First Place, Last Place

Has there been a more competition-obsessed culture than that of the U.S.? Probably. But I can't think of one. Horses are allowed to win, place, or show, and gamblers are allowed to attempt to make money (the track always makes money) on place and show, not just win. But otherwise, we seem to be a culture obsessed with the celebrity of first place or the ignominy of last place, although the real gamblers out there bet on the points by which team X beats team Y, so in that instance, the importance of place, of coming out ahead or standing atop the heap, has shrunk. Nonetheless, gamblers are led by the phantom of winning.

Is there much doubt that George W. Bush is at once the biggest winner (two-time president, in a manner of speaking) and the biggest loser (what project or response of his has succeeded?, and this is not a rhetorical question--I do wish I could name one success) in American politics in recent memory? Hollywood screenwriters could not have created a better parody-president. The president in Dr. Strangelove, played by Peter Sellers, seems more authentically presidential than George W. Bush; please know this is not a political statement--I am speaking strictly in terms of art. The real guy is a better parody of the president. George W. Bush is a performance artist. Did you see/hear his latest speech? What satirist could have written a more successful satire?. . . .

. . . .We've all won something, I suppose--some little competition. A card game. A foot-race. A contest in which two people try to throw a wad of paper into a waste-can. Poems of mine have won a couple of competitions, but from this vantage point, I have to wonder by what criteria my poems came out "ahead," in "first." My poems have also "lost" competitions, meaning they received no mention. They were ignored. They do not seem to have taken it personally. Good for them. As a friend once said, "One may not, strictly speaking, be offended; one may choose to take offense--or not." Thank you, W.T.H.

. . .As a low-level mere high-school athlete, I was a member of a basketball team that tied for first place in the league and therefore was "co-champion." Did we come in first? Yes and no! I still have a little plaque somewhere that commemorates the event. It's hard to believe that anyone cared enough to create the plaque or that I have held on to it. In college, on an intra-mural flag-football team, I was part of a "championship" team. Ha! What I love most of all is our name: the Moke-Hill Gophers, after a town called Mokulumne Hill in the Sierra Nevada. It is in Calaveras County, the site of Twain's famous frog-story. The team was composed of cowboys, literally, from that town; and me. I also took first place in a dormitory ping-pong (table-tennis) tournament, strictly because of a) my unorthodox style and b) defense. Incredibly as it may seem, I "earned" a trophy. So there's some evidence: a dormitory at a community college in the United States held a ping-pong tournament, for which the winner earned a trophy. Yes, the U.S. is obsessed with competition.

I do fondly recall Robin Williams's having won an Oscar and saying, a few months later, "Don't worry, folks, the Oscars aren't rigged," meaning: of course they're rigged. I liked him more for his having said that. "Best supporting actor." Best acting, or best support? In what sense "best"? What are the criteria? Who are the judges? Who votes, and who counts the votes? Whatever.

In high school, I did not compete in track-and-field, but I remember watching track-meets, and there was a class-mate of mine, Phil, who competed in a long-distance event. I think it was the three-mile race. I'm not sure they even have such an event even more. Phil always came in last. But I remember watching him finish the race, calmly and nobly. That may be my most vivid memory of watching sports in high school. Last place. The nobility of it. Phil, wherever you are, the official records say you didn't win, place, or show. But as far as memory is concerned, you came in first. Well done.

So here are poems about a) first place and b) last place.

First Place

The figure on the trophy
lifts its arms for as long
as its soft, shiny metal
will last. It doesn’t know
what it celebrates. Trophies
are good that way—entirely
disinterested. They’re
unambitious, manufactured.
They weren’t able to hear
the cheers. At landfills they
break apart gracefully.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

* * *
The Last Place

Not long from now
nor far from here's
the place where all
that matters now,
even if it matters then,
must matter to
somebody else.

To anyone who finds
this note: good luck
and look ahead
to your last place
not far, not long
from when and where
you read this--your
eyes, your mind
alive and quick
and liquid, not
concerned with doom.

Ah, bless you on
your way to where
what matters now
must matter to
someone besides
the one your are,
the one I am.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom,

Wrist

What a great old, ornery word "wrist" is. When I say it and think about it, as language, I see it walking out of an Anglo-Saxon forest, in a bad mood. According to the OED online, the word goes back at least to 940 A.C.E. in written (Old) English, and back then it meant the same thing it does today. Later, however, some people got sloppy for a while and used the word to refer to the ankle and to thigh- and calf-bones. That doesn't seem to have lasted long. "Wrist" can also be used a verb--in the game of cricket, for example. I think I've heard it used in tennis, too--"wristing" the ball over the net, as opposed to taking a full swing.

Where does the wrist begin and end? Is that an anatomical question or a metaphysical one?

Here's a poem meditating on the wrist:

Wrist

1.

The road narrows as it approaches the river.
The bridge is brief as bridges are. Beyond it,
five separate routes materialize. Seeming
parallel at first, the routes diverge.

2.

When I looked at her brown wrist
that summer, I fell in what-I-thought-
was-love. I don’t blame myself
for having thought me into love.
Her wrist was better than ideal because
it existed. So did she. Aristotle always
held a better hand than Plato’s, so
to speak, for he knew real beat ideal
every time just because it showed up.
The rest of what I knew that summer
seemed useless. It was. I do hope
she kept the bracelet.

3.

His wrists were placed under arrest
and bound. They were booked, charged,
arraigned, tried, convicted, and sentenced.
Loyal to his wrists, he went
to prison with them.

4.

The other day a woman’s wrists asked her
why she’d worked so hard. She said because
she wasn’t born a Rockefeller, for example.
The wrists said, “That’s what we thought.”
With the help of her wrists, she picked up
a tool and went back to work.

5.

By means of repetitive motion,
Industrial Society declared war on The Wrist.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

Weeds, Jobs, and Long, Tall Poems

I was talking with someone who works at a college and employs college-students. She said that for some of the students (who are 18-22 years old), this part-time job at college is the first job they've had. She and I discussed the merits and drawbacks of going to work early, as in when you are 15 or 16. I think we both had started working "full time/part time" when we were about that age--meaning that we'd held 8-hour-a-day-jobs but only in the summer. I never worked during high school because I played sports, but once summer started, I worked full time. Oddly enough (odd-jobly enough) my first paying job was as a self-employed laborer--a cutter of weeds.

I'd been meaning to write a poem about, or "out of that," experience for the longest time, but it took me, oh, 35 years to get to it. That's probably a good thing because when you write a poem about something you know really well, sometimes you are too loyal to the facts, and imagination sits on the bench. For me the poem is a throwback not just in the sense that it's about something that happened a long time ago but also in the sense that I used to write "long, tall" poems. They're in free verse, but the lines are pretty much the same length--and short. I don't really know why I got into that groove, but I did. Then I got out of it. With this poem, I went back to it.

Regarding work: it's probably a good thing, a net-plus for a "kid" to hold a job before s/he gets to college, chiefly because a) it reminds the person why college can be an economic benefit, longterm b) it induces you to encounter difficult personalities and c) it gives you some basic good habits: show up on time, pay attention to detail, get the job done. Also, if you or your family need the money, then the job is giving you part of what you need. Otherwise, I'm not Puritanical about work; there's more to life, so they say.

Regarding work and poetry (or creative writing in general): I often advise writers who are stuck to write about work. It's something they know, it brings vivid images, it often involved some kind of conflict, it can bring its own language (for example, carpentry brings "joist," bussing tables brings "Run silver!"), but probably you have some distance from the job-in-the-past, so you are free to make stuff up, too.

The poem, which first appeared in Sierra Journal a few years ago:

Weed-Cutter for Widows

I used to cut weeds for widows.
--Blue shirt, blue jeans, brown boots,
cap, a pocket knife, gloves, and
a wood-handled, saw-toothed hacker
called a devil-stick. Sweet-pea vines
rioted, overwhelmed old ladies’
clapboard houses. Yards and cars
and stuff like that had been territory
of the husbands, who’d retired
into death, picture-frames, and
annuity payments. The widows
came out on porches and waved
baggy, soft arms in slow motion
toward a place in the yard they
didn’t like. I went to work.

I cut back ten summers of growth,
sweating shirt and jeans through.
Inside the stuffy houses, the widows
napped themselves into youth, where
they married someone different who
didn’t have the bright idea of buying
a summer home in a hard High-Sierra
town full of thin oxygen and mountain
misfits. The widows woke up
and were old and shawled again.

They brought out a few dollar bills
and lemonade, too sweet. I needed
water. I was quiet and polite
and did the work,
unlike their children, who were 40
years old, mean, fat, lazy, and down
there in the Bay Area hoping Ma
would die soon and feed their greed
with Will. I walked home on state-highway
asphalt that pulsed heat. One widow
would tell another about the boy
who cut weeds. I had quite the
little business that summer. Sometimes
the widows visit me when I nap and
dream. I give them their money
back just before a wave of sweet-pea
vines crests and inundates us all.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom. First published in Sierra Journal, edited by Bill Hotchkiss.

Moisture

I called a good friend in San Diego today and told him that in the Northwest, we were experiencing a day of cold wind and hard rain. He said in San Diego it was, well, San Diego; sunny. I cursed gently, insincerely, and humorously; still I was envious.

A good day, then, to consider moisture, a word that, in English, goes back to the medieval period (according to the OED online), specifically to medieval philosophy, which at that time incorporated science. The word referred to the liquid inherent in animals and plants, and often it was called "radical moisture." One etymological root of "radical," apparently and ironically, is "root." So I guess radical moisture was natural moisture--the water infused in the tissue, if that's the right term, of plants and animals.

Here's a poem that meditates on moisture. I think the poem is more medieval than radical.

Moisture: A Study

Cleopatra’s perspiration; water her slaves
drank; Rasputin’s mucous; my great-aunt’s
tears, dispatched when, in Sweden’s north,
she discovered she was pregnant by
Sig the traveling fiddle-player; sweat on
Sig's fiddle-strings; denatured
alcohol of perfume dabbed behind an
ear before a party; party in which the
room gets humid because of human heat;
saliva I expressed
that summer we built the long stone wall
beside the cemetery; water in the mortar
of that wall: any of this and all other
historical moisture might reside in raindrops
dimpling a fish-pond I stare at now
using moist eyeballs. It’s no news we’re
mostly water, so after we die, most of what was
us is in earthly circulation—puddle, Pacific,
creek, blizzard, mist; also in other bodies
full of water, rats in Paris, a cat in Nairobi,
a toad napping next to damp gravestones,
not to put too fine a point on it.

Copyright 2007

Waiting

I remember reading once that, based on a life-expectancy of 70 years, most people will spend about five years in the bathroom--not all at once (one hopes), but total. I wonder if that's accurate. Assuming it's in the ballpark, then most of us must spend even more years waiting. Stuck in a chair, leaning against a wall, pacing, or holding a phone to the ear (while being "on hold"). It's probably worse for me because I tend to show up for appointments very early, so like those people at the beginning of Casablanca, I "wait. . .and wait. . .and wait."

It's interesting that people who are sick in hospitals are called patients. For once, an institution tells the truth! By using that name, hospitals are disclosing that if you are sick and come to the hospital, your main task will not be to get well but to wait, to be patient. If politicians were as truthful, they would openly refer to voters and other citizens as "victims," "patsies," or "suckers." The president would begin a TV-speech by saying, "Good evening, suckers! Social Security is toast! I'm spending all your money in Iraq; a lot of it is going to large corporations! What's new with you?"

I don't know how waiters and waitresses and "wait-staff" got that wait-related name and its variations. In most restaurants, they don't wait at all. In fact, sometimes they leave the table too quickly, just when you're ready to order or have a question, or right after they've given you what you did not order. I guess sometimes they wait for the chef to produce the food. "Server" is more accurate, I suppose, but it sounds strange. Maybe we need a brand-new term, like a "plate-jockey" or a "food-hauler" or "calorie-delivery specialist." No, better stick with waiter and waitress. Or server.

It may have been William Burroughs who said that the life of a junkie consists almost entirely of waiting--for the next fix. And what a great word "fix" is in this context. The junkie is in need of constant repair, but once s/he gets the fix, s/he's ruined again and needs fixing.

In my childhood, I heard people make the sarcastic comment, "What are you waiting for?", when they really meant "Start" or "Hurry" or "I'm impatient; take care of me." I don't hear that comment much any more, nor do I hear "I don't have all day!" I do hear the more direct "What's taking so long?"

What is patience? I know it's an alleged virtue. I think it may be the ability to wait without being internally (or externally) agitated. I know lots of people who look calm while they're waiting, but inside things are in turmoil, so they're not really being patient. How do you know when you're being patient? It's more than just waiting with apparent calmness and politeness, I think. It's a quality of being. The more power and/or celebrity people have or appear to have, the less they are required to be patient and the more they are entitled to force other people to be patient. Is that an accurate statement?

Anyway, here's a little poem about waiting (and I apologize for the delay):

Expect Delays

At the annual International Patience Festival,
held every other year (or so),
participants double-park on each other’s nerves;
wait in lines leading up to
unstaffed stations;
are notified appointments with a
chiropractor
have been rescheduled; ache; stand by
for further announcements;
get the runaround and put on hold;
pray, hope, digress; pass the
time;
consult obscure religious texts; sigh; check their
watches,
their messages;
ask each other if there’s been “any word”;
fall behind schedule; and,
and
believe people are basically good.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

Phrase Books

The concept of a phrasebook is amusing, I believe. The idea is that you buy a book of phrases commonly used in a language and you use that book to make your way in a country whose language is not your own. Things quickly get complicated, however, even with the simplest of phrases. Your "Goodbye" might be someone else's "Go with God." You will probably mispronounce whatever phrase you're trying to use, thereby turning it into a) strange sounds or b) a joke or c) an insult.

Then there's this problem: You want to ask someone in the country something, so you look at your phrasebook, pick out the question, and say it. The person answers. You don't understand the answer, so what was the use of saying your phrase? Or you do understand the answer but don't know what to say next. You look at your phrasebook, but of course it offers no help. In conversation, it's the second, third, fourth (and so one) things that matter, not the serve. You serve your phrase, and a response comes screaming back over the net, and there's no way you can handle it.

Nonetheless, I'm a sucker for phrase books. I bought one before we went to Berlin this summer. I think I used it once out of a possible--oh, let's say 50--interactions, and even then I used it only as a kind of prep. I had studied German long ago, and I had lived in Germany for a year in 80-81, so I had that to fall back on, but "falling back on" was about all it was good for. Rather like an old worn-out bed. Pieces of a second language do float to the surface, however. And hearing the language makes you remember things; you get into the swing of language; you get by. And we mustn't overlook the fact that because of the British and American Empires, English has insinuated itself all over the place, so even ins spite of our best intentions, our desires to blend in, we are, by default, linguistic bullies. Meanwhile, the phrasebook stays up in the hotel room, on vacation. Think of all the free vacations phrase books have taken!

This poem is based on the premise that two travelers communicate using only their phrase books. I'd prefer that every other line of the dialogue were indented, but I can't get the blog-program to let me do that. Clearly, I need to buy a phrasebook in Blogese so I can talk to my blog.

The poem:


Two Travelers Meet By Chance Inside a Phrase-Book


“My name is Carmen,” she said.
“The Post Office is over there,” he replied.
“Thank you! It is one o’clock.”
“Goodbye! How are you?”
“Do you speak English?”
“The pleasure is all mine.”
“My factory is on fire.”
“Excuse me.”
“That dog is frothing at the mouth.”
“You’re welcome!”
“My passport lies under your thigh.”
“Where is the café?”
“Keep walking to the left.”
“Please put this on your head, my painful cousin.”


Ambrose Bierce wrote The Devil's Dictionary, with all sorts of funny definitions of words. I think he may have defined "coward," for example, as "One who, in a perilous emergency, thinks with his legs.” (I just finished re-reading Gore Vidal's novel, Lincoln, in which Vidal has Lincoln signing [or not]execution orders for hundreds of soldiers who ran away from battles or who committed other potentially capital offenses. Lincoln has sympathy for those he calls "the leg men," the ones who run away, because he thinks that's how he might react in battle.) I think someone should write a phrasebook-counterpart to Bierce's Dictionary--something like the Franz Kafka Phrasebook for Foreign Travelers, a phrasebook that revels in the absurdity of phrase books.



Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

Yes We Know a Banana: A Thing Poem

A thing poem is a poem about--you guessed it--a thing. --An object, an item.



In News of the Universe: Poems of The Two-Fold Consciousness, poet, Men's Movement leader, and Jungian Robert Bly argues that the thing poem is new to the West (as in Western civilization); actually he argues that old German riddle-poems (about things) were in the right ballpark but that the West abandoned such poems. It's pretty easy to come up with thing poems written after the riddle poems in the West, however. Swift's poem about a rain-shower in London is really about a sewer-system. Keats wrote about an urn, Wordsworth about a locomoitve, Dickinson about all sorts of things. Bly's interested in a particular kind of thing poem, however, one in which the poet doesn't merely describes but free-associates. Bly might argue that poets should let their unconscious or submerged-conscious mind go to work on the object, just as our dreaming minds go to work on objects, associating freely and surrealistically. Elsewhere Bly has argued that mainstream English and American poetry hasn't done enough of this "leaping," this association. There's too much flat-footed, linear description in the tradition, from his point of view, if I'm representing his view correctly. He's passionate and insistent about his Jungian approach. Me--I'm no Jungian; or if I am, I am one by accident; or I am one and I don't know it--maybe that's the point of Jungianism. But I do like to read and write thing poems, and when a poet gets stuck, turning to the writing of a thing poem is usually a good way out. It's a way to get back to basics. Look at something, write about it, let your mind play carom-shots off it.



Here is a thing poem about a banana. I have given it the second most predictable title I could think of, not "Banana" but "Of Banana." I rather like that old-fashioned use of "of," to mean "concerning."



Of Banana


An armada of curved yellow boats
sails from tropics to a blue northern bay.
On surrounding hills, something
has happened to snow, which is
warm but not melting, is firm
and edible. Modestly we chew the snow.

In the cobbler’s workshop, scraps
of gold leather darken with age.

Tiny faces appear in fog, recede.
Air tastes of smoke and vanilla.

I shall ask that to your door be delivered
a bouquet of enormous commas
with which to punctuate sections
of lush rhetoric you bought at auction.
It is not the least I can do.

Harvesters are chopping, hacking
at sun’s abundant fruit.
Eros arrives in a Panama hat, promoting
a golden fertility symbol. From dense trees,
bright birds deride phallocentrism,
and why wouldn’t they?

Here, dear, are a few soft, white coins
with which to purchase sated hunger
before you walk back in the world,
before you must decide
how many of what to buy.

Here, dear, is charcoal. Please
use it to draw lines on thick, soft yellow paper.
Now peel back the paper to reveal the essence
of what you thought you were drawing. Are
you hungry?

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

Life-Changing Books

It's an especially interesting era in which to be a book-lover, which I define not simply as someone who likes to read but as someone who loves books themselves--who may have not just a favorite novel but also a favorite particular copy of that novel.

In all of human history, it has never been easier than it is now--if one has a bit of currency--to get a book. With the electronic web in place, the world is a bookshelf. At the same time, the book, as such, seems to be on its way out. Reports of its demise are exaggerated, but maybe not enough to quell a book-lover's fears entirely. Those who publish books think of them first (and second, and third) as "product," and the product is getting expensive to make, and there are not unreasonable demands for "sustainability," and the literary novel--to pick one genre--is something not a lot of people seem interested in. The remaindered-book table at Borders or Barnes and Noble is full of hardback novels. The real estate in such stores is taken up by romance novels, graphic novels, mysteries, and nonfiction. At the same time, libraries begin to look more like hotel lobbies with computer terminals, as opposed to places where books are stored. I wonder if, in the not-to-distant-future, used-book stores will become even stranger places than they are now--truly underground sites where eccentric readers and keepers of old-fashioned objects called "books" prowl like today's collectors of old-fashioned hand-tools or like people who horde string for no apparent reason.

So when I consider the topic of life-changing books, I'm tempted to assert that the reading of books itself and the attachment to books itself constitute the life-changing, or consciousness-changing, phenomenon, not so much the particular books that apparently pack dramatic influential power. That is, we may say that Book X "changed our lives," but in fact Book X may just have seemed to have changed our lives, while the more glacial process of reading itself may have been the real source of change. Also, a consciousness-changing book need not be a great book or even a good book. A terribly flawed book can, I believe, change a person's consciousness for the better simply becauses it creates some kind of awakening. A priest I know knows a priest who is writing an article for Commonweal, and in the article the writer-priest apparently defines "spirituality" as the intentional changing of consciousness (for the better, we hope), and 0ne can't predict what kind of book will trigger that intentionality (now there's a Latinate word!).

Nonetheless, here's a brief list of books that seem to have changed my life in the sense of changing my consciousness. I'm deliberately excluding sacred texts because they occupy a category unto themselves.

Huckleberry Finn--not for the reasons you might guess, not because it's "a great novel," although it probably is. I think I was about 11 years old, and I'd read Tom Sawyer and had a pretty easy go of it. Also on the family bookshelf was an inexpensive green hardback of Huck Finn, probably published by Grossett and Dunlap. I picked it up and started to read it--and it was tough. It was just flat out different than Tom Sawyer. I learned then that books could be hard, even if you understand the words. I couldn't finish the book then, but I didn't blame the book, no more than I would have blamed the mountain if at the time I'd failed to hike up a mountain. I also "knew"--guessed--that I'd return to Huck Finn one day, and I'd be more ready, and it would be more ready for me.

Around the same time I think I was reading books written especially for adolescents, in particular some adventure stories--hunting stories, really--by an author named Jim Kjellegaard. And not much later, I started reading the Doc Savage series of adventure novels by Kenneth Robeson. Kjellegaard later became quite obscure, his books hard to find, and I discovered that Robeson was a pretty bad writer, for lots of reasons. But at the time, these books kept me reading, kept me involved in plots, characters, and language, and that's important.

When I was about 15, my parents bought me the complete Sherlock Holmes tales and novels. It's the equivalent of buying someone their own private ocean, for I've gone swimming in those tales ever since. The character, Holmes, is unique; his relationship to Watson is mercurial; and Conan Doyle's stately sentences entrance. Whatever is old-fashioned and flawed about the tales seems only to contribute to their charm.

The Fire Next Time, composed of long essays by James Baldwin, was probably my first life-changing book in the classic sense of the term. I found it by accident in the back of a high-school classroom and read it straight through. It changed entirely the way I looked at ethnicity in the United States. It changed my view of language, of how powerful it could be. The experience was a bit like being knocked down, physically. The book is still at the top of my list of nonfiction books.

Into the early college years, Camus's The Stranger captivated me and induced me to think about "larger issues," such as whether life has any meaning and why "the rules" of life are what they are, and who really is "in charge," if anyone or anything is. I was not immune from having the usual undergraduate response to the book--what happened [in the book]? Did anything happen? I mean, I know he killed a guy, but still, what happened? Nonetheless, the book got to me. So did Barrabas, by Par Lagerkvist, and there is an umlaut over the a in par. Like The Stranger, it's a spare book that cuts to the bone of things. I always think of those books in tandem.

Poetry anthologies at the time bowled me over--A Little Treasury of Modern Verse and a couple of the Norton anthologies. Any anthologies of lyric poetry in English would have done the same; these just happened to be the ones I bought for courses. I suddenly became a compulsive reader of poetry. I feasted on it. I even liked reading the poems I didn't like. I had it bad, and that ain't good, as the saying goes. Poems by Browning, Dickinson, Hopkins, Housman, and countless others burst like fireworks in my reading-consciousness. I began seriously to write my own (terribly serious) poems. Around the same time, I discovered the poetry of Randall Jarrell and Karl Shapiro. The work was modern, but not in the T.S. Eliot way. It was smart, and it was also "American" in ways with which I could identify at the time.

A two-volume history of philosophy, written by Wallace Matson, was certainly a life-changing book, just as the two-semester course on the same subject was probably the most influential course of my undergraduate career. It was taught by George Sessions. Philosophers tend not to like history-of-philosophy courses because you really don't "do philosophy," as they say, in such courses; instead you watch the big ideas and arguments go by. But what a parade! And we "did" philosophy in the sense of having George induce us to put the ideas in friendly competition in our minds.

Subsequently, . . . .ah, so many books. Langston Hughes's book of short stories, The Ways of White Folks. . . . . Innumerable volumes of poems by invidual authors (not antholgies, I mean), including The Back Country, by Gary Snyder--his best, but not his best known, book of poems. . . . Jeffers's Selected Poems. . . . Much more Dickinson. . . .Franz Kafka's stories, especially "The Hunger Artist" and "The Metamorphoses"--the latter "blew my mind," as we used to say, back in the day. . . . James Joyce's short stories, Dubliners. . . . .Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, by Shunryu Suzuki. . . . . Accessories After the Fact (which I read when I was a junior in college, I believe), a painstaking, dispassinate deconstruction of the Warren Report on JFK's assassination. Yes, Virginia, there was more than one shooter, and there was a plan to kill him, but for our official history, we prefer the denial and the lone assassin. It's pointless to argue about it. The book is by Sylvia Meagher. It changed my consciousness because it changed entirely my view of "my" nation and its government....Jacques Ellul's book, Propaganda, which I just recently read. A political-scientist friend recommended it. It is perhaps the book on propaganda, and much of it is counter-intuitive (and least to the naive reader, like me); for example, Ellul points out that allegedly smart people like college professors are highly susceptible to propaganda (no matter the source--"left" or "right"), partly because of their addiction to information, partly because they fancy themselves smart, and when you fancy yourself, your open to propagandistic attack. . . . Robert Farris Thompson's book on African and African American culture and aesthetics: Flash of the Spirit. Brilliant. Paul Monette's book, Becoming a Man: great insight into being gay in the U.S. . . . .William Styron's Sophie's Choice, which I read in Germany. . . . A Little Book on the Human Shadow, by Robert Bly--his own idiosyncratic take on Jungian "thought.". . . . The Cloud of Unknowing, by St. Denis. . . . Snow Country, by Kawabata. . . . Rabbit, Run, by John Updike (this is out of chronological order; I think I read it when I was a junior in high school; it helped show me what "the contemporary novel" was). . . . Colette's Claudine novels--fascinating in their study of gender-and-power, gender and class. Fatima Mernissi's Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood, opened windows on a culture completely different from mine. . . . Faulkner's novella, The Bear. . . . Shakespeare's King Lear, which I finally "got" when I was about 20 or 21. The most essentially tragic play I have read. And seen. And War and Peace, a massive but exquisitely constructed novel. Just the best. I'm finishing my third reading of it. It's a beast, but a friendly beast. It lies there, knowing, distant, and self-contained, like a cat. A very large cat.

What about "the greats," however? The Iliad and The Odyssey. Yes, I read them, more than once. I recognize their greatness, how they lay a foundation. Fabulous scenes. Fascinating psychology--why Odysseus doesn't want to go to war and even gets in disguise to try to "dodge the draft," as it were. Why Achilles stops fighting. And starts again. The Trojan Horse! Scylla and Charybdis! The Sirens! But I can't say the books changed my consciousness. The same goes for Paradise Lost. A tremendous achievement. But in my case, not life-changing. And to tell the truth, boring in places, like a very long solo by a virtuoso jazz-player; you don't question the greatness, but you're still bored by the solo. Plato? Maybe. I struggled pleasurably with some of the dialogues. The parable of the cave is pretty cool. But as early as age 18, when I was taking that history of philosophy course, I knew I was an Aristotelian. Form only seems to be elsewhere and ideal; it actually is in the things themselves. Down-to-earth Ari. Unlike Socrates (at least Plato's version of the S-Man), Aristotle did not view himself or philosophy to be above rhetoric; rhetoric is essentially "the fray," the mixed up verbal and social interaction of living humans. It can be awful, and it often is, but it ain't necessarily so; so Aristotle studied it, as he studied all things. The great empiricist. "Let's have a look": that seems to have been Aristotle's impulse. "Let's keep doubting whether having a look will do any good; let's be passively aggressive; let's pretend we don't use rhetoric when we attack rhetoric; let's affirm something called 'virtue' by denying all else." This seems to have been Socrates's impulse. . . . So I guess maybe reading Plato did change my consciousness.

Essential Reading from the Middle East

Concerning some essential reading (in my opinion) from the Middle East, by way of San Francisco and Guantanamo:


According to amazon.com, a book called The Essential Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks, has earned the following "honors":

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #3,396 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Popular in these categories: (What's this?)

#1 in	Books > Religion & Spirituality > Islam > Sufism
#1 in	Books > Literature & Fiction > Authors, A-Z > ( R ) > Rumi, Mevlana Jalaleddin
#2 in	Books > Literature & Fiction > Poetry > Ancient, Classical & Medieval

That's right: Number One in Sufism (okay, let's assume that's not a massive category), but also Number One in Literature and Fiction by an author whose last name begins with R, and Number Two in all of Ancient and Classical & Medieval Poetry. And roughly 3,400th of all books sold on amazon.com. Sales position 3,400 (roughly) at amazon.com is pretty high up there for any book, but for poetry? Almost incredible.

Why is the translated (by Coleman Barks) work of a medieval poet from Afghanistan so popular in the U.S.? Well, I think Rumi's work earned the popularity the old fashioned way. It's terrific, even as one supposes the translation, which is no doubt excellent, does not do it complete justice. In an English translation, we can't get the full sense of Rumi's talent for rhythm and meter, but his gift of imagery, his wit, his learning, his intelligence, and his vast breadth of interests come through, as does his generous spirituality. Here's a snippet that may exemplify the combination of wit and spirituality often found in Rumi's work:

from On Resurrection Day

by Rumi, as translated by Coleman Barks

On Resurrection Day your body testifies against you.
Your hand says, "I stole money."
Your lips, "I said meanness."
Your feet, "I went where I shouldn't."
Your genitals, "Me, too."

The Essential Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks (Harper San Francisco, 2004), expanded edition.

Rumi was born in 1207 and died in 1273.

Barks writes (p. xvii), "Because of these troubles we are living in, I want to call attention again to Rumi's role as a bridge between religions and cultures. . . . Interfaith hardly reaches the depth of his connecting. Rumi speaks from the clear head at the center." One illustration of this connective quality: Rumi is the favorite poet of a Jesuit parish priest in Tacoma.

If you haven't looked into The Essential Rumi yet, give it a try, and it's the kind of book a person may just leap into at any point--no reading from page 1 to 300+, please, unless you simply must read that way. Jump in an have a look around. Move fast until you find something you like, and I think you will. Fair warning: You may find yourself continuing to read when you have allegedly better things to do.

As essential as Rumi, I would argue, if much more tied to the political moment, is Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak, edited by Marc Falkoff, a professor of law who represents some of the prisoners at Guantanamo (University of Iowa Press, 2007). It's a painful book of poems to read, to say something close to the least. It's also a mortifying, shaming book for an American to read. Some of the poets have been released from the prison--but only after years of abuse and of being deprived of due process, and in many cases, after having been detained for no good reason. That is, even if one sets aside whether the prison is morally or legally correct (I really don't want to set these questions aside), one must conclude that many of the prisoners were clearly detained because of a combination of overzealousness, greed, rough politics (especially in Pakistan), and/or incompetence on the part of Americans and others. The collection is one of those books of poems that pulls you in opposite directions. It forces you to see, again, that the differences between Guantanamo prison and a concentration camp are difficult to cite, and yet it confirms the essential power of language and, more specifically, of poetry. I'm not sure it's proper to speak in terms of a "national shame" because I don't know if nations can be shamed. All nations are institutions of power. But people of and in nations can be shamed. From the dust-jacket, a comment from poet Robert Pinsky:

"Poetry, art of the human voice, helps turn us toward what we should or must not ignore. Speaking as they can across barriers actual and figurative, translated into our American tongue, these voices in confinement implicitly call us to our principles and to our humanity. They deserve, above all, not admiration or belief or sympathy--but attention. Attention to them is urgent for us."

Pinsky may be anticipating the reaction of those who suspect that some of these poets might be, for lack of a better term, "bad guys." Pinsky does not respond by pointing out that even the detention of bad guys is supposed to be governed by international law and respect for human rights (how naive this sounds in these jaded times). Nor does he point out that even from the point of view of the jailors, some of these men should never have been arrested, let alone jailed. Instead he suggests, implicitly, that as you hold on to your skepticism, your worries, your anger, or your fear, pay attention. Read what some of these prisoners say. Then consider your principles and your humanity. Attention to the prisoners in Guantanamo is, as Pinsky argues, urgent for us, but it is also urgent for the prisoners.

Haircut

Here follows a miscellany regarding haircuts:


I got a haircut on Sunday.

Up through the middle-school years, my father cut my hair and that of my brothers. He had purchased some clippers, probably from a mail-order catalogue (Montgomery Ward). He gave us all buzz-cuts, and he had a buzz-cut, too, so I'm sure we looked like a family of Marines or a cult of some kind. Only my mother, the sole female in the family, was allowed something besides a buzz-cut. She chose something akin to a Katherine Hepburn parted-look, right out of the 1940s. Good for her.

Rain, shine, snow, or sub-freezing North Wind at 4,000 feet in the Sierra Nevada, my dad always cut our hair outside. That way he didn't have to sweep up anything. Ever had your hair cut while the snow is falling--around you? I have. It's become a fond memory, but its becoming a fond memory took decades, believe me.

The buzz-cut didn't become a problem until a)I turned 12 or 13 and, like every other kid who turns 12 or 13, became hyper-self-conscious and b) longer hair became the fashion, owing in part to the arrival of the Beatles in . . . 1964--if I have my history right. I entered high school in 1967, and long hair was not just a style but a statement. And there I was with my buzz-cut. Damn.

Things have come full-circle, and I'm back to a modified buzz-cut, spiked up with some hair-gel.

The culture of hair and hair-cuts is endlessly fascinating, of course, especially in the U.S., where the meaning of hair is conditioned (so to speak) by so many factors: ethnicity, politics, gender, images of sexuality, class, age, and--above all--relentless advertising, which has convinced us that hair is alive; it isn't; only the follicles are, I believe.

Interestingly, I am well past the self-conscious era of my life, at least with regard to haircuts, so when I went to work today, I was surprised when many people registered recognition that I'd gotten a haircut. I'd actually forgotten that I'd gotten one. My standard blast-from-the-past response is, "No, I got my ears lowered." My head seems to get bigger (I'm not referring figuratively to ego, although that's possible, too) and more perfectly cubicle as the years go by. I attribute this phenomenon to my being partly Scandinavian, as Americans once referred to Swedes as "square-heads." Cube-heads would have been more accurate. . . .Today a student said, "At least you still have hair" (meaning, I suppose, that a lot of other men don't still have their hair and that, even if my haircut looks stupid, at least I have hair to cut).

I also think the etiquette surrounding the question of noticing someone's haircut is interesting. Are you supposed to comment on someone's change of "hair style"? If you just say, "So, you got a haircut," are you leaving some rhetorical space open that could be filled by the following assumption: "...and it looks [or you look] funny"? Sometimes people add, a bit late, ". . . . it looks good!" Once more with feeling, please.

Barber shops, per se, have almost disappeared in most mid-sized to large cities, at least on the West Coast. Franchises like Hair Masters have replaced them. You can get a relatively inexpensive haircut at the franchises, but elsewhere, you have to drop some serious coin to have somebody work the scissors or the clippers. I think the first haircut a child receives is still a big deal, probably across all cultures. In spite of the women's movement and feminism, women's hairstyles have remained fairly stable, with regard to length and (added) coloring and other treatments. In the U.S. most women still seem to shave their legs and under-arms, too. I wonder why that's so. Anthropologists would know, perhaps. . . . In spite of or maybe because of my buzz-cut in the late1960s and early 1970s, I was a big fan, as a spectator at least, of the afro. Mainstream magazines deployed photos of afros to suggest radicalism, I remember. Angela Davis's afro became a symbol of radicalism (to some), I recall. Me, I liked it when NBA players started "wearing" afros, and I liked movies such as Shaft and Superfly in which the afro made appearances. (The sound-tracks were what sold me on the movies, however, I must admit.) I thought Joe Willie Namath's long hair was cool, although I realize I probably have to point out that Namath was a famous football player at the time. (Joe Who?). . . . .To date, I have not gotten my hair "permed." I think I probably won't, ever. When I was a kid, I wondered about that term, "permanent," applied to a hair-treatment that was so obviously temporary. Older now, I've given up on the possibility that the language connected to such things as grooming might make sense.

The best hair-story I know is still the one with Rapunzel, but I love the "Barber Shop" movies, all about African American men in barber shops, and I love Eudora Welty's story, set in a hair-parlor, "Petrified Man." It is a perfect short story. My favorite hair-poem is Karl Shapiro's "Haircut," which John Updike includes in his recent selection of Shapiro's poems. The movie (based on the musical) Hair is not as bad as you might think it would be (there's a stirring recommendation), even if it makes you wince in a few places. Treat Williams is the star, and Milos Forman directed. Beverly D'Angelo is in it, too.

Not that you asked, but "haircut" or "hair cut" seems to have entered the English language in the early 1800s. Words in which "hair" now appears have proliferated to such a degree that the OED can barely keep up.

"Hey, you got your hair cut. . . . . It looks good!" Right.

A Less Well Known Lazarus from A Less Well Known War Poem

In class we recently studied some poems about war, including such "standards" as Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est" and Randall Jarrell's "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner." Among the less well known poems we studied was "Still Falls the Rain" (1942), by Edith Sitwell, which--between the title and the poem--suggests that the topic is "The Raids. 1940. Night and Dawn." By "raids," of course, is meant the nightly bombardment of England, especially London, by German aircraft.

However, the poem turns out not to be about life (or death), per se, in London during the bombing. There are no images of the bombed city or of bomb-shelters. Instead the poem begins this way:

Still falls the Rain--
Dark as the world of man, black as our loss--
Blind as nineteen hundred and forty nails
Upon the Cross.

That is, the poem begins not so subtly. It places the raids squarely in the midst of general human suffering and sin and in a Christian tradition and does not concern itself with this particular war (World Warr II), with the Germans, or with the British. It appeals to Christ insofar as he suffered, believe Christians, for the sin that, among other things, apparently keeps driving people to make war, so Sitwell is not focusing on who is bombing whom or on who "started" the war. As far as her poem is concerned, humankind started the war. She also alludes to Cain and, not honorifically, to "Caesar's laurel crown" (as contrasted, implicitly, with the crown of thorns). Conventionally, of course, we may be accustomed to thinking of World War II as needing to have been fought and to thinking that "the good side" won, so Sitwell's poem is disconcerting insofar as it perceives the war from a completely different framework, just as Robinson Jeffers, in his poems, viewed the war as a clash of empires. Neither Sitwell nor Jeffers takes a conventional, "popular" view of the war.

Later in the poem, the speaker urges Christ to "have mercy on us--/On Dives and 0n Lazarus./Under the Rain the sore and the gold."

The reference is not to the "famous" resurrected Lazarus but to a chapter in Luke (16, verses 19 and ff.), in which there is a rich man [Dives] who wears fancy clothes and dines extravagantly every night. A beggar named Lazarus appears outside the rich man's house, hoping for some crumbs but getting none. He's covered with sores, which the rich man's dogs lick. Thus the dogs treat Lazarus better than their master does. Dives and Lazarus die, the former going to Hell and the latter to Heaven. According to Jesus, Dives then looks over to the other side (to Heaven) and asks Abraham to send Lazarus over with some water. Abraham responds by saying (to paraphrase), "Sorry, it's too late; you made your choice when you were alive, and now you and Lazarus will be separated by a chasm."

By coincidence, this parable from Luke was the subject of a homily at my parish the same week, and the priest pointed out that even in Hell, Dives "doesn't get it." In Hell he behaves like a selfish rich person and asks Abraham to treat Lazarus as a servant. In a sense, the priest said, Dives's Hell is self-created; it is as much a mind-set as anything else.

But Sitwell's poem lumps Dives and Lazarus together, as the rain (and the bombs) fall, and asks Christ for mercy for everyone, rich person and poor person alike.

The parable--which Christ tells to the Pharisees, by the way--is hard to take because there's no second chance for Dives. The poem is hard to take because Sitwell sidesteps conventional ways of looking at war, at Germany's raids on England, and at World War II, and she goes straight for a Christian theme. I told the students it was perfectly all right not to like this poem, as long as they understood it--understood why they disliked it. Ironically, it may be easier to like "Dulce et Decorum Est," in spite of of the graphic images, because to mock empty, easy patriotism is more conventional now than asking Christ for mercy during a war. Sitwell not only invokes religion in time of war but a particular religion. She also invokes a less well known Lazarus from the New Testament.

We also studied some poems by an American Iraq-war veteran, Brian Turner, who has published a book of poems with Alice James Books in Boston. He, too, does some unconventional things with war poetry. You might look for his work.

A Haunting Little Poem

Here is a poem by Arna Bontemps (1902-1972), novelist, poet, editor, nonfiction writer, and children's author--and a member of the Harlem Renaissance (Langston Hughes and Bontemps were the best of friends):



Length of Moon



Then the golden hour
Will tick its last
And the flame will go down in the flower.


A briefer length of moon
Will mark the sea-line and the yellow dune.


Then we may think of this, yet
There will be something forgotten
And something we should forget.


It will be like all things we know:
A stone will fail; a rose is sure to go.


It will be quiet then and we may stay
Long at the picket gate, --
But there will be less to say.



The poem first appeared in the magazine FIRE!!, edited by Wallace Thurman and other younger members of the Harlem Renaissance, and published in 1926. Like a lot of little magazines ("little" referring simply to circulation and subsequently connotating a literary magazine), this one survived but one issue.

Bontemps' poem is one of those wonderful but small poems that get lost in the shuffling of literary history. Such poems may not end up in one of the well known anthologies and therefore their fate is left to libraries and/or to a few scholars who may study the author. Such poems are not lesser in quality than many of the much-anthologized poems and are greater in quality, arguably, than some very famous poems. I call Bontemps' poem "little" only because it is an unpretentious, one-page lyric poem; in other ways, it's big.

Bontemps invents a form for himself here--a three-line stanza rhyming aba, followed by rhyming-couplet stanza. The voice of the poem is understated, and the images are terrific. Any poem that announces itself as being about the moon will cause temporary concern because we fear a cliche is coming, but with Bontemps' poem, there's no cause for worry. The images echo those found in Zen poetry or the poems of Rumi; they are sharp but not forced to carry large symbolism. The poem unfolds quickly but quietly until suddenly we realize that it is, in part, about a couple; perhaps they are courting; perhaps they realize the relationship isn't going well; we can't say for sure. All we know is that "there will be less to say." I think the intentional (apparently) ambiguity works superbly there. Whatever is going on with the (two?) people, "there will be less to say" after they have experienced, together, the image of monnlight on dunes and the sea-line. And in way, after we experience such a scene, there should be less to say, for the scene has said something, has pierced us with some kind of meaning, some change in consciousness. When I first read the poem, I didn't expect it to end at the "picket gate," with "less to say." It's a surprising ending, but not a melodramatic one. It's a haunting poem, but it's by no means a gothic moon-poem or a cliche moon-love-poem. I admire its spare strength, its restraint, its capacity to arrange the images so that they communicate multiple meanings. I love the image of the flame going down in the flower, as if flowers were small lamps, the wicks of which were turned down at dusk.

"There will be something forgotten/And something we should forget." How cryptic! What will they forget? Surely they won't remember every detail of the scene. What should they forget? Harsh words? Some kind of betrayal? The lines that follow don't "answer" the questions raised by the previous lines. Instead they give the bigger answer: all things pass, not just a rose, which we know is short-lived, but also stones, which will be eroded or otherwise disintegrate, and which--as parts of foundations--will fail.

A coda: Bontemps wrote a terrfic novel, better known than this poem but probably still under-rated, called Black Thunder, which retells the story of a slave-rebellion led by Gabriel Prosser.

Surrealism and Children

Our son is heading toward age 19; meanwhile, many of my colleagues have young children and in some cases have just started a family.

An older colleague once said to me, when our son was young, "You tend to be so focused on whatever age or 'phase' your child is in that you block out everything that came before as well as any thoughts about years to come." There's some truth to that. When I consider my younger colleagues and their children, I really have to work to reconstruct what it was like for my wife and me when our son was 1,2, 3, 6, 10, and so on.

One thing I do remember is how surrealism comes naturally to children. Their use of language is so playful and protean that they come up with extraordinary combinations of words and phrases. Their word-associations are ingenious. Also, everything is essentially a play-thing to them, so they tend to see the functional in artistic terms, just as Dali saw the functional clock as something that might melt as it hung from a limb in the sun. The older we get, the more likely--for a variety of reasons--we are to channel the surrealistic impulse away from us and become routine, rational, and perhaps plodding creatures.

I think I wrote the following poem when our son was four, five, or six years old--as I said, it's so hard to go back and recover moments precisely. I do recall that I was reading a paperback anthology of surrealistic European and American poetry at the time, as well as doing the maintenance-thing in the back yard of the house we lived in then. Henri Michaux was a French surrealist poet. The poem:

Miscellany: Michaux, Back Yard, A Son, Poetic Ambition, Oz

Henri Michaux says, “The ambition to write
a poem is enough to kill it.” The following words
have been reluctant to join an ambitious poem:
Epicondylitis. Actuarial. My son brings me half an acorn,
which looks like an owl's face. He turns over aluminum
chairs so they look even more like junk, or art.
“Do we need tools out here?!” he asks, with authority.
Not yet five, he can prophesy the joy
of chainsaws, V-8 engines, weed-eaters, snow-
blowers—stuff that makes us a snarling, fuel-drunk breed.
“The little I want, you never bring,” said Michaux
to his own life. His life listened—sure it did, uh-huh,
the way a stump pays attention to mockingbirds.
Digging in dirt, my son says to no one,
“I’ll get you and your little dog, too!”

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom