The Safety Buffalo

I think it was my wife who first dubbed me a "safety buffalo," although I don't know how she came up with the buffalo part. A safety buffalo is essentially the same thing, or person, as a worry wart--now an old-fashioned term, I think.

I often think, "What could go wrong, and how might one prevent it from going wrong?" Sometimes it's useful to think this way, but it's also exhausting, and I admit it does tend to take the fun out of things.

In the Catholic mass now, the priest tends to interrupt the Lord's Prayer right after "deliver us from evil," and the priest in our parish says, "deliver us, Lord, from all our useless fears," and then we finish with "for the kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours, now and forever." That "useless fears" phrase is interesting. He's right, of course; most of our fears are useless. At the same time, I assume Evolution selected "fear" for a reason, and as far as I know, the Catholic Church has no "issues" with the concept of Evolution. Sometimes caution, thinking ahead, and worry turn out to be useful--in the short run, at least, if not on the scale of kingdom, power, and glory. I sure wish Bush had been more cautious about going to war, for example.

My good friend and colleague, the late Wendy Bishop, loved the term "safety buffalo," for some reason, and she agreed with my wife that the term fit me. Wendy and I shared some Scandinavian ethnicity, and we agreed that Swedes and Norwegians may not see the glass as half-empty, but they routinely imagine situations in which the glass breaks and becomes a dangerous, jagged shard.

Here is my poem about the imaginary safety buffalo, and I hope Wendy is smiling somewhere in a place well beyond our world of fears. The poem is dedicated to all worriers out there. May you get a good night's sleep!

The Safety Buffalo

The Safety Buffalo lowers
his head and horns, considers
everything that could go wrong.
His whole head’s covered
with thick hide and hair. Beneath
these lies bone. Beneath bone
lies a bison-brain recalling well
how good things can go wrong.

The Safety Buffalo has seen
the apocalypse of prairie lightning,
heard trees explode in an ice-storm,
smelled diesel and blood
when a metal box full of humans
went spinning off that gray
line into stones. The Safety
Buffalo worries for the herd,
steps cautiously, snorts
at how carefree the antelope is,
and the goose. Death
is always loose on the prairie.
This the Safety Buffalo knows.

Heavy Light Verse

I ran across the following poem by Rudyard Kipling, in The Norton Book of Light Verse, edited by Russell Baker:

A Dead Statesman

I could not dig, I dared not rob.
Therefore I lied to please the mob.
Now all my lies are proved untrue
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?

I don't know to what statesman Kipling was referring, but the poem reminded me of George W. Bush.

Arguably, however, Bush has robbed, in the sense of funneling federal money to large corporations, a.ka. "private contractors," in many cases with no bidding process. Neither Congress nor anyone else in "power" (does Congress have power anymore?) seems to have accounted for the drained billions. It seems he has practiced this thievery both in Iraq and in New Orleans. He has certainly lied to the mob--if by "the mob," Kipling means "people" or "voters." Bush won't specify what he was doing when he was supposed to be fulfilling his National Guard duty as a pilot, and the records have been hidden. Does that qualify as a lie? I think so. He lied about weapons of mass destruction, and he sent Colin Powell to the U.N. to spread the lie. He approved the use of torture and lied about it, using a kind of two-step: a) "we don't torture" but b) "we don't discuss our interrogation techniques." He and his cohorts discuss "techniques"--quite a euphemism--to the extent that they say "we don't torture," but when they are pressed--for example, by a specific question like "Do you use 'water-boarding'?"--they say, "We don't discuss our techniques." "Water-boarding" is quite a euphemism, too--for almost-drowning someone, for making them choke on water repeatedly.

Certainly all of Bush's lies have been proved untrue (I'm not sure about that line--lies are by definition untrue), but he won't have to face the men (and women and children) he slew--U.S. citizens sent to Iraq and killed, and hundreds of thousands of ordinary Iraqi and Afghan citizens killed by bombing or killed by the civil wars that Bush's invasion unleashed. That's the thing about almost total power: it doesn't have to face its consequences. Bush will spend the rest of his life on his ranch in Texas or traveling to secure locations. Arguably, he is among the presidents most unaffected by consequences. Kennedy got his head blown off--the ultimate consequence of being president; Johnson had to decide not to seek reelection because of the debacle of Viet Nam; Nixon had to resign; Ford lost in his only presidential election; Carter lost to Reagan; Reagan was at least forced to make a speech about Iran/Contra (a minor consequences, I admit, but he was humiliated); Bush Sr. lost to Clinton; Clinton was impeached, and he was forced to admit that he lied.

I believe Bush is, obviously, a failure as a leader but a kind of mad genius as a politician., partly because he seems to have figured out that to succeed as a politician, you don't need to succeed as a leader; in fact, it may easier to succeed as a politician if you fail as a leader. He has rewritten the calculus of politics.

He measures success strictly by winning elections and draining power from opponents and quasi-opponents, but he doesn't really do anything with the power except screw up. He's not a Republican or really even a Neo-Con. He is Nihilist (please see "The Big Lebowski"). By Bush's measurement, he is a huge success, and in terms of brute-force politics, it's hard to argue with his units of measurement. He "won" two elections. Fairly or unfairly, he won them. Congress has never held him accountable. When it attempts to use legislation to block what he wants to do, he signs it and states that he doesn't have to obey the legislation. The validity of these signing statements hasn't been challenged in the courts, so Bush has not been held accountable for ignoring one branch of government. He refuses to make his attorney general resign. He made Rumsfeld resign--but so what? The war continued. He won't sign the Kyoto Accord, and he ignores rules set out by the Geneva Conventions; no consequences for him have ensued. True, some Republicans lost some elections because of the debacle in Iraq--but so what? What does Bush care about his own party, except insofar as it helped get him elected and, when it controlled Congress, rolled over like a family dog. The shift in power in Congress has been symbolic, not real. Congress hasn't checked Bush. I believe his mad genius lies in doing whatever he wants to do or what the Neo-Cons want him to do and, subsequently, in never having to face the consequences of doing what he wants. He is the wealthy kid who perpetually screws up but fails upward, upward to two terms as the most powerful "elected" official in the world. His own family seems surprised at his success--that's how bizarre the situation. Jeb was supposed to be the successful one, not the screw-up, George. He's defeated even his own family at their own game! Fascinating. His success as a mad political genius seems to be a symptom of a broken American political process. However, Bush and his supporters--and, in spite of Iraq, I believe at least 50 per cent of American adults essentially approve of what Bush represents--probably do not believe the process is broken. Reasonably, they must deduce that it is working--for them. Bush "could not dig"--could not make a living he way most people must do in the U.S. He did dare to rob, in a variety of ways. He will never really have to face "the men [he] slew"--or face any other consequences.

People were fond of calling both Reagan and Clinton "Teflon" presidents because of their gifts of slick communication, which seemed to make political friction pass by in tough situations. Reagan read texts and cue-cards expertly; Clinton spoke with great success extemporaneously, and he had a tremendously subtle sense of audience. Reagan got away with Iran/Contra. Clinton got away with sexually harrassing an employee and lying about it.

Whatever the so-called Founding Fathers had in mind when they designed the three branches of the federal government, with the hope that the three branches would share power, well, it isn't working. Bush has gotten around that system. All three branches have irreversible dry-rot.

But I think the ultimate Teflon president has been George W. Bush. He makes Reagan and Clinton look like Little Leaguers. He eschews compromise; in fact he mocks it. He's not interested in real policy successes, such as responding effectively to (take your pick) Katrina, the health-care crisis, our energy problems, the widening gap between rich and poor, global warming, the exploitation of non-citizen workers. He is not interested in diplomacy. He is not interested in data. He is not interested in history. He is interested in winning elections and, after that, doing what he wants to do, like ride a bike or appoint his pal Harriet to the Supreme Court. Mostly, he seems bored by existence, seems to have an extremely short attention-span, seems unable to put basic thoughts together or to read a simple text out loud.

Bush: our mad genius, our dictator--not, alas, our "statesman."

Chores

My family and I are moving from a house with some serious landscaping, including a koi pond, to some temporary housing, and then ultimately (God willing and if the creek don't rise, as the saying goes) to the place where so many in our generation now seem headed: a condominium.

One impetus for the move is that, at long last, I am weary of all the chores associated with gardening and with owning a house. Working in a garden used to energize me. No more. Chores (routine tasks) have become a chore (a burden); it's nice how that word does double-duty.

At dinner with friends the other evening, someone expressed the view that she didn't think middle-class or even working-class kids had "chores" anymore. I'm not sure that's true. Probably a lot of children and adolescents help raise families. But I took her point; the idea of teenagers, especially, being asked regularly to weed a garden, cut grass, help repair the house, etc., may belong to a bygone era.

Here's a quasi-philosophical poem about chores, as I say goodbye to some kinds of chores and hello to others in the coming months:

Chores

I am what I do, and I
do what I can, so I am
what I can do,
which now is watching pale
rose light, dusk after some
day we had. I used to be
cutting grass. That
was a long moment ago
when things were so what then,
the grass a long example.

I bow my head, evening,
acknowledge tasks, which
add up to me,
a who whose having done
is such as he is to be.

Rabbits At Airports

I saw on the televised news the other day that a military airfield had been over-run by rabbits and that, somehow, the rabbits were interfering with radar. I'm not quite sure how rabbits can interfere with radar, but I guess it's possible; at any rate, some of the personnel at the airfield were rounding up the four-legged, long-eared usual suspects--and transporting them elsewhere, I hope, not killing them.

The episode reminded me of when my wife and I flew to Paris from Sweden, on Swedish airlines (SAS). We landed in Paris, but the planes were in quite a queue, so we had to wait out on the tarmac for a long time. The Swedish pilot was a bit miffed and came as close as a polite Swede could to saying something snide about the French. I also remember that two things were going on at the time that made Swedes nervous because both meant that Sweden would have to get closer to mainland Europe and be less autonomous. A bridge from Sweden to Denmark was being proposed and debated, and Renault and Volvo were thinking about merging. The former ultimately happened. The latter deal fell apart, chiefly because the Swedes didn't trust the French, I'm afraid.

In any event, as our plane sat on the tarmac, we looked out the window, and on the rather lush grass between runways were . . . many rabbits! It was quite a humorous site. Huge planes, small rabbits. Ridiculously, we were sitting in an aluminum tube, and we had paid for the privilege of doing so, while the rabbits, who had no bank accounts, were enjoying themselves, outside, near Paris, munching away in the fresh air. Out of this experience came the following poem:

French Rabbits

Rabbits greeted our airplane in Paris.
On grass between tarmac strips, they
looked like brown pockets plump
with tobacco and francs. They
moved cautiously, as if we
were hungry or German. Some
of them were shopkeepers, worried
and energetic like Balzac’s people.
Others were grand in their
miniature arrogance, standing
on hind legs like DeGaul, looking
down and up at once, saluting the sun.

Copyright 2006

Revisiting Europe

I'm scheduled to give a paper at an the international conference of a Law and Society academic organization. I'm talking about Langston Hughes's political poems, especially the ones he wrote about specific issues, in some cases even specific legal cases, such as one involving a House of Representatives member named Arthur Mitchell, who sued railroad companies because of their Jim Crow rules, and who prevailed ultimately at the Supreme Court level. I think I may be the only literary scholar amongst social scientists; that should be interesting.

The conference is in Berlin. The last time I was there was in 1981, and of course to visit what was East Berlin, I had to go through checkpoints, return to West Berlin within a short span of time, and buy a certain number of East German deutschmarks. Now the wall is down, Germany is united (although I'm sure issues remained to be worked out), and the Cold War has seemingly been replaced by something as constant but nebulous and as easy to manipulate, politically: "the War on Terror." Obviously, terrorists who want to harm the U.S. exist, but at the same time, I think politicians like Cheney have a worldview that somehow requires, needs, a bifurcated world. But I'll leave this to the Law and Society folk.

On a more routine level, something called the Chunnel exists now--a highway under the English Channel. When I traveled from London to Mainz (Germany, where I was to teach for a year at Gutenberg University) in one very long day, I took a small ship from Dover to Ostend, and virtually everyone but me and a young Irish woman got terribly seasick because the waters were so rough. It was quite a spectacle. Of course, she and I didn't really know why we didn't get sick; something to do with our inner ears. I think at one point we just looked at each other and shrugged.

Here's hoping all goes well with my journey from the U.S. to Berlin via Amsterdam, and here's hoping all goes well with your travels. In the meantime, here's a poem remembering the channel-crossing some 26+ years ago:

Channel-Crossing

Irish Girl sat on a crate,
topside. Cigarette-smoke
out of her mouth joined
English-Channel mist.
American Me stood beside
her oafishly. Everyone else
but a bemused British crew
was puking. A man threw up
into the wind. Wet, pink
pebbles flew our way.
Below-decks, a danse-macabre
of vomiters staggered,
careened. Irish Girl and I
didn’t know why we
weren’t ill from the heaving,
pitching barrel of a boat. Her
smoke smelled fine. I
made her laugh, once only,
can’t remember how. Her
eyes were dark blue,
her hair dark brown but
with secret plans to become
red. This was when
the Tunnel was still
a Jungian blueprint beneath
the ocean. We docked, Ostend.
Irish Girl took a train
different from mine. A
widening channel of years
later, I do hope she’s alive,
never been sea-sick, and
laughing.

Midsummer

I have a colleague whose husband is extremely fond of the longest day of the year in the northern hemisphere: June 21, a.k.a mid-summer. I told her that he should become an honorary Swede because the Swedes are enthralled with mid-summer, have large celebrations, and see all that sunshine (almost 24 hours worth) as due recompense for those long winters.

I've spent a few days in the far north of Sweden at both the bottom of winter (New Year's Eve) and the height of summer. In the former, the sun just gets above the horizon and then goes to sleep again--only a brief hello. In the latter, you have to cover the windows if you want to get any sleep. My grandfather came from a large family in Boden, a garrison town up north; he came to the U.S. in the very early 20th century and became a gold miner--that is, one who works full time in a gold mine, drilling, setting dynamite charges, loading ore cars: nothing glamorous about that. Allegedly he was well known for being able to use very few dynamite sticks to produce large amounts of ore.

When I taught for a semester as a Fulbright Scholar at Uppsala University in Sweden, I mentioned to students that I had roots in Boden, and they had a good chuckle. Let's just say Boden isn't considered the most cosmopolitan town in Sweden. But actually it's a nice town--great old railway station, wonderful farms nearby, a fine old church--which I saw represented on a pewter plate my whole life. Actually to visit the church in my mid-twenties was a bit disorienting. One gets accustomed to something being only art, not reality.

Here's a small poem about being in a cafe in Boden in the summertime:

A Café in Boden, Sweden

There were tables under trees, dappling
on white table-linens, waitresses snug in skirts
and starched white shirts. There was the fresh
Swedish breeze, a tinge of Swedish sadness,
which is composed of history, stoicism,
and routine. There was Swedish spoken:
efficient, supple, sounding like a creek.
There were we; we were there. Some
laughter, not much. There was cardamom
in the rolls, a flower in each vase. There
was a sense in which our lives had been
established by others for others and were
to include this interlude at an outdoor café—
a kind of play that wouldn’t presume
to have a major theme or conflict. There
is this clarified memory of the scene,
Swedish café, outdoors, Boden, far north.

Copyright 2007

Avalanche; Landslide

I'm reading a terrific little novel published in 1947 (in English) by the Swiss writer C-F Ramuz. His native language and the novel's original language was French. I don't know what C-F stands for or why it's hyphenated.

The novel concerns the village of Derborence, high in the Swiss Alps, but not high enough, for it was wiped out by a landslide that was really a mountain-collapse. A tall, massive piece of the Alps simply fell one summer, covering the village, which was used chiefly in the summer by shepherds. Of course, the mountain fell in the summer, just after many of the shepherds had arrived. There was at least one survivor.

Here's a link to a photograph of the mountain, post-collapse, and if you look hard enough, you can see a little chalet that was spared--it was up just high enough, I think:

http://www.trekearth.com/gallery/Europe/Switzerland/photo23337.htm


The novel's in the plain style of French realistic prose that I like a lot: novels by Balzac, Anatole France, Zola are in this style, or at least I think so. The last time I read French not in translation was about 1973. My teacher sarcastically complimented me on my Spanish accent when I spoke French. C'est la academie. Other readers prefer Proust to Balzac and A. France, I realize. Flaubert is somewhere in between, I think, but leaning toward the realists. But please consult scholars of French literature for the real story, so to speak.

According to the OED, "avalanche" applies only to a snow-slide, not to a land-slide or a mountain-collapse. Apparently "la valanche" was once in use, but the l fell away, so to speak.

An avalanche hit the small Sierra Nevada town I'm from--before I was born. It destroyed a schoolhouse, that is to say, THE schoolhouse, and the town chose never to rebuild it. So after that, children and adolescents in the K-12 bracket had to be bussed 12 miles to Downieville from Sierra City to go to school. It's still that way. My elder brother was in the transitional group that started in the Sierra City schoolhouse but was induced by the avalanche to board the bus.

Apparently Sierra City, when it was a wild, woolly, youthful mining camp/town was wiped out, or nearly so, twice by avalanches in the 1860s, but those camps were pretty make-shift affairs, tents and shacks, whereas nowadays, there are many well built, well established residences, above which loom the Sierra Buttes, at 8,000 feet or about 4,000 feet above the town--with nothing between the town and the mountain except a precipitous slope on friendly terms with gravity. An avalanche has not hit the town since the 1950s, when the aforementioned schoolhouse was destroyed--with no children or adults in it, thank God.

Here's what I think is a whimsical poem about the avalanche, but first let me give props again to C-F Ramuz and his novel, When the Mountain Fell.

Avalanche

In my hometown, an avalanche ran over
an empty shack, crossed the highway,
crushed the schoolhouse. The children
were all home eating boiled peas,
scratching themselves, wanting to go
outside in the snow once more before
bedtime.

That evening’s event ended
schooling in the town. Children ever
since have traveled twelve miles to go
learn in the next town.

Cameras remembered the sight
of snow versus building. People
would recall the sound without
describing it. They couldn’t go
around talking about how loud
snow could be—how long the sound
lasted, how it was sustained, patient,
and terrible. No, better to say,
“That was really something, that was."

So far,
all descendants of the avalanche have
stayed on the mountain, melted,
slipped into the river, and traveled
toward San Francisco—there
to continue their education in
the Bay.

Copyright 2007

Ghosts

I need to search library-holdings on line to discover the extent to which anthropologists have studied ghosts across cultures. Has there ever been a significant human community that was without some notion of ghosts--spirits of departed people that coexist with living humans and that prefer to occupy--haunt--certain places or times? Hard to imagine a ghost-free culture. Intriguing to imagine the differences, across cultures, in concepts of ghosts.

Some 25 years ago, an uncle of mine died, around Christmas time. He and his wife, my father's sister, lived about 100 yards from us all throughout my childhood. For a long time they had horses, and the pasture featured one of the greatest frog-ponds in history. I worked for my uncle for a couple summers; he ran heavy equipment, built roads, and operated a rock crusher. I spent one summer busting up boulders with a sledge hammer. It was like old-school prison with hard labor--except of course I got paid a minimum wage, was not surrounded by criminals, and could go home: quitting time was 3:30, I remember, because we started at 7:00 a.m.

One year after he died, we decided to visit his wife, my aunt. It was cold outside--winter in the Sierra Nevada. My father decided to drive the 100 yards in his pickup, so my brother and I, then in our 20s, got in the back of the pickup. We pulled up near our aunt's house; all the lights were out. We assumed she had made an early evening of it, and we decided not to go over and knock on the door. The truck was parked and turned off, and my brother and I sat in the back, freezing. Suddenly a blast of warm air came out of nowhere and poured down on us, disappearing as quickly as it had appeared. We were far away from my aunt's house, so the air could not have come from her fireplace chimney. The truck was turned off, so the heat didn't come from the truck. No doubt it was some explicable pocket of warm air. No doubt. Nonetheless, I'm still 40% convinced it was the spirit of my uncle, chiefly because the visitation was so mischievous, impulsive, mercurial, and not a little intemperate, just like him. Later I read that some African Americans, especially in the South, among others, think of such anomalous blasts of warm air as spirits.

I never wrote a poem about the incident because I couldn't find a way to do it in a way that seemed fresh. I just couldn't quite get the right strategy for the poem. These things happen.

But I have written ghost poems. Here is one. It imagines that ghosts can and may produce memoranda, and it attempts to empathize with ghosts, rather than demonizing them. I've often found it appealing to blend the language and rhetorical situation of something bureaucratic, like a memo, with a subject that is not bureaucratic. The blending creates a kind of torque, in my opinion. At any rate, the poem:

Memorandum From a Ghost

I prefer not to think of myself
as a ghost. The term “assertive absence”
stands nicely for me. After a while,
I exist if you want me to. If
you don’t materialize, nothing
will represent what represents
me. Imagine a connection between
me, you, and the building. Imagine
me, and I’ll brush you lightly
with a cool caress, just enough
to send some of your oldest instincts
scrambling up the ladders of your
DNA, then jumping into the fluid
of your spine. It is my pleasure.

Copyright 2007.

Elegies

To start by defining: An elegy is a poem of lament, usually concerning a person who has died but sometimes concerning something else that has disappeared. A eulogy is similar, but it's usually a formal address, not necessarily a poem, and it's often linked directly to a funeral or a similar rite.



If you just stuck to elegies in the poetry of almost any culture, you'd probably get a magnificent cross-section of that culture's poetic heritage. The elegy tends to get the best out of poets who try it. Sometimes, of course, its gets the worst, meaning the most cliche, overwrought, or sentimental. Poet Richard Hugo--I think he wrote this in The Triggering Town--suggested that poets wait a certain set amount of time after a person has died to write an elegy about that person. I think it was either six or ten years.



Two of the most famous elegies in English happen to be poems I don't much like. One is "Lycidas," by John Milton, written about a young friend of his who drowned; and the other is "Adonais," written by Percy Shelley about his friend, the great poet John Keats. It is hard not to recognize the mastery in these poems; they are learned, accomplished, eloquent, and finished. I've always found both to be overwrought, however; they take me away from the persons being elegized. They are like freestanding monuments--magnificent but ultimately unrelated to what they are allegedly about. But of course this is just my opinion, and my opinion is in the minority. Samuel Johnson agreed with me (that is, I agree with him) about "Lycidas," but most people who know Milton's and Johnson's work say that this judgment was one of Johnson's few slips.



My favorite elegies include Gerard Manley Hopkins' "Felix Randle"; W.H. Auden's poem about the death of W.B. Yeats; George Barker's sonnet for his mother, who seems like she was one tough woman; Randall Jarrell's "Death of the Ball Turret Gunner," which, technically, is "spoken" by the dead gunner, but is in fact an elegy for soldiers in general--in six superb lines; John Crowe Ransom's "Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter"; Robert Lowell's "For the Union Dead," which contains the fabulous line, "A savage servility slides by on grease"; Langston Hughes' "Lament for Dark People," which is a daring but successful elegy, spoken by a collective persona, about people of color who have been enslaved and otherwise displaced; Emily Dickinson's poem # 68 (or #89, depending on the numbering system), which is an elegy that resists being an elegy; and Dickinson's #340 (or #280), "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain."



After my father died in 1997, I struggled with how to write about his death. I kept writing, but I didn't finish anything satsifactory. I kept Hugo's advice in mind and didn't rush things. Probably the most satisfying elegy, at least from my perspective, that came out of that writing sprang from a mundane, dutiful task: sorting his tools, something my two brothers and I did. I think the task and the tools themselves were subjects oblique enough to help move my language away from overt sentimentality. I do mention autumn in the poem, but only because we happened to sort the tools in the fall; that is, I wasn't going after the old autumn = death comparison. Anyway, here it is, "Sorting the Tools":





Sorting the Tools


With such fashioned metal and wood,
he didn’t mean to leave his mark, imprint
“I am.” Mostly he was building shelter,
earning wages, securing premises. Also,
he was one to impress his will on
the present, not the future. That
rubbed handle nonetheless bears
an inadvertent mark only his palm

could have left. This other handle’s
darkened by days, by years, of perspiration,
his specific salts. This mechanism here—
he repaired it himself. Note his deliberate,
improvised way, the practical jazz
of rural labor, making things keep
functioning when parts aren’t available
right away. This workshop is cold.

Outside, oaks have dumped all leaves
and acorns, have stripped themselves
down to gray, lithe muscle, ready
for Winter. A bear broke down
the biggest apple tree. This duty
makes us sorters sad when
we’re not smiling. Mostly this
is tedious work. Every now and then
we recognize we’re awed by what
the tools tell us about how difficult,
steady, and determined his work
was all those years.

from The Coast Starlight: Collected Poems 1976-2006.

Paradise Lost, Presumptuousness Feared

John Milton's epic religious poem, Paradise Lost, is, like the Odyssey and Hamlet, one of those great works that seem to insist upon remaining central to the (Western but perhaps even global) culture, although I grant that "the culture" now consists chiefly of video screens--like this one--of one kind or another; corporate franchising; and the fusion of military, industry, media, and capital; and great chasms between poverty and wealth. I am cautiously pessimistic about the centrality of literature, but to the extent canons of literature exist, Paradise Lost remains among them, even as the canons do and should shift over time. Some works are carried downstream or evaporate, sometimes for good reason, but Paradise Lost seems as close to permanent bedrock as you can get.



To continue, ill-advisedly, the geologic comparison, Paradise Lost is a Mt. Rainier or Mt. Everest kind of work. Even if you don't love it, you still have to stand in awe of it. Samuel Johnson said, famously, of this epic poem, "No one wished it longer." (I usually think the same thing about movies by Oliver Stone.) But Johnson still granted its greatness. The complete and consistent mastery of blank verse for over 300 pages; the superb imagery and phrasing; the fusion of Classical and Biblical learning; the fabulous scenes and plotting; the rhetoric (look at the speeches by Satan's cohorts as each one develops a different argument for attacking God); the wonderful combination of structure and decoration: all this comes together to forge a monument of words.



Therefore, when I mention the following quibble with the work, it is as if I'm throwing a pebble at Mt. Rainier: the poem is as astonishingly presumptuous as it is accomplished. That's my quibble. Milton presumes not just to know what God thinks but what exactly God says, and by this I mean not that Milton quotes the Bible but that he makes up speeches by God--and by Christ, and by Satan, and so on. That is, of all the awe-inspiring characteristics of the poem, the greatest one may be the characteristic of, well, pride. Rereading Paradise Lost recently, I admired it as much as if not more than I always admired it, but I also found myself, upon reading a great passage, thinking a) that's a great passage and b) that's a great passage that compeletely fabricates "God's" mind. Of course, Milton might say, "And your point is . . .?"



The pebble I'm throwing is theological, although that term is a bit fancy for the situation. Temperamentally, intutitively, I am simply much more likely than Milton to begin by assuming I know almost nothing about God. No doubt Milton would agree with this assumption--I mean with regard to how little I know. The issue of my learning vs. Milton's learning aside, I'm aligned with St. Denis, to whom is attributed the work, The Cloud of Unknowing, one premise of which is this: If you think you know something about God, you are wrong, no matter who you are, what you've studied, and how much you think you know.



Having read and digested, so to speak, St. Denis's work, I wrote the following poem, which is rather on the opposite end of several spectrae (I hope I have the Latin plural correct) from Paradise Lost, to say the least:



Mortal Devotion


(The Cloud of Unknowing)


Life suggests I
should prepare to die,

implies it would be
glad to help me

get set. Death might occur
before the end of this or

that sentence. St. Denis,
about prayer, says this:

Start by praying you may
live long enough to pray.

I try to get ready,
am no quick study,

think that it is all
done, that I hear a call.

I don’t know, so
help me, God, to go

on.


Copyright 2006, from The Coast Starlight: Collected Poems 1976-2006.

A Visit to a Movie Studio

I heard on the radio today that those who rate movies according to who should see them (children, adolescents, teens, or adults) have decided to take cigarette-smoking into account, as well as representations of sex, violence, and cursing. Apparently they will take the context of smoking into account, so apparently some smoking would be appropriate for all ages. The premises underlying and assumptions connected to this decision by the movie industry are too abundant and contradictory even to begin to discuss. As I understand it, the old Hays Code, which is the ancestor of the present rating system, arose in part because of the scandalous trial of "Fatty" Arbuckle for rape and murder. (I think he was acquitted, but his career was ruined.)

At any rate (or rating), the news-story made me think about the only time I visited a movie studio--Paramount--some years ago. A friend I'd met at a screen-writing workshop (at the Squaw Valley Writers Conference) took me there. We took the workshop from Tom Rickman, who wrote "Coal Miner's Daughter" and received an Oscar nomination. My friend's been in the business a long time, and I admire his resilience in such an unforgiving industry as the movies and in such a tough town, professionally, as Hollywood. He's a writer and a producer, and he's even done some acting and directing. He's talented, versatile, down to earth, and of good cheer.

First we visited the bungalow area, where the Ladd Company (as in Cheryl and Alan and, if I have it right, Alan, Jr.), which was/is housed at Paramount. (The intricate web of production- and distribution-companies and studios is but one element of Hollywood that mystifies me.) The actor William Atherton, who's in the Die Hard movies, was walking around outside. We exchanged hellos, kind of like ordinary human beings.

Then my friend and I walked around the studio. My first impression was how quiet it seemed. Not much going on. Then I seemed to get the idea that a studio is mainly a hive of sound-stages--so of course the studio, per se, would be quiet. (I remember seeing the sound stage for the TV show, "Soul Train.") We also saw an (empty) concrete tank, really just a parking lot with little walls, which, when filled, serves for all manner of lake or ocean scenes. I like that part of Hollywood--making "reality" out of something very simple, so that Griffith Park will do very nicely for the "Africa" of Tarzan movies, thank you very much. Movies are supposed to be "fake"; that's what makes them movies. I think that's why I like BBC productions so much; they do so much with so little, rely a lot on costumes and interiors and not too many fancy camera-shots.

For some reason, the studio, especially the back lot, made me melancholy--something about the sight of those fake "New York City" streets and storefronts, on the backlot. Something about all the unplugged lights, all the grim, basic, hard work that goes into "making pictures." It is an industry, after all, one that has an uneasy relationship with "art." I think I tried to capture the melancholia in the following poem:

Back Lot, Paramount Studios

Like a prostitute’s face, the facades

are blank and professional, ready

to be reeled into routine fantasy.

Objects and people here exist

in quotation marks: Two “police”

cars sit outside a “bank.” A “criminal”

gets made up. The virtual hush is

holy. Then someone drops a portable

light in the “barber shop.” The loud sound

is real. Ghosts of dead stars are paid

scale. Spirits of dead executives scrub

pots in the commissary.

Sunlight has an agent.

Shadows have hired a publicist.

Copyright 2007

Animals and Humans, Part Two

The "Sea Monster" blog referred to old concepts such as personification and anthropomorphism. There is also an ancient form of literature that seems unabashedly to personify, for it uses animals as the characters in stories; this form of literature is the fable. By being so explicit in its use of animals, however, fables actually don't personify. Instead of turning animals into humans, the fable turns humans into animals--sort of in the way actors become characters.

Probably the most satisfying part of ascribing human motives or attributes to animals is that we know we're wrong; the ascribing we're doing isn't literal; that's what makes it, and makes animals, humorous. Mules persist in certain behaviors, but they aren't stubborn, literally, in the way humans are. Foxes may be clever, but they are clever in an entirely foxish way. They're not being clever. They're being foxes. One way for us to appreciate their being foxes is to speak of them in human terms, all the while knowing we're not literally or scientifically speaking of them as humans. The use of figurative language and figurative thinking is simply a process of appreciation, not of scientific description, which can of course co-exist with figurative description. That is, a scientist can enjoy a good fable, especially one in which a scientists is played by--by a lemur, let's say.

Following is a fable-poem, a story that has simple origins: I simply noticed that a raven is mentioned in the story about Noah's ark. The dove from that story is famous, but I wondered about that raven, so I made up a story, which is mostly tongue-in-cheek, so I hope you take it that way:


Fable: Noah and Raven


And he sent forth a raven
Which went forth to and fro
Until the waters were dried up
From off the earth.

Genesis 8:7


Notice: Raven didn’t return and make a report.
Didn’t like the voyage from the first in fact.

Wasn’t surprised when, deep into the cruise,
Noah went sea-mad, tossed birds

Up into the wind. They fluttered back
To deck, bewildered, bruised, and flappable.

Raven thought, This isn’t working.
Then Noah, becalmed, dispatched Dove

And Raven on recon. Dove cooed.
Raven cawed, wondered Why not send

Seagull or Duck? Hence the term “water
birds.” Humans—as thick as two planks!

A portly black kite, Raven rode the breeze,
Alighted on a shred of dry land,

Ate surfaced slimy creatures. Told Dove,
Hey, you’re nuts to complete the mission,

Said, You watch, they’ll make your image
A symbol of something fine, hunt

Your kind, cook tenderness off your hollow
Bones, thank God not you for it, eat.

No big surprise to Raven when
The Noahs finally showed, parked the Ark,

Unloaded, promised God to be good,
Began to subdivide. The grandkids

Laughed like apes, threw rocks at Raven,
Flung filthy anti-avian epithets.

The little bullies wept for days
When Raven hired snakes to put

The fear of God in them. Old
Bird-brained Noah, though, turned out

To be almost all right. His hair went wild
Eider-white. He’d stumble out,

Toss bread-crumbs Raven’s way,
Tell the brood, Stop being s’goddamned

Mean to animals. The Old Man seemed
To have his doubts about Dry Land,

Spent most nights alone in the mildewed
Ark, playing cribbage with God. So

Wonder not, children of the Weather Channel,
Why millennia later ravens are resentful,

Strut snidely, rustle wings,
Curse us in Squawkese—us and our endless

Multiplication. They build nests like
Carpenters, love hard rain, keep their black

Exteriors as sleek as gangster cars,
Dive-bomb languid lovers two-by-two

In the pigeony park, know how
To read the rainbow signs.


Copyright 2007

Sea Monster

One of the first things we learn when we learn to analyze literature is the concept of personification, wherein something non-human is described in human terms: the sun awoke, the tree waved at me, the boulder ignored me, etc. Around the same time, we're likely to get introduced to the broader epistemological concept into which personification fits: anthropomorphism, wherein everything is fitted to a human scale.

It is always tempting, of course, to describe something in human terms; metaphors, similes, and analogies that personify come much too easily to mind, so we're likely not just to personify but to do it in a manner that's cliche: a double error. And if the personifying metaphors are mixed, then (to mix metaphors) we have a hat trick--a triple error.

Even if we don't personify, per se, however, is there any way not to view the world in human terms? True, it's probably better to describe a tree in a way that doesn't compare it to a human body (arms, hands, etc.). In fact, Joyce Kilmer's infamous tree poem gets into trouble because the personification is mixed and the tree-human seems to be doing impossible things, even as we agree to let the tree be human for a moment. But even if we're not explicitly anthropomorphic, aren't we still always implicitly anthropomorphic? . . . . Some colleges have courses with titles like this: "Literature and the Human Experience." As opposed to what? Literature and the dog experience?! All we know is human.

But as poets (not philosophers), we can pretend to emphathize, I suppose. That's what I did in a poem I wrote many, many moons ago. It was the first poem I published in a national journal, as opposed to a school-publication or something local. The basic move I make in the poem is a very old one: writing "as" a creature, so that the creature "speaks." Of course this is not literally possible. It's clumsy poetic ventriloquism. At the same time, the exercise does force a body at least to try to think less self-centeredly; to imagine.

While I was attempting to imagine and empathize, however, I was really mainly just playing with language. The poem is really "about" certain words and sounds I like, and the business about the sea monster is secondary, from my point of view if not the reader's. Also, I think this poem is from a time when I had just begun to study "deep grammar"--the Chomsky idea about the grammar that's allegedly in the bedrock of all our brains. I was learning to diagram sentences using "transformational grammar"; it was great fun, but I have no idea how accurate transformational grammar is with regard to describing what goes on in our brains when we produce language. I see another philosophical problem has reared its head (personification): how well can we know the brain by studying the brain with a brain? Hmmm.

Nonetheless, I did want to demythologize sea monsters--I do remember having that particular goal in mind. Assuming they exist, sea monsters must have a pretty rough time of it. Being a monster in the ocean has to be a tough job. And as if things weren't tough enough, there's always some Ahab out there wanting to turn you into a nemesis or a symbol or both. At any rate, here it is--an old poem about an old sea monster (and thanks to the late Quentin Howard, the editor who took this poem, giving a young writer a boost of confidence):


Sea Monster



I drift beneath a grammar of sharply etched shapes
and clear contrasts. Eddies dance as if to mock
my dumb back as I pass under a cove’s calm surface.
Sometimes a seabird’s shriek thuds through thick
water. I feel forever dark weight of water.
It’s as present to me as my own body as I push
through it with ridiculous flippers. One day I will
just stop and drop to ancient mud;
clouds of mud will mushroom out about me, swirl,
disappear on currents. I’ll roll on one side
with one eye buried in muck and one still staring
at black water mottled with insinuations of light.
A sound will grow in me, rise out of my
mute years, build into a moaning like a sunken
ship’s crushed hull, then race into a scream smothered
by seawater, seaweed. A white bird will cock its head, thinking
it’s heard a fish, dip to the surface, and seeing nothing,
sail back to bright bluffs. I will have become
an inundated continent of grief, overwhelmed.


Copyright 2007