts to stroke his back, the way you would calm a wounded animal. 

They don’t mean anything, she says. They just flash on and off.

Really, John asks. He has already started to calm down. Becca strokes him on the back a couple more times, stronger now. Sure, she says. I would not lie to you.

Ok, John says. He is still sobbing—a big strong guy, he looks like a small child. Really, he asks again. Yes, Becca says, firm in her voice. 

She moves her small fine hand from his back, still sitting on the floor next to him in the dim light, and places it against his cheek so he will turn his head to face her. His tears touch her hand. 

Yes, Becca says. Yes, she says. I promise you.

Ok, John says. It’s ok now. He is still sobbing, softly now.

Good, says Becca. She looks at me—I can’t read what she is thinking, but that is what I always have loved about her. She is absolutely unknowable to me, a mystery. 

She looks at me and then down at the ground, and she is still stroking John’s back until finally he lies down and she can move away. 

I am just watching. In a little while she will leave and I will not see her again for three years, and then never again after that. But for a moment—in this moment—the world seems flooded with meaning. 




Fugue State

In about half a year, one more academic semester, I will start my first sabbatical in 28 years, six months with pay and no teaching. What does one do with such an amazing gift? 

Initially I said that I would work on a book of poems, but that first full book is already finished and hunting for small-press prizes, and while I can’t stop writing poems, to say that one will spend six months simply writing poems seems a bit like saying I will go to a Buddhist monastery or volunteer to make new gardens out of the fallow land in Detroit. 

Stevens said “It is not every day that the world arranges itself into a poem,” and this was a fine piece of wisdom, among the many fine pieces he produced. 

I am recognizing, contemplating this period of months with pay and no work, that I have to be very thoughtful or it will just be wasted time and perhaps even harmful to me, since I’ve never done that well when I don’t have some sort of project or occupation—the way a dog left alone for a day, bored, in an empty house, may rip up all the furniture and piss on the rug.

I’ve often talked with my students about the difference between poets and prose writers, at least in my experience of them when I was in graduate school and in my friendships. Prose writers sit down to the desk each day and do their work. They carry an attaché case to the bar after the seminar and look at their watch. They have work to do—the next chapter, the next paragraph, the next sentence.

A poet is…looking for something. The notebook in her hand is light enough to carry anywhere, and when the message comes she will drop everything and follow its instructions.

Most of the good poets I know write prose, too, in order to stay busy, I suppose, while waiting for the messenger. Certainly that has been my own habit since I started teaching and re-entered my being as a writer a few years ago. 

When I think of what I will do to fill the time—to have a reason each morning to get myself to the desk, even when inspiration is absent or the black dog has come in the door again—I really don’t know. I’m tempted to try to write something that will sell—a great advice book for parents of students with autism, or one of those novels that wind up with a lot of readers. I’d love to write a really good novel—like everyone who ever worked in journalism, I feel that I have one good novel in me. But probably I don’t. My talent for invention lies in language, not in action. So I wind up, finally, back at non-fiction prose and memoir.

The problem with memoir, of course, is that it is like showing one’s vacation pictures to an audience which has had its own vacations, too, and it is difficult to know how to be interesting in a way that is not merely prurient, especially if one has essentially led a quiet normal life, as I have for the most part. And the parts that are most interesting in the telling involve a sort of betrayal, especially when people are still living. 

Writing really well—which is a goal of mine, sometimes realized—provides a kind of veneer that makes ordinary things more beautiful, a way to dodge sensationalism I guess, but still the question of purpose—of meaning—seems unanswered. I like it when Nabokov has Humbert Humbert write, in Lolita, that you can count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. There is some virtue to being a decent writer, but how much of one?

When I think of how to parse this dilemma, which comes down to the essential purposelessness of telling one’s stories when one has lived an ordinary life, apart from the occasional encounter, it seems to me that simply writing well or having interesting stories to tell is a merely adequate justification. The root of mere also assembles to “pure,” so I am not selling myself short here. Still, something more is needed to make the work have purpose.

So, two things. The first is that if I have learned anything in my life it is that the idea of what is normal—of normalcy—is deeply vicious and harmful. Our social compact is that we frame our being in the world against an internalized notion of what we ought to do and how we ought to be, since everyone else is like that, and this makes us quite crazy, at least in the United States, which surely is as sick a great empire as the world has ever known, or at least the most hypochondriac.
With the ascendency of psychiatry, nearly all of us are sick now. I suppose one purpose is to try to open a window into this reality.

But that project is ultimately meaningless, tied to its time and place--and it involves betrayal—perhaps an inevitable project, involving betrayal, but not worth it in itself. The idea of the hegemony of normalcy, the irrationality of everyday life, the universal neurosis of humankind, is hardly original with me. The best I can do with it is to provide a gloss. 

So, the second idea, more powerful I think: it is possible that our being in the world, our life, has meaning. One searches for it, for the small and hidden places where it may reside. Writing is a form of meditation, or better, of prayer. I have often prayed to false gods. Perhaps in the prayers that my stories make I will find a way to a truer muse, a better and more abiding sense of Being. 


What Remains Of Us


I could save other people, but I could not save myself. Write that down, inscribe it. The muse I loved was harsh and distant, she brought night to me in a small silver cup, cool against my lips, and she made my voice harsh as crows. I never have learned how to make anything beautiful. 

Milosz in his last poem, for his dead wife, said that he had never made any poem in praise of darkness. I fear now I have praised the dark too much, the fallen petals of the fruit-trees littered inside my heart like the end of any season.

When I teach, occasionally it is possible to feel a sense of meaning. I am fortunate in this—fortunate in my students, who still look for meaning, and who so often have been wounded by the hard world they encountered. I do believe that it is possible to do good in the world, and that perhaps I have done some good. The praise that comes occasionally at the end of a semester pleases the ego—it is nice to know one’s time has not been utterly wasted. 

I am in a very bad mood today, obviously--a word that means “in the way,” from “ob” (against) and “via”: (way)—this slate grey against a dove grey background, a sky that keeps every secret, a voice that will not answer me. No words comfort me, least of all my own.

Still, I did write this poem today, a sonnet. I like writing sonnets occasionally, like throwing a rock at a tree—it comforts me to know that I still have the skill of it. Hitting a tree in the strike zone like the kid pitcher I once was, making some rhymes work in the five-beat line. Good stuff. 

There is a moment I like in Ford Madox Ford’s great tetralogy, “Parade’s End,” where the protagonist Christopher Tietjens is challenged by a major who came up from the ranks to write a sonnet very quickly—maybe five minutes, and Tietjens says you write the sonnet and then I will translate it into Latin in the same time. They are under bombardment. World War I. Tietjens is not in his right mind, but he can translate the sonnet into Latin easily. I’m a bit like that today. I like to time myself when I write a sonnet. Tietjens is faster, still. It’s all just five-finger music.

Why does meaning and the absence of meaning make such a draw on my heart, like a tide that drags always on what seems a small dead sea to me? I am writing my epitaph, since that is all time gives us, so I made this little sonnet in the cold gray weather today:

Postscript: Something Beautiful and True
Cherry blossoms all fallen in the dusk--
The emptiness and bewilderment of time.
Nothing is forgiven. If I ask
The sky breaks open in a perfect rhyme
Then shuts again—the secret still untold.
Jays and crows skritter and call, their voices
Harsh in the twilight, and nothing will hold
Any feeling, it is lost now, all the choices
That make a life… and now at dark the litter
Of dead petals, gleaming pale and random
In the unmown lawn. A few stars scatter
Against a deeper blue, a broken kingdom.
I wanted to write something beautiful and true.
My sweet dark muse, I sang these songs for you.


Singer said that since God is infinitely silent and distant he felt free to hang any system of belief on him that he wanted. When I pray in my harsh crow voice I pray to an impossibly distant muse, cool and dark and far away as the stars, who might one day forgive me for my sins and love the songs I sang for her. 

At the end of the play Lear prays that his daughter might still live, dead as earth as she is, and the ending is vague and ambiguous, he sees the feather flutter on her lips and says, “See, see!” before he collapses into his own death. When I was very young, in graduate school, I absorbed the play so deeply that its meaning—which is absent of any meaning, the dark broken heart of the world—became part of me. I write in the shadow of it—every poem I have made has Cordelia still dead at the end. 

The problem of meaning, in our lives, is a real problem. We turn away from it, pick up some groceries, make a fine sweet stew, tuck the kids in, answer the email and turn on the ballgame, or go crazy with the longing and emptiness and wind up in the newspaper. 

Randall Jarrell, who walked in front of a car when he was just my age, after a fine career as a poet and the best critic of his generation, has a poem where he says that God is playing a sort of hide and seek with us, the way you do with a very young child, covering your eyes and then lifting your hands away to say “there you are!” And he says “there you are!” Not that day when he walked in front of the car on the highway, however. No one was there.

Milosz says he never made any poem in praise of the dark, and I hope that I may say the same. But there is a great deal of darkness about. One need not go in search of it—it finds you. One hopes to have made something true and beautiful, but the materials are scant and mostly filled with darkness. If history is a nightmare from which one seeks to awake…even to awake from it seems a sort of indulgence. In the end, dust. 

But we are made from star-dust, the original moment, and it seems certain to me that the world and all of our being in it has a sort of meaning. Looking for it is hard. Just hard. 

There is a story about Ezra Pound that I like—poor old Ezra, mad in a way, and a terrible anti-Semite, a bad man in that way, who also was generous to other poets and invented modern poetry in English. He was out in public sometime after they freed him from St. Elizabeth’s, and he was called on to say something. He said this: “Tempus loquendi, tempus tacendi.”

My friend Charley said he was abandoning his column, Charley’s War, which made me sad in a way, since his writing in it is extremely beautiful and true, but sometimes one must think tacendi instead of loquendi. I suppose if I will ever achieve something both beautiful and true, it will be in a sort of silence. 

I have saved other people, in a way. I am a good teacher. Just rescued them from drowning, not the whole course of life. I know how to tug a kid out of the water.

I suppose that this is meaningful, though it is like a slip of lilac hidden in a pile of dark sand. 

Larkin, who was surely the most surly and disappointed great poet the world has known, ends his poem “An Arundal Tomb” with the phrase “What remains of us is love.” I think this is true, and also beautiful. 

Someday I will learn to write better songs. 
 

Transgression and other loves


When I was in graduate school with a fellowship and time on my hands, all I was doing was writing poems, I used to go with a friend to the Rat on Beacon Street, but not to hear the punk they played in the basement, although it was the hub of that music in that time. No, the Rathskeller had the best ribs in that part of Boston and my friend, who was studying for her Ph.D. in English, was from Jackson, Mississippi and she knew barbecue pretty well. In that brief period in my life I would have done anything she said, so I learned to like ribs. Now, thinking of that long ago time, those weeks I kept a scarf hidden in a drawer in my desk and the punk rock thudded from the basement, the concept of transgression comes to me. 

I have always been interested in transgression. In my last fiction workshop this spring, as I talked with students about writing and their experience in the class, and what it means to put writing somewhere close to the center of one’s life, one student asked about transgressive work, work that is true, or at least authentic, but that also is difficult to share because it breaks in some fashion the social compact that greases the wheels of our discourse—the polite lying that gets us through each social day. He caught me short, out of my usual store of glib patter. It is a hard question. I felt compelled to be honest, at least in a fashion, and I said that it is a hard choice one makes, and mentioned that in my current book of poems, the one I wanted to burn in my last column, a central poem described an incident in my youth of the sort one does not usually discuss in polite society. 

I had called the poem “Manifesto,” and the gist of it was the notion that all things are resolved in life by love, a notion I stole from Plato, or really some notes on Plato that my Uncle Lin had written in the front of his undergraduate copy of Plato. The poem ends “If one judges the emptiness of a thing / He must also be able to judge the truth and beauty.” It was a poem about accepting the worst thing that had happened to me in my life. I was saying that sometimes it is necessary to be transgressive in one’s art, but that it is also important to be intentional about it. I also said that much art today, as ever, is either safe and quotidian, a form of polite lying, or else transgressive in ways that are designed to shock and that are not particularly authentic.

I also mentioned to my students a phrase from William Blake—at least I think it was Blake, since I can’t find the quotation now and can only paraphrase it, so maybe it was some other poet, or I invented it—that to follow a true calling the poet must leave everything else behind, friends, family, society, God, religion, and so on. I do think this is the case, still, though it is a deeply romantic notion and one that I may yet discard. Certainly in my own life I did not follow Blake’s advice. I’ve stayed pretty close to shore, in my work, or at least so it seems to me now, savage and raw as some of the poems may have been in the impulse that gave rise to them.

I did not tell my students that the incident I had described in the poem involved sexual encounters I had with an English teacher I liked a great deal when I was in ninth grade. I would not have chosen to have sex with him, of course—it was unpleasant and confusing to me at the time, though he never hurt me physically. In fact, he adored me, and it was the first time anyone had shown me real affection in my life. He made me feel beautiful. Then I got my first girlfriend, and made him stop, and never saw him again—I think the small private school I attended at the time was on to him, and made him leave. It wasn’t something I particularly hid, in my life—I told a couple of girlfriends about it when I was young, and while obviously I was the victim of a sexual predator, I never felt particularly like assuming that version of my own narrative. It was just something that happened in my life, like other things. But to write about it and put it at the center of my one real book of poems was, I think, transgressive in a way, which is why I mentioned in a vague fashion to my students that sometimes one must be transgressive in order to speak one’s truth.

All great art is transgressive, of course, crossing the boundary of what already is known and customary to chart new ground and enlarge our sense of what it means to be human. Marlowe, of course, was deeply transgressive in his life and art, and had he lived, and Shakespeare died, he might have invented us in ways that are interesting to contemplate. Shakespeare lived, and he did invent us, to borrow Harold Bloom’s formulation, and while his works seem customary to us now, varnished by the endless gloss on them, one still finds in them how utterly deep his penetration was of our polite social lies. The ending of Lear is so painful and cruel that for decades it was performed only in Bowdlerized form, with Cordelia still alive at the end, walking off into the sunset with her dad, not dead as earth. Hamlet, that fine figure whose wit and razor intelligence surpasses any of us who came after, was a stone cold murderer, to put it in modern terms. That we revere him and mourn him is a mark of how sly Shakespeare’s transgression was. Talk to the Polonius family if you don’t know what I mean. Milton wrote Satan as a model of human will, the great Romantic, and after that the Romantics broke the mirror and tore the boundaries apart. Most art since then has extended the terrain of what is possible, until now everything is permitted, and meaning is at best provisional and ironic.

Punk rock at the Rat and CBGB took the Romantic project about as far as it could go, and now we are left with bricollage or late echoes. I’m not complaining—I was eating ribs at the Rat, not creating art out of excrement, and late echoes are fine with me, since what better choice does one have?

What seems strange, though, is to live in a time where everything is permitted and where the idea of what is normal is so violently enforced. Anything goes now, and it is hard not to think it is a good thing, and yet it is as if there were a great flood of normalcy, a huge, vast, slow-moving river of social production of what is normal and accepted, while drugs, pornography, and prostitution produce annual revenues that far exceed those of many small nations, and a culture of violence and indifference has become the norm. To have fought two wars for more than a decade and brought torture into the apparatus of the security state, almost without notice, while housewives of desperate county and game of throne and rape rule the airwaves—perhaps transgression is a word we can’t use anymore, as if simply to be good, to aspire to some sense of the good, is the most transgressive thing of all. To bring the reality of how we live now to the surface, to let history flow through one onto a page or canvas, would tear one apart. 

It is difficult not to feel that way, at least. This last week brings so much beauty to Vermont, the new leaves, the lilacs, the violets and heal-all in the unmown lawn. I embrace the season, dip myself in the cold green waters of the river, feel the sweet breeze on my face, wonder what counts for value in a world that is both so damaged—the broken heart of the world—and so perfect. Late in his life, Wallace Stevens wrote a poem called “A Quiet Normal Life.” Perhaps the greatest American poet of his generation, he walked to his work at a Hartford insurance agency each day, composing poems in his head that he would dictate to his secretary when he got to his office. His work was nearly untouched by the history he lived through—two great wars, the depression, the Holocaust. The poem ends “His actual candle blazed with artifice.” He died of cancer a couple of years later.

This musing has no conclusion. The world is oblivious to us, and will outlast us, until it too will be destroyed by the sun, which is destined to collapse and explode at some distant point. If there is some telos, some direction, to all of this sorrow and beauty, it does not lie in anything physical. I want a new definition for transgression—a love that crosses all boundaries. I want to learn to write better songs.





BurningLeaves


Tonight I want to burn everything I have written. I did it once before, ten years ago. It’s the right kind of night, musty and cool, no chance of any brush-fire starting, and the first warm day after a long winter. And there’s a bonfire outside—my daughter is having some friends for s’mores and a sleepover after the junior prom. If I had everything I’ve done in paper in my hands it would be easy to toss it on the fire. 

Why do I feel this way? I think that nothing I have done answers to the question that time poses. Skill and craft, the utterances one’s heart bleats out in the course of being, all the words…in the end what does any of it mean? We construct meaning out of time, lift ourselves from bed each morning, up and ho, but time writes us down in a way that erases our meanings—even if they last a little while. 

When I was a kid, studying at Harvard, I used to wander the stacks in the lower reaches of Widener Library, back in the 1970s when you could still do that, and one time I found myself on a very low floor—maybe the fifth floor underground—in a region where fiction from the 1930s and 1940s was stored. I felt as if I had entered the library Borges made for us. A huge ream of novels and short story collections by authors whose names I had never heard of, ample grist for someone doing one of those dissertations on the social construction of knowledge in a certain period of history, but basically lost to time. 

This memory has stayed with me lo these thirty years—something like Gray’s Churchyard poem. The books in those stacks were gravestones with dates and names no one would read. Wandering down there, in the concrete and steel of that part of the building, which was named after someone who drowned, with a bequest that for many years required also that students would pass a swimming test—it was cancelled so I missed it by a year or so, though I could have done it in my sleep—I am a good swimmer—I felt the emptiness and bewilderment of time.

One writes out of a sort of compulsion, or obligation. It is hard to give up. The time one has is narrow, really—even the sort of grace of time someone like John Crowe Ransom or Stanley Kunitz was given, living into their nineties, is still far too brief. It is difficult to think that at 57—I passed that milestone a few days ago, an odd sort of doubling of years, since I was born in 1957—one has not written anything that will last. When I read my work I can see, however, that this is true.

Perhaps, recognizing this, I accept my fate. The compulsion stays with me. Maybe tomorrow I will write better songs. I’m not sorry I don’t have one of those books on the shelves of that imaginary library where everything is forgotten. I would someday like to write one true thing, something that might last—but now it is only…only part ego—that terrible will that drives one—and now also, maybe…something else.

Pray for the grace of accuracy—that’s Lowell. Ariel was glad he had written his poems—that’s Stevens. Things were always slipping away from all of us—that’s a line that I liked very much from a short story my lover in graduate school wrote. We love the things we love for what they are. That’s Frost. And me—I’ve got nothing, as the joke goes. 

I am surrounded by teenagers as I write this. I am chaperoning a substance-free post-prom party for my younger daughter, whom I love so dearly it breaks my heart almost to think of how much I love her. I am staying up because there are quite a few teenagers about, and some of them are boys, and we are in an old mill, off the grid, in Green River, with a fire burning in the fireplace, which I am tending, and they are playing cards and laughing and being their young selves with the terror and hardship of youth, so much different than the terror and hardship I feel, old now, as I write these words.

Earlier today I dove into the cool waters of our pond here in Green River, the water chilling but mild enough, now in early May after a long winter, and I wished that the sweetness that flowed over me in that moment might absolve me. All the poems and words I have written burned as I felt the chill water on my skin—they vanished, like a layer of skin. Instead, silence. 

And now it is morning again. Bright clear brilliant blue and flooded with sunlight, the children awake and sullen or awed by what transpired in the dark, and I am a shabby old man holding a cup of coffee looking at the sun and the clear water of the stream that runs along this old mill, and if there is meaning in my life I think I will keep looking for it. If anything I write ever matters, I’ll only know a hundred years after I die. That’s my friend Andy McCord. I should give him a ring, make amends.

Emptiness and fullness are just one thing, or so the ancient wisdom says. It is hard to experience it. I’ll keep trying, that much I promise myself as I watch my daughter get into our old Buick and drive up Jelly Mill Road into her life. I won’t burn what I have written, not today. Maybe tomorrow. There’s always that to look forward to. 


Declaring Spring Has Come



As I walked into my short fiction class on the last Thursday of March I said in a loud, cheerful voice that I had decided to declare that spring had officially come, and that from now on we would write as if it were spring, not winter. The snowpack on the quad contested this claim, but the air was milder than it had been and thin sunlight graced the classroom windows, which we opened to get some air. 

My fifteen students, bleary with sleeplessness and mid-term exams, seemed willing to accept the premise, though one of them immediately went to his computer to check the incoming weather and reported that we still had much misery ahead—which you know, of course, if you woke to ice sheeting your car the next morning.

I had a great lesson planned, but it went south quickly. Almost none of them had read the chapter that I had assigned, about how to start a story, and then it turned out that I had botched all my copying, so the handout of examples of prose poems and sudden fiction that I had intended to start our next unit with was a thorough mess. 

I tried to back and fill by moving right to critique, but it also turned out that the copies of a long short story by one of the students that I had handed out on Tuesday were missing every other page. It was interesting that some of the students who had read it still thought it was quite fine, even missing the pages, but of course we needed the whole story in order to discuss it, so I had to re-copy it, too.

What a mess! Standing in front of the class, I had almost nothing, apart from my declaration of spring. But after three decades in the business I have at least learned how to greet disaster with good cheer, and my students are a game lot—really a wonderful group. I confessed everything to them, and let them off the hook for the reading—I know how creative writing comes last when mid-terms descend.

Improvising, I asked then whether they would mind using some of the cards from Storymatic ™, a wonderful tool made by local teacher and entrepreneur Brian Mooney that I use often for invention, to craft the first line or first lines of a story, or even to make a sudden fiction, while I went off to wrestle the copying machine into some form of compliance. They were up for it. Sure, they said.

The cards are wonderful. They mix character traits--ventriloquist, man with a broken leg, cowboy, lost child—with situations like “nobody will listen,” “wins the lottery,” “an untold secret”; and you draw them at random to make a story for them. (I have invented some of these terms since my cards are at work and I am at home as I write this.) A game for a long car ride, in one way, but also a way to get past the quotidian of one’s own experience—they force invention. 

I handed great clusters of cards around the classroom, hoping it would hold them, and then left to do my copying, which took much longer than I had expected. I hoped that they would focus and do their work. At worse, I supposed, we would waste part of a class while they checked Facebook status and so on.

When I finally had all my packets together in good order, I came back to the classroom to find a tardy student, one of my favorites, standing outside the door. I only have a few rules as a teacher. One of them is that students should always come to class, no matter how late they are—I know how easy it is to oversleep, to lose track of time, to spend some time in a room alone wondering whether or not one really wants to meet the commitments one has made for the day. I say that I will welcome them with open arms, and applaud their courage in showing up, however late they may be. And I really mean it, and students know that I mean it. 

But I also say that if you are late and the door is shut, please wait until I admit you, since a class is a sort of performance, and the same rules one might apply to arriving late at a theater—not to be seated until a break in the action—may apply to my own performance as a teacher. Students get this too, so this favorite student of mine was waiting there when I arrived with my armful of handouts.

Hi, George, I said. I was trying to catch your eye, he said, but you’re not there. They are all so quiet in there. I know, I said. I was here. He smiled. 

We entered the room together, and it was true, everyone was quiet, intent, writing their sentences and stories, using the strange prompts that the cards had given them. It was impossible to interrupt them, in fact—they were so intent. And this was a moment when spring broke open in my heart, after what has been a surly winter for me. They were writing. Intent. Focused. Laboring hard on their prose—and who would I be to interrupt? I gave George a big stack of cards and he and I settled into our places, quiet as cats.

At some point, a few minutes later, I gave a sound and then said they would have a minute or two to finish what they were working on. We still had an hour left—it is a long class—and we had to read the proper version of the long story one of the students had made, and critique it, and there was also this business about prose poetry and sudden fiction I had to introduce. They all were still writing when I asked them to stop.

We went around the room then, to listen to what each of them had made in that time out of the materials they had chosen, and I wish that I could remember now well enough what each had written to report it here, since it was wonderful. But it was ephemeral, too—words in the air that I would corrupt with my own memory, improvisations that reminded me of the way listening to jazz in a club, say listening to McCoy Tyner with his band at the Village Vanguard in 1976, is only for the moment—that even if it had been recorded it would never be the same as in that moment when you heard it. 

“When you hear music, after it’s over, it’s gone, in the air, you can never capture it again.” That’s Eric Dolphy, the brilliant saxophone and flute player. I first heard the quote thirty years ago, and I remember it tonight, thinking of these first sentences and little stories my students said aloud.

Ventriloquists hate many things—architects, bridges, and people who love cats. When I find myself listening to radio songs that no one else can hear, I think of how often people who win the lottery wind up poor, and how anyone who loses a skilled parrot has part of their voice captured on the wind, available to someone they may not know, a stranger, someone who may never have their best intentions at heart. I say this because I have grown weary of ventriloquism, and hope to learn someday to fight fires, even though I was born with wings and a tail. I consulted someone who had been fired from a very famous consulting firm, but when I came to his place of business I found that the staircase to his second-floor office was broken, as if someone had set a small bomb under it. It made me question whether I was on the right path.

This last paragraph only gives a small flavor of what was read around the classroom on that first day of spring that I had declared, during the mild moment of Thursday afternoon before I went to the copier and returned with sheaves of paper in my arms. It is what happens when one lets random elements—phrases, words, strange connections—guide invention. I just made it up. 

In the Narnia story, winter has a symbolic force—it is about the best take I know on acedia. In my own life, it seems to have a literal one, at least in these later years. And I wonder, now as I fight off winter with my bare hands, how much all of this has to do with how narrow the terrain for invention can be, in my role as a teacher, in my life as a writer, in my students’ lives as they face all that we ask of them in our terribly narrow ways, well-meaning as we may be, and in all of our lives in this very late time in our dreadful history, from which we all seek to awake. 

Enough. It is warm enough tonight that a thick mist rises from the slowly vanishing snow-fields. Tomorrow I know that when I wake I will hear the harsh screes of red-winged blackbirds in the trees around the house, and that at least one of them will flourish the red epaulettes on his wings. Chickadees will come to the seeds scattered on the back deck. The dog will tug at my bed, filled with life, anxious to get out there, into the cold dawn air. And if I have it within me, I can invent the day that will come. 




What does one do when writing will not come?

Part 2


Teaching is an improvisational art for me, so I am not exactly sure why I coupled Singer’s “Gimpel the Fool” with the Schwartz story. The obvious point is that each is a masterwork of first-person narration, and in the class we focus on craft and technique more than content. So Schwartz at one extreme—the first-person approach as a way to turn the personal into the general, into art—and Singer at the other, first-person narration as a different way of creating a character. That each tale is fundamentally Jewish in its origin had something to do with it, too. Schwartz was a central member of the generation of Jews, children of immigrants, whose academic achievements forced Ivy League colleges to develop quota systems (much as, in more tacit ways now, they have them for Asian-Americans), and who dominated the intellectual life of the 1930s. (Bloom, too, is a late member of this cohort.) Singer was born in Poland and spent part of his seedtime in Warsaw and part in one of the shtetls that would form a locus for many of his stories, including Gimpel the Fool. He wrote in Yiddish. He came to the US in 1935, mindful of the coming storm that would erase almost every trace of the rich Jewish culture he chronicled from the face of Europe. 

When we discussed Gimpel the Fool in class it was important, of course, that students understand this context for the story, just as it was important that they know that there was a time in the intellectual history of their culture when Freud was a dominant figure, along with Marx. In 2014 it can seem that so much has been smoothed out of our base of knowledge—perhaps partly because there simply is too much information, and partly because in the digital world all information has equal standing, so that Jay-Z, the Ukraine, and Freud all exist in equal measure, instantly available on Wikipedia or YouTube, and equally unknowable in any real sense. But the Holocaust still has cultural resonance, and the idea that the world Singer represented in Gimpel is entirely a lost world had meaning for them. 

Gimpel is a fool. The village baker—he provides the village with bread—he is eternally deceived and taken in, eternally faithful and credulous. Taunted and derided, he turns the other cheek, though he is strong enough to knock his tormentors to Krakow if he wanted to. He’s no slugger, he says. The village marries him to a fallen woman, whom he tries to adore, and who tells him on her deathbed that none of their children were his—she doesn’t know whose they are, but she knows they were not his.
This moment of her dying brings a sense of absolute betrayal to poor Gimpel, and then he is tempted by the figure of evil, who tells him there is no heaven and no hell, no God, nothing but a “thick mire,” and encourages him to urinate in the bread he makes, which he does. A nice revenge on those who deceived him and made his life meaningless—the desecration of the bread. And then, in a vision, his dead wife comes to him, burned black by her torment. “You fool!” she says “You fool! Simply because I was false is everything false? I deceived no one but myself.” And Gimpel then rejects the temptation, buries the fouled loaves he has made, and leaves the village to wander in the larger world, telling stories to children and depending on the kindness of strangers.

Gimpel is old, at the end of the story—he carries his death-shroud in his sack. Soon another schnorrer will take his spot on the bed of straw. The worms are waiting. I had to read this ending aloud to my class—there was no way to talk about it. It simply is. “No doubt the world is entirely an imaginary world,” says Gimpel, “but it is only once removed from the true world.” And then he continues: “When the time comes, I will go joyfully. Whatever there may be, it will be real, without complication, without ridicule, without deception. God be praised: there even Gimpel cannot be deceived.”

So, two stories, one written after the death of God, and the second written after the observable, nearly incontrovertible evidence of that death. Freud finished Darwin’s work, the Victorian clock-maker God that Tennyson wrote as a way to accommodate the evidence of biology and geology became the mere projection of unconscious and unknowable forces within the psyche. Thanatos and Eros war within us, Freud wrote in his last work (Civilization and its Discontents), and he lived long enough to see how easily Thanatos gained the upper hand. Schwartz and his friends, Berryman and Lowell, were young enough to be part of “the greatest generation” that endured the second war and came to maturity in the Pax Americana that followed, also known as the Cold War, and perhaps the gods of Freud and Marx proved some solace—if history was the nightmare from which one could not awake, and humankind was universally sick at heart, then, at least, one could look at these realities clearly and show them. “Why not say what happened?’—so Lowell wrote in his “Epilogue,” the last work in the thick pound of poems he made. 
Singer was older, raised in a different tradition, and though he turned his back on the religion of his father, a Hasidic rabbi, he maintained all his life the communitarian sense that makes Judaism more than a religion, living out his years on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where one might occasionally catch a glimpse of him in a Broadway coffee shop, as I once did, and then in the elderly community of Miami. He said that he practiced a private mysticism, that “Since God was completely unknown and eternally silent, He could be endowed with whatever traits one elected to hang upon Him." 

These two modes of belief—the young man who shouts at his parents on the screen not to do it, that their children will be monsters, that no good can come of it; the old wandering story-teller who imagines that there is a real world only partly removed from this world of illusion in which we live—may seem like far poles on a spectrum of faith, perhaps in somewhat the same way that the beauty of Ted Williams’ swing at bat has, at the far end of its arc, the ugliness of his decapitated head frozen in a cryogenic vault. 

And in my reading during this cold, fallow time, as I watch ideas for poems and stories bob far-out on a distant bay like freighters at rest in a blinding sun, I come back to the notion that Shakespeare already has written Schwartz and Singer, that each of them, like Hamlet, and Falstaff, and Lear, and Prospero, exist in the world of the human he created. At the end of Lear there is an ambiguous moment when the ancient king thinks he sees the feather he has placed against Cordelia’s lips flutter, as if she still had some breath. “See! See!” he says, and then he dies. She’s dead as earth, of course—he told us that. Yet we are left to wonder whether he died in a moment of pure delusion, or of redemption. Cordelia does still live; when I pick up the play tonight she will be there, embodiment of truth and love, and faith. And so does Edmund—he will give the order again, that hangs her. And Kent, the good servant, standing nearby, will follow and watch it all, and then have the grace afforded him, to speak his own epitaph. 
This is why one reads when one cannot write. 



What does one do when writing will not come?

Part 1


What does one do when writing will not come? Poems sit like freighters bobbing on the bay, waiting off-shore for a signal before they will cruise in to unload their mysterious cargo. I’ve lost the code. From time to time, a small boat putters in and docks with its trivial news. I write it down, erase it, send it to a friend. 
Winter is like this—not a metaphor but a mode of being. Teaching comes again at the end of January, a harbinger, new seeds to be set right and harvested in an unimaginable spring, 15 weeks away and counting, a semester’s span. But nothing new. The sun is the same old sun, shining thin and sere through high clouds. What does one do? One reads. 

At the solstice, a gift under the tree—a new life of Ted Williams, the splendid splinter. Written by Ben Bradlee’s son, the provenance sparks interest. That era of journalism was the one I grew up in. Ben’s dad was Newsweek’s Washington Bureau chief when Kennedy was president, and then he took over the Post. Reading his son’s book is a cultural history of the vanished generations—1930s-1980s—the arc of Williams’ life within one context, baseball, that was also, in that time, many other contexts (race, politics, show business, the unfolding of American culture.) 
A great book. As I read it I thought about the author and what might have driven him to spend ten years writing the definitive biography of one of the greatest hitters who ever lived, and what it might have meant to be a relatively minor journalist whose father ran the Washington Post during Watergate, played by Hal Holbrook.

Then I also think about how these influences might have played together to make such a great book, and also think how it will be dismissed, in the end, as a baseball book and then forgotten for a few decades, perhaps to be taken up again a century or so from now as one of the texts that explained how we lived during a certain period of time. As I reads it, it certainly seemed like a text that might explain how we lived during a certain period of time. I spent a a week in an arm-chair imagining the early 1950s, just after the war, and thinking of what it would be like to give oneself to such a project, ten years of research and reporting, and then the writing of it. A lot of work. 

Which, in the end, comes to nothing. I think it was in my junior or senior year of college that I began to prowl the stacks of Widener, the central library, when you could still do that, and I remember one day, just wandering down there in the dimness and the beautiful organization of it, I found a whole ream of novels that had been published in the 1930s and 1940s. Given how things were for me at that moment, if I had inserted some desperate note among the pages, to be found—when—when they finally junked the lot? Or sent it to some warehouse in Allston?—it might still mean something to me. But it doesn’t. Nothing does.

Except maybe. After the Ted Williams thing, I had Harold Bloom’s magisterial work on Shakespeare, The Invention of the Human. Everything for Bloom is about priority—getting there first, or if you can’t, at least talking about what it would have meant to get there first, or how his own sense of who got there first might shape how the rest of us understand and relate to the literature he absorbed as a hungry child who grew up to be a ravening figure in the epoch of literary studies that I happened to have lived through. Bloom is a pitiable figure, in one way—his arguments in the 1990s against the rise of “critical theory,” and especially against feminist and Marxist ways of theorizing literature, read sadly in 2014—a rear-guard action against a battle not worth winning, since it will be won anyway, in time, which writes us all down. But he is like Cordelia, his love of literature so deep that all he has ever known is how to say the truth. 

Bloom managed to read everyone more deeply and more thoroughly than the rest of us—a strange obsession. I have been reading Bloom’s obsession with Shakespeare most nights as I tuck myself in and seek a way of waking the next morning. He says that Shakespeare invented us. That Freud is a gloss on Hamlet, that Hamlet invents his readers, that Falstaff—who Bloom prioritizes and whom I have not yet read again—is a window into a dimension of the human that also creates us. Bloom is Falstaff, of course, the late inheritor, secular, plump, and filled with a rough wisdom. 

I’m still reading him as I toss and turn with the angst of late middle age. Shakespeare was dead by the time he was my age. Bloom suggests a secular religion—Hamlet invents us, Lear shows our fate, Prospero tempts us to imagine what cannot be, apart from each third thought, which is his grave. Ted Williams is Othello. 

I taught two stories last week—Delmore Schwartz’s “In Dreams Begin Responsibility” and Isaac Basheevis Singer’s “Gimpel the Fool.” Go read them. I won’t parse them here, except slightly, to make a couple of tosses toward the month that will come, and the warming of the earth after that.

Schwartz, the sainted, fallen poet whose best work preceded his adulthood, wakes on his 21st year from the film-script of his origins, in the disastrous early year of a long descent into the nightmare of the depression and the holocaust and the world war, to see that his attempt to prevent his parents’ marriage and his own birth could not be effected. Instead, he must recognize that everything he does matters too much. His life is real, circumscribed by his fate.

The prophet one must evoke, to understand this tale, is Freud. It’s odd to see how out of fashion Freud is, these days, when his insights and severe Jewish mysticism still form the contours of our lives. I tell my students: every time you watch a commercial on TV, you are watching Freud. Interesting, that we rejected the idea that our thoughts and feelings are constructed by our experiences as we progress through the biology to the psychology of our childhoods into the passages of our latent period and then our adolescence, etc, etc.,--in favor of some notion that biochemistry is what it is all about, the neuroscience of our dreams and so on. Science and computing will never answer the basic questions, and the fact that we have given ourselves to these failed magicians answers only to the sorrow and anger of our current reality.
Schwartz is not much read anymore—a curio from a dark age, now that things are so much brighter, ho ho. He sits in the theater of dreams watching his vaguely pompous, slightly awkward father, filled with an American ambition, court his mother. An awkward visit to her home, where he is the picture of some quiet mirth and speculation—is he good enough for her?—and then a walk along the boardwalk of the Coney Island of dreams, and as the narrator’s terror at the unfolding drama that will lead to his parents’ marriage and his birth steadily increases, the casual stroll in brilliant sunlight along the waves grows steadily bleaker, until finally his father proposes, almost against his will, and his mother accepts—“it is all I have ever wanted,” she says, and then a botched photograph and a growing unease, until finally his father leaves his mother abruptly in a fortune-teller’s small booth and strides away. The narrator, who is Schwartz, wakes finally from the nightmare into the dawn of his 21st year, with morning already begun.

When I first read this story I was 21 myself, and the savage irony of it reminded me of the anecdote that Kafka’s friends would cackle with laughter when they read his dark works. When one is young, looking into the abyss with a sort of angry laughter seems like a sort of pleasure. “Don’t do it!” Schwartz shouts as his father proposes. This seemed enormously funny to me, in 1977. I am 56 now, and it is several decades since I read Schwartz with anything other some curiosity to try to see what it was he had meant to me when I was a young man. He’s part of my bildungsroman, which itself is a book I can read only with curiosity now, and a sort of fond contempt.

But still, one day last week I taught the story to my short fiction workshop. We were focused on first-person narration, and even though Schwartz no longer is anthologized, by-passed by literary history, for a time at least, the work still seems to me a masterpiece of a certain era that we forget at our peril, and I like to have my students read things that complicate their sense of their lives, which god knows are complex enough in some ways, but also remarkably smoothed and simplified in others. They didn’t like the story very much, it seemed, though it was hard to tell. It seemed to make them uneasy. Good, I thought, on two fronts. Uneasiness is a good thing to feel, when one is a student, and learning how to not like what one reads is an important skill, too rarely taught in our cookie-cutter schools, which tend to bring literature to kids as if it has already been sanctioned, rather than still up for debate. (Does anyone really think that “A Catcher in the Rye” is a great novel anymore?)