What I'm reading

The book that changed my direction toward the moments described best by poetry is one I happened to begin a couple weeks ago, Danse Macabre, a biography of Francois Villon by French historian Aubrey Burl. I vaguely remember reading Villon many years ago, mostly because I was reading a lot of erotic or bawdy poetry then as much of my own poetry was focused there. 

But Burl writes of him

Villon was born in an age of turbulence, a time of vast contrasts in wealth and poverty, in piety and villainy, in barbarity and artistry. It was a period of change during which he rejected the sterility of [common] verse in favor of sharply realistic poetry...Villon was himself a contrast...Many of his verses are remarkable descriptions of the decent delights and indecent depravities of the Paris that he knew so well: bishops and brothels; priests and prisons; clerics and criminals; Te Deums and taverns; ladies of the nobility and ladies of the streets. This empathy with everyday life and his awareness of its brevity enabled him to write poetry so ingeniously crafted that it seems to speak without art, person to person, to his readers.

I don't claim, as Burl also writes, "artistic brilliance" as a condition of my writing, although there was a period when I wrote formal poetry. It made me appreciate the work that goes into that. Here is a bit of Villon.

When I consider the dry bones 

In charnel houses, skulls lacking name, 

Which were the poor or the wealthy ones?

Masters of Requests, men of fame

Or common porters? Now the same.

King's man, merchant, soldier, baker, 

To this none-ness they all came,

Bishop like a candle-maker.

My other primary read, or rereading, is Poets on Street Corners, an anthology of Soviet dissident poets by Olga Carlisle, with her husband half the team known for translating Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. This 1970 paperback was the place where I'd first found the Anna Akhmatova poem I quoted in my last post, and it has remained with me since at least the early 80s when I bought it for the .25 cents penciled on the cover. Aside from Akhmatova the other poet I remember best from this book is the controversial Yevgeny Yevtushenko, whose opening to "Babi Yar" still haunts me.

There are no monuments on Babi Yar, 

A steep ravine is all, a rough memorial. 

Fear is my ground--

     

 

 

 

"By Way of Introduction"

I've wanted to note what has been going on in the world for quite some time but find myself in the position of someone trying to write history as it's happening, trying to write about the events as if they've ended only to discover a new ingot of information that explains or confuses the situation further. Finally, I've decided the medium I need to use is poetry. 

I used to write a lot of poetry and for a long time. It's hard to say I gave it up; rather that I found prose was better for what I was writing. I'm returning to verse because it's the vehicle in which I can identify a moment. 

For my inspiration, I am looking to the resistance poets of many periods. But my model is Russian poet Anna Akmatova, specifically "By Way of Introduction."

In the terrible years of the Yezhovshchina, I spent

seventeen months in the prison lines at Leningrad.

Once, someone recognized me. Then a 

woman standing behind me, her lips blue with cold,

who had of course never heard of me, woke up from

the stupor that enveloped us, and asked me, whis-

pering in my ear (for we only spoke in whispers):

"Could you describe this?"

I said, "I can."

Then something like a smile glided over what was

once her face. 

The company is good

I don't remember where I got this book, but I do remember looking at it several times before actually buying it. I finished reading it last night after several years of picking it up, reading a few chapters, and putting it back down. That's often how I read novels nowadays, in short spurts that add up. 

I wasn't always impressed by the writing--too thick in places, like an overfilled pastry, where what I want is simpler, smoother--but when I was I was deeply impressed. 

<Faith spreads the blanket over the piano. At the woodpile, she balances a log on the chopping block and hoists the ax over her head, her belly pushing her off balance. Then a contraction comes and she drops the ax. Has Ray ever said the word love? Has he ever praised Faith's beauty, or has he ever held her and whispered with his lips against her hair? How could he say those things to her last night? How could he say all the things he ever said to her? 

Balancing the wood, bringing down the ax, she stops crying and gets furious. Over and over, she thinks, He has no right. She leans into the chopping, panting, fierce. The effort seems to lessen the pain. He has no right. The words fit with the rhythm of her chopping. Ugly words, from the very start. You can watch TV if you fuck me first.>

This is the author, Goldberry Long (I may have finally chosen to buy this book simply for its author's name), describing the titular character's mother, hugely pregnant with Juniper's brother Sunny Boy Blue who will, in the first sentence of the book, throw himself off a ferry on its journey between Seattle and Bainbridge Island, setting in motion the frantic, furious memories and flight of the narrator. Sunny called information from a bar on the wharf, written her number and the name Juniper Tree Burning, on the wall next to the payphone, and then thrown himself into the spray. That last sentence above is the way both she and runaway husband Ray remember as the first words he said on meeting Faith. Juniper, now living under the name Jennifer, a medical student and newly married, has a last memory of Sunny that's damaging: Sunny Boy Blue, the Backward Boy, full of cigarettes and vodka and a constant hack, kidnapped her from her own wedding for her gifts. A book of photographs and gasoline-soaked tennis balls, lit and dropped into the Rio Grande. 

Later, when she leaves her husband in a panic, Jenny kidnaps her own jilted bride, Sarah, who will become her best friend, her sparring partner, and eventually, in some ways, her salvation. Together, like some mix of Runaway Bride and Thelma and Louise, but sans the violence or abuse, they are in search of...something. It's never really clear. But the drive is picturesque and the company good.

There are issues, of course, many of them. Much of the novel is told in flashback, sometimes from Jennifer's and sometimes Juniper's perspective, while much of the present is in present tense, sometimes by Jennifer, sometimes Juniper, sometimes an insistent third person narrator. None of that is an issue, and frankly I think Long did a good job with her self-determined unreliable narrator. 

But there are questions we end up with: The above-mentioned thick writing, so winning in places, slows down the reading of the last chapters, when Jenny/Juniper is actually moving very fast and very chaotically, and I found myself skipping large patches of text to match my reading with the action. How did Sunny Blue Boy develop from terminally coughing, sickly, piss-smelling child to often drunk, chain-smoking, world-traveling, charming speaker of several languages? In addition to Sunny, Juniper's hippie parents, disappointed mother and dissolute father, show up to the ceremony and, except for figuring heavily in the flashbacks, then disappear from the narrative. Granted, the time in the present is only a few days, but she doesn't call or even think of them in the present. And Maggie, bar-owning mechanic, where does her incredible anger toward Jennifer come from? 

But here is what Long gets right. First, there's a happy ending, and novels just don't often have happy endings any longer. (No, it doesn't involve Sunny. He remains dead.) And then this, which I didn't read until after finishing the book but which explains to me why I stayed with it for years. Not a part of the narrative, but a Note From the Author tacked onto the Reading Group Guide in my edition: 

It seems to me there are many fine books about the angry young man taking his journey of self-discovery across the American landscape. There are few, however, about the angry young woman.

Now that was worth the getting through. 

 

People the barricades without me

 I hadn't promised to anyone except perhaps myself, and had only mentioned my intention to my wife and mother-in-law, but I expected to attend a small protest here in my small midwestern city. It was sponsored by the March for Women's Rights, the same organization that had set up the anti-trump protest in DC around 2017's inauguration I had missed, as well as one in 2019 in Madison I managed to attend. 

I had somewhat made plans  in the way I do, keeping in the back of my mind while my day goes on were I intend to go and what I intend to do once there. But I read an article this morning--I forget where and can't locate it again--that was a recognition of the necessity of this sort of constant protest, spurred by the recent Texas Law and the number of states trying to ape it. It is a bad law and I am against both it and the attempts by other places to make the same law. But this article had one interview that stuck in my head all day and kept me finally away.

One of the article's interviews was with an older woman who said, and I am paraphrasing here, "Will I be at the protest today? No. It's a protest against the right thing, but Roe v Wade was decided 50 years ago, and I've marched in hundreds of protests to keep it safe, and it's obviously had no effect at all. We shouldn't have to keep marching after something becomes law. I'm tired. Maybe we need to lose the right for a generation in order to remember why we fought for it."

Bitter? Oh, definitely. But it's an earned bitterness. In driving my mother-in-law home, I passed the park where the protest had just started. I saw a number of people I know, all of them over 60. 

Of course, there were other protests in other larger cities and I don't doubt there were thousands of people of child-bearing age marching and shouting and making a ruckus. But that isn't the point. This woman, whose name I can't locate, is right about one thing. We shouldn't have to keep marching after something becomes law. We've marched and made noise for a half century, and if all that has led to is the ease with which a Republican majority can effectively ban a legal and safe procedure, then we have done nothing. Is it wrong of me to agree with her that perhaps we need to lose the right to them for a generation to remind us why we marched? Maybe. But I speak from the perspective of metaphoric sore feet. Those women with more at stake and sorer feet have the right to suggest maybe it's time to step back. 

The Holiness of Lift and Drop

 

Two months ago I was asked to be part of a service celebrating the holiness of work. Most people assumed I would talk about my pastoral or chaplain work, but I wrote this about a dull, plodding job that I discovered had its own holiness. This is the five minute version I went with. I wrote a longer version to get the story out and may turn that later into a longer essay. 

THE HOLINESS OF LIFT AND DROP

    I used to work short-term jobs, most of them through an agency. There was a plant in Mankato, LMH Quality Packaging, that put together candy bags for local businesses. I rode my bike there one day and was put on the assembly line, checking bag seals. But after a little bit I was called into the foreman’s office and told, because I looked like someone who didn’t mind harder work, I would be moved.

I was taken to a room that was pretty big although there was only one table and one man in it. The fellow was a little shorter than me and what he was doing was walking around the table, which had sides about a foot tall, with a shovel. There were different candies inside and he’d dig into them and then drop them again before taking another shovelful. I was handed a similar shovel, a short-handled grain shovel, and left in the room.

The guy, whose name was Gary, told me what the work was without stopping or slowing down. What we were doing was mixing candies for the assorted candy bags you get around Halloween or party treats. About every hour someone else come along, take the table which was on wheels, and bring in an empty one. Then a half dozen other people would bring in about 20 10-pound bags of different candies—Sweet Tarts, Skittles, Peanut Butter Cups, Tootsie Rolls, the kinds of candy were always different—and dump them into the table. Our job, he explained, was to walk the length of the table and then around, dipping the shovels into the candies, and then turning the shovelful over. Every 10 minutes we’d change directions.

That was it. Not a very hard job. But shortly after starting, I was bored and my arms ached, especially my shoulders. My legs were sore from the walking and pivoting. My forearms ] jolted each time I dug my shovel into the box and it connected with the bottom. Sometimes the hard candies broke or the softer ones mushed and then I’d have to reach in and dig them out. And I was bored. God, was I bored.

At our first break, Gary gave me pointers. “Angle the shovel gently so you don’t hit the table bottom. Let the momentum carry the shovel just above the pile and then let them slide off to one side. Keep your legs bent at the knees and your legs won’t hurt as much. Stay exactly opposite me and you won’t have to hurry or slow down, just keep the same pace.” I did that and it was easier but no less boring. I hollered over to him “How do you deal with being bored?”

He said, “Bored? I never think about it. I just focus on one thing: the shovel lifting and dropping. That’s it. Everything else just gets in the way.”

I was surprised, given my experiences with Zen and meditation, I hadn’t caught onto it sooner. It was kitchen work, simply the repetition of movements without haste or worry about it’s being done. The job would never be done I realized, more tables with more candy would come in, and it would always be done by the end of the day because another two guys would take the shovels for second shift.

The rest of the week passed by with aches of course, and some foot sores. I learned to wear sneakers instead of boots, to ease the shovel because it didn’t matter how much I loaded on the shovel, it would always be added to by Gary. And I drifted, letting my mind wander away from monkey-mind, and let thoughts come, go, stay, whatever they felt compelled to do.

The work was holy, by which I mean there were people who enjoyed those candies and enjoyed the variety available. Even if no one bought the bag and it ended up in the landfill, the insects and mice would eventually eat the candy. It might not be good for them nutritionally—it wasn’t good for you or me nutritionally—but it added a little sweetness and pleasure to their lives, and I could hope for no more than that.

Joys and Concerns: Guy in a Wheelchair

 

About a month ago I was visiting a patient at a facility that recently reopened to me. We were sitting in one of the common rooms, chatting, watching TV together. A resident I didn't know was wheeling by and as he passed the door he said, "Chip? Chip Mahr?" I said, "No, I'm Bob," and showed him my badge and repeated, "I'm Bob, I'm the chaplain."

He came in and said, "Your name's not Mahr? You're not related to him?" I said, "I don't think so." Then he started talking about how much he enjoyed living at the facility and what good care they took of him. He was younger than the usual resident, late 60s, early 70s, and looked in fairly good shape. He mentioned that his house was visible from one end of the facility.

At some point, he made reference to what brought him there. "Just this January, this happened," and he dropped his head to show a large impression, like someone had stamped it, in his skull. His hair was just starting to cover it over. "I was just walking down the street and the next thing I know I'm waking up in March at the hospital. I had slid on some ice on the sidewalk and been knocked out. Brain bleed, coma, all the good stuff." He was pretty okay with it, he said. He had lived alone and didn't have any family and now he was here and they were making up his new family. He repeated that the food was good and they took great care of him.

I asked what he had done for work and he said he'd delivered packages. "Here 's the funny thing. I used to deliver to places like this and I'd walk in and I didn't know anyone. But pretty soon someone would come up to me and just start talking. I'd end up sticking around longer just to talk to them, you know, they didn't have any family or friends visiting, so I just felt good talking to them about anything. And now here I am, one of those guys I used to talk to."

Working in hospice, we often deal with people who have been ill for a while or whose ailment has been apparent and can be traced back. But it isn't always that way. Sometimes what changes our lives is as simple as an unseen patch of ice that puts us in the position of our patients. As with a lot of things, that's neither good nor bad. No warning, sudden change. It happens. I'm not suggesting we keep an eye peeled for the unexpected, that'll drive you nuts. Just being aware it can happen to us and the people we love is sobering.

Flashy queer stuff

 

A new patient this morning, a retired funeral home director, said to me something along the lines of, When you're older you start reminiscing more often. He thought it was funny that, some 20+ years younger than him, I was already doing that. But it's true that much of my time while driving or doing crosswords is spent with the equivalent of 16mm film clacking in the back of my head. 

In 1973, I was a fat, ungainly, probably acned tween, although the term wasn't used then, on the way from middle school to high school. In the next year I'd start acting in school productions, reading pulp novels, and lose my virginity. But at 13 I was just a schlub who, on Friday nights, stayed up late to watch The Midnight Special. 

Most of the artists they played were pretty good, if not terribly innovative. I mean, I was just starting to listen to groups like the Doobie Brothers and Steely Dan and appreciate the comedy of Monty Python. But Mac Davis and Anne Murray were more the stuff I'd see, and they were all right, although I could hear them in regular rotation on local radio. But in November they played the David Bowie 1980 Floor Show. 

I can't say if I knew Bowie was appearing on that show or not. I'd heard "Space Oddity" of course. It had penetrated even the stodgy AM wasteland of rural upstate New York. There had been something to the sound that appealed to me, so it's possible I was paying attention that he was headlining. 

But the first minutes of the show, a videoed version of the two night farewell to Ziggy Stardust Bowie performed at London's Marquee Club that previous October, did not prepare me adequately for the moment as he began the title song "1984" and two of his backup singers stepped forward to rip the gaudy gauzy costume he was wearing from him to show he was actually wearing a spangled bustier with fishnets and garters and high heels. That moment smacked me across the forehead with a force it would take me decades and my first experiences with LSD to identify as pleasure in the unexpected and unexplainable. 

I would go to bed that night having sat on the edge of my dad's padded rocker for an hour and a half hearing sounds and seeing things I couldn't articulate to anyone. On Monday, no one I knew or asked had remained with the show much beyond the first minutes. "You kidding, that flashy queer stuff? What was that, anyway?"

It was flashy queer stuff, no mistaking. And while my response was not equal to the imagined reaction of Christian Bale in Velvet Goldmine, it was a solid, rock hard love that's lasted my life since. Bowie's sexually charged pas de deux with strutting Mick Ronson awakened feelings in me I couldn't articulate and certainly couldn't act on for years. My first Bowie was the Changes One album bought that week at Barker's, the local department store that everyone knew had the better selection, and played deep grooves into the nylon. 

Decades later, teaching the Orwell novel, I tried to introduce it and make its messages relatable to classes by playing cuts from Diamond Dogs for them, trying to explain what seeing the songs acted out was like. But it left them staring at me like I was showing them nude photos of their mothers. I suppose some things, like the life-altering media experience one goes through at that certain age, are  untranslatable.