Off By Heart
July 30 2014


My neighbour built his house
from the ground up.

From its foundation

poured on bedrock,

to the strong spine

of its steeply pitched roof.

He has every tool imaginable,
organized
and meticulously tended.
So they come easily to hand,
inanimate instruments
given life
in his strong skilled grip.

The muscle memory
of hammering a nail,
slack-wristed
centre-cut.
The exquisite economy of action
in its centrifugal arc,
and the hammer-head, landing exactly
with a dull precise thud.

My instrument is a cheap ball-point pen
on blank generic paper,
used carelessly
then tossed aside.
But I too, take joy
in the pride of craftsmanship

things that last.
The telling line break,
the plangent word, finding its place
a clever verse, rephrased.

Something worthwhile, remaining
from the numbing day-to-day,
when busyness threatens
to consume us whole,
leave no mark
we ever existed.
A small measure
of my interior life,
a permanent record
of me.

As amongst all our possessions
only our houses out-live us.
We, mere custodians
who will pass them on
a little the worse for wear.
How a house becomes a home
lived-in well.

And though books decompose, paper burns
a poem may also endure.
A favourite verse, the spoken word

recited,
learned

off by heart.
Like a body revived
with the kiss of life,
words inspired
with breath.

I envy his skill. But I think what each of us do, different as it is, gratifies us in a similar way:  this idea of leaving something behind; making something good enough to last.

This is another poem based on the idea of poetry as an oral art form:  that a poem is meant to be recited and heard, not silently read. I like the conflation of breathing and inspiration:  to literally inspire, because breath is life; and to be inspired. That is, to bring words to life with the kiss of life; like artificial respiration, literally breathing them out. 

I’m a little leery of “how a house becomes a home”. I know the phrase reeks of cliché; but I suppose clichés persist because they contain an essential truth, and elegantly express it. And I think they can be used well in poetry if they’re strong enough to give the reader pause, invite her to truly hear it as if for the first time.

I like, in the beginning, the focus on the hand:  the idea of manual labour, of handiness; the hand as a symbol of both strength and precision. And I like the embodiment of craft:  not just hand and wrist and grip, but the “strong spine” and “muscle memory”, as well as the pouring and the hammering. The final stanza of the poem echoes this, with more allusions to the human body:  off by heart and kiss of life and inspired breath. There is a kind of purity in physical labour, and I want to imply this same feeling of muscularity in the assembling of words and ideas.

Historical Distance
July 28 2014


When we say The Great War
a century after its final shot
there are mostly puzzled looks.
How can war be Great, they seem to say.
And there is only irony, not greatness
in a noble death
for a stupid cause.

The First World War was named
in 1918.
I am surprised
that with Europe exhausted, millions slaughtered
some sharp-eyed observer
was so quick to predict

the Second,
direct descendant
in a dynasty of war.
As if this were inevitable, like progress;
industrial killing
even more efficient,
its profiteers
richer and richer.

Now

there are small wars, smouldering conflicts
on every continent
all at once.
The world is constantly warring,
but with no declaration, or final shot
we have yet to anoint
a Third.

Although once we thought
the Third World War
would incinerate the planet.
So be thankful, perhaps
that we have learned to get on with our lives,
ignoring
the pall of smoke
the mangled bodies.
Safe in our tribes,
bound by the ties
of culture, and blood.

In modernity
the art of prediction
is served best by thinking the worst.
Historical distance
has proved unnecessary.

In 1918
they were already biding their time
to the next.
And now, even better
distracting ourselves to death.


I was shocked to read this (in an article by Burt Solomon -- published July 22 2014 on The Atlantic Wire -- who attributes some unnamed British journalist). I had always imagined that the designation Great War morphed into First World War only after a second erupted 25 years later. In retrospect, of course, we can see how the Treaty of Versailles sowed the seeds for the second; but that was hardly evident in 1918. After all, wasn't it also known as The War to End All Wars?

Another lesson of that war was the value of empire. We think of exploitation and colonialism, and of racism, its evil sibling. But the Roman, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and British empires were surprisingly cosmopolitan, as well as tolerant: pay obeisance, pay your taxes, and we'll leave you alone. It was the idealistic Wilsonian call of "national self-determination" that undermined a peaceful status quo: that nation-state became smaller and more ethnic; the call for more and more subdivision endless. When ineffective nation-states offer no protection or stability or rule of law, than people naturally turn to their more reliable tribes: the native tribes of blood, the adoptive tribes of culture and language and religion. Think of modern day Iraq. Destructive centrifugal forces are set in motion. ...Which, I know, is a lot to glean from the 3 short lines that end the 4th stanza!

A world war in the Europe of 1914 seemed unthinkable. Here, now, in the peaceable kingdom (Canada ...fortress North America) we also think ourselves immune to war. And overwhelmed by unimaginable suffering, desensitized by the endless litany of crises, and feeling despair at problems that seem unsolvable (the Israeli/Arab conflict comes to mind!), we have become adept at tuning out. "Distracting ourselves to death", as it were.

Setting out to write a piece like this was very daunting for me. It's a bit too political and historical and impersonal. It has a flavour of idealistic advocacy I find very difficult to pull off in poetry. So I'm very pleased with the result. I think it was the language that invited me in: the play on "great"; the dynastic metaphor offered up by first, second, and third. Not to mention being energized by the shock and despair at the revelation that set me off in the first place: that it was already, in 1918, being called the First World War?!!

I think my impetus also comes out of the context of what's happening these days, in the first two decades of the 21st century. I've been an attentive observer of world affairs for almost 50 years. But I think the onslaught of crisis after crisis, as well as the medieval levels of brutality and ideology, are all unprecedented. Was the Enlightenment only imagined? For one, who would have thought that after the Holocaust, genocides would still go on? Or that gleeful beheadings of sectarian rivals would be happening, based on a fundamentalist perversion of one of the world's mainstream religions? Or that in the most stubborn act of colossal ignorance, climate change would be smugly and strenuously and persistently denied by important decision-makers, despite a vast and urgent scientific consensus? The feelings of helplessness, despair, and misanthropy are almost overwhelming. So I'm glad I could write out (which is a writer's way of working out) at least something of this.

New Fathers
July 23 2014


My nephew sends me pictures
of his beautiful baby girl,
which I dutifully archive
in my overflowing in-box.
Because it would be disrespectful
not to.
And who am I
to give him pause?

New fathers
are enthusiasts,
their delight infects us all.
And so her pictures sit,

unseen, but undeleted
guilt-free.

There are few pictures
of my childhood.
When the world did not revolve around kids.
When my parents, undone by technology
would leave the camera behind.
And when there was more hardship, than prosperity
who had the time?
So my undocumented life
will not live on
in posterity.

We were raised

as free-range kids.
Then farmed out to teachers
to be professionally finished;

our parents pre-occupied

with grown-up life, important work,

in a culture that mostly deferred

to authority.

Until, in the fullness of time

we slipped into adulthood
unobserved.

Which is just as well,
because who will ever revisit
this abundance of pictures?
And what does it mean
that to be real
it must be viewed through a lens;
modern meta-lives
performed so self-consciously?

But the power of a photograph
is impressive as ever.

The inner life, behind

that inscrutable smile.

A frozen moment, scrutinized

with the intensity of stillness,

like a theologian

parsing holy verse.

How simple shades of grey

conjure such big feelings;

the sweet pain

of nostalgia,

all the firsts relived.

While I have walked softly

left no trace.

Can reinvent my past

exactly as I wish,

unconstrained

by evidence.

Looking back
from a distant future
I could never have imagined, then.

Where possibility

no longer seems infinite.
And where old fathers
are not so enamoured by newness.
Not so quick with a camera
or filled with the stamina
to shoot.
Not so sure
a picture captures the truth.


Honestly, I'll get to those pictures soon!

But really, I am charmed and impressed by his delight in fatherhood.

Nevertheless, like inflation in anything, the abundance of pictures devalues any single one. The exercise in creating vast archives of childhood seems not only obsessive, but pointless: after all, as the poem says, will they ever even be looked at? And is a thing only valid if it's captured on film/video/electronic bit? What about simply losing oneself in the moment, in the flow, in unself-conscious life? Since a picture is all about serving the future and saving the past, it seems as if the present somehow gets lost.

I'm not an "old father": old(!), yes; but father, no. So there is a little poetic license here. But the perspective of age is valid. Yes, one tends to become more jaded and less energetic. But one also tends to skepticism and doubt; to a deeper questioning about received wisdom and assumed certainties. For one, I think it's far better to lose the picture while cherishing the experience, and then move on to the next, fully immersed.

On the other hand, I admire the urge to share; as well as a new father's earnest sweetness in assuming the rest of the world feels just as giddy as he does.

Meanwhile, I'll go on living unobserved, documenting myself -- however inadequately -- if not in pictures, then in words.

  ... Except That They're Present

July 20 2014

When I walked through the woods
after learning the names of trees
the path seemed clear.
As if a lens had found its focus
and the soft greenery sharpened.
As if a flat canvas
had acquired depth,
every tree
stood separate.

Even though names are mere conceits
disguised as knowledge;
what more do I know, after all
but one more word?

Yet how could I live
without language?
Navigating the world
in an incurious blur,
getting by
on grunts, and gestures.
Where I couldn't think
big thoughts,
abstraction, and concept
would be impossible.

If all language is metaphor
then in my head
a parallel universe exists,
one

among the billions.
So in the simple act of forgetting

whole planets perish

stars go dead.
When all would seem lost, yet the world goes on,

indifferent

unwitnessed.

The woods are familiar now;
my feet find their way, thoughts drift off.

I am a simpleton here

ignorant, unlettered,

but intently receptive

to the messy profusion of life.

So I have started on sound, and listening better;
to birdsong, and trees that fall,

to wind

portending the weather.

Though I know nothing of birds
except that they're present,

somewhere

in that green amorphous curtain.

Their calls merge

the underbrush scurries,

all alert

to heavy footsteps, laboured breath.

In this cathedral of nature,

where there never was

any sacred silence

for me to disturb.

Where I need not be sure

of even a little

I've seen and heard;

no bird yet identified,

no tree referred.

The woods are deep,

hidden things, swarming

in dappled leaves

underneath rocks.
Walled-off by words,
when I would prefer
to know only forest.
To find myself lost
and speechless.
To walk
as if no one had been here before.


I think this is about the bliss of ignorance, the limitations of language, the smug certainty of naming. And about reductionism set against a more organic vision of the whole.

Without language, we would not be human. Higher order thinking would be impossible. The world beyond sight and touch would be a blur. We would have impoverished inner lives. And because history wouldn't exist and culture would be thin, we could never know our forbears, would be lost to our descendants. The argument is that knowledge allows a deeper and more nuanced appreciation of things. And it certainly does feel powerful and all-knowing to walk through the woods, mapping a clear and certain path; identifying birds, calling out trees. This taxonomic knowledge helps order our attention, helps engage us in the surrounding world. It presumably enhances pleasure and deepens meaning. This is the argument for birders, who identify birds by their calls, annotate their plumage, compile lengthy life lists.

Yet there is a counter-argument: that in this reduction of the whole to its parts, we miss the real truth. This is certainly the lesson of ecology. A clear-cut that's been replanted, after all, is NOT a forest, notwithstanding the presumption of "reforestation": it's a monoculture plantation of trees. The organic whole is so much more, down into the soil and up into the air. So the message in this poem is a call for synthesis, not reduction. It asks you to chose between the forest and the "tree that fall(s)". It asks who might be more filled with wonder, feel more pleasure: the speechless, but observant, walker; or his all-knowing counterpart? I argue on behalf of the walker, who listens to the whole forest; who hears "birdsong" instead of calls.

The "deep" woods in the final stanza is more than mere cliché. It's meant to call back to "depth" in the first, and so illuminate the two ways of knowing. (If you missed this, I'm not at all surprised: it's a ridiculous subtlety, and hardly fair to even the most attentive reader!)

In the first stanza, there is the superficial knowledge of names, the illusion of knowing. As well as a slightly ironic -- not to mention skeptical -- reference to the Biblical injunction of naming: that in giving Man the power to name things, God not only confers dominion, but elevates and separates us from the rest of His creation.

In the final stanza, "deep" is meant to refer to a way of knowing that is more receptive, organic, and wholistic; one free of preconceived notions and received wisdom. The references in the final three stanzas are very intentional. There is flora and fauna (leaves and birds); soil ("underneath rocks") and air ("wind") and the 4th dimension of time ("portending" weather): so again, the whole forest, not just the trees.

Of course it's ironic that I would appear to inveigh against language -- and even more, against metaphor -- when everything about me is language; and when the poem itself is an intentional metaphor based on language, speech, and illiteracy. But the poem isn't against language; it's about the limitations of language, about its place. How, by their very nature, words get between us and reality. How language privileges processing over feeling and experiencing; how it creates distance; how it neatly orders the world and so hardens our thinking. I love language. And I tend to intellectualize everything. But there are also times for immersion, flow, letting go.

I had terrific fun with the 2nd last stanza. I wrote it after the poem was well finished, and while I was scanning through for what I thought would be the last time. I found myself still hung up on making this idea crystal clear (again, the fundamental mistake of not trusting the reader, of too many words): that is, the idea of being receptive to the symphony of sounds without reducing each call to an exercise in bird identification, without the gotcha-like focus on assigning species and names and checking-off lists. Also, for whatever reason, I hadn't yet overcome the compulsion to get something like "bird identification" in there, somewhere. So the stanza began with "merge", which nicely played off "curtain". And the fun came with keeping that sound going, while not making anything seem shoe-horned in just for the sake of rhyme: where it's just the word you'd expect, and seems to naturally fall into place. Which I think I succeeded in doing. (It goes like this: "scurries", "alert", "disturb", "sure", "heard", "bird", and "referred". And then continues into the final stanza with "words" and "prefer".) Not to mention finding a place for "identified" that didn't seem too contrived. A good editor would probably work on me to throw this stanza out entirely. But since I'm my own editor, and -- like most writers -- tend to regard every word as precious and inviolable(!), it stays! Because it's not just the fun of rhyme or the compulsion of "identified". I also like the way he becomes a clumsy interloper. I like the challenge to the romantic stereotype of nature as some sort of cathedral: reverent, and silent. I like the comfort with uncertainty; the humility of acknowledging unknowability.

I would highly recommend a fantastic podcast: an episode of WNYCs RadioLab called Words -- released free on iTunes Aug 9, 2010. (I know this because I still have it saved on my iPod!) It explores the relationship between language and thought, and is well worth listening. It explains a lot about the 2nd paragraph above.

Incomprehensible Glass

July 18 2014

On the window, above the sink
a fly

standing still.

Microscopic feet

holding fast,
grip, detach
at will.

Gravity hardly matters

when a creature so small

can fall any distance
and not be killed.
Can hang upside-down
as matter-of-fact, as flat-on-the-ground.

Or in zig-zag flight

his elemental skill.

Who sees the world
through invisible glass
he cannot possibly breach.
Kaleidoscopically
via multi-facetted eyes.

A memento mori
in my cheerful kitchen,
where the laws of physics
are so very different
for each.
Whose time goes fast, compared to me;

when seconds, at rest
must feel like days.

He walks, I swat
and off he darts,
like a shot, past my head.
An inscrutable fly, incessantly buzzing
beating against the pane.

Until he stops,
as if gathering strength

or an exquisite act of evasion,
held
by surface tension
incomprehensible glass.

He looks almost decorative, in his stillness,
a life-like pendant
pinned to her dress,
a piece of eccentric art.
Back-lit, against the window,
each tiny detail
precisely etched.

How unnatural this seems,
a creature of flight
immobilized.
As still
as a compressed spring
hair-trigger tight.

Where I wish him dead.
And he

intent on the light.


Lydia Davis, a writer I much admire, writes extremely short stories that are much more like flash fiction or poetry than the usual narrative form. She contributed a piece to the recent Atlantic (July/August 2014) about her creative process. I recall referring to her in a previous blurb as well.

She says she starts by sitting at her desk and putting down anything that comes to mind -- her thoughts, or simple descriptions of what's around her, carefully written and revised. She gave an example from her notebook -- "Although the house seemed very bright, clean, and elegant, one could tell by the number of flies that swarmed in it, landed on the furniture, and crept up and down the windowpanes, that something was rotten." -- and then explained how flies walk up and down the windowpane in front of her desk. (And also delightfully explained that the original "crept" would have been revised to "walked" because that's what they do: they are simply making their way, and it's only solipsistic observers like us who see it as furtive. Or at least I think that's what I think she may have meant: she actually explained this by making a reference to Nabokov, which went completely over my head!)

I love writing about the small and the diurnal. And I also love exploring orders of magnitude: zooming in and out from the macro to the miniscule; alluding to how different orders of magnitude can co-exist, obliviously over-lapping in time and space. So a fly on a windowpane was irresistible to me.

And, in words like "inscrutable" and "incomprehensible", there is also this idea of the unknowable other. We have a tendency to anthropomorphize; I suppose part of our innate urge to understand and explain, to discern patterns, to experience empathy. But where truly knowing is impossible, to admit ignorance is a necessary act of both humility and respect. Originally, I had an "ee" rhyme going into the final stanza, and was tempted to use something like "intent/ on freedom": a shameless anthropomorphism. So I'm so much more please with "light".

I like the idea of memento mori and death contrasted with the cheerful kitchen; of the insignificant with the momentous. And I like the ambivalence and tension in the two views of the fly: the wonder of creation, of a beautifully rendered piece of art, closely observed; in contrast with the nuisance bug, casually squashed without a second thought.

Water-Works
July 8 2014


Like small reflecting pools

between shallow berms of earth,

ascending

tightly nested
hugging the slope.
Not cut gems, but softly contoured jewels,
in a garland
of multi-coloured light.

Pin-cushioned
by green shoots of rice.
And tended
by knee-deep peasants

crouching bent,

indistinguishable, in big paddy hats,

all brim

like flattened lampshades.

They are not self-made men
libertarian, American.
Because they were born into this,
and will pass it on, as is
just as their ancestors did.
The generations past
on whose shoulders they stand,
like the low earthen dams, on which they quick-step

nimbly balancing.

Our conceit
is that we owe the past nothing,
boot-strapping ourselves
into future's promised land.
Dizzy
with winner-take-all.

But here, the transformation of nature
to serve man,
this civilized planet
of water-works, rice paddies
make clear
what's owed the past.
And how the many
subsume the one.

It was always thus
in the still air, and slowly lifting mist;
this hillside
of polished glass
glinting in early sun.

 The settled landscape of rice paddies exemplifies a traditional culture of obligation, continuity, community. 

Ours, in contrast, is far more individualistic. Which, like most beliefs based on ideology, is as much smug delusion as truth: we also owe our forbears, and under-estimate our dependence on our contemporaries The rich worship this ideal of the "self-made man"; and I agree, there is much to be said for ambition and risk and initiative. But there is also the luck of birth and circumstance, as well as the shared legacy of infrastructure and rule of law.

The coincidence of two images was behind this poem.

First, there was the same documentary that came up in another recent blurb: Watermark. Edward Burtynsky, the Canadian artist whose panoramic photographs gaze upon the vast scale of manufactured landscapes -- evoking both their unexpected beauty, and their waste -- accomplishes this even better in moving pictures: starting with a tightly composed shot, and then ever so gradually zooming out and out until the impression is overwhelming. I love the way he challenges our expectations by shifting between the micro and the macro; between the human scale and the monolithic. One subject of the film was a community of rice paddies somewhere in China. Not the modern China, but the traditional one. And all through it, I had the unsettled feeling that this way of life (and I acknowledge I'm probably romanticizing a way of life that is more hard and subsistence than it is idyllic) would soon be sacrificed to progress.

Second, there was a still photo I saw as part of The National Geographic Traveller Photo Contest 2014 - Part II: an aerial view of rice paddies, where the reflected sun transforms it into multi-coloured jewels, garlanding the slope. It looked like a beautiful mosaic, not a constructed landscape.

Re-reading, I've noticed several references to body parts and human action, and I rather like this muscular through-line. There's hugging, knee-deep, and boot-strapping; as well as standing on shoulders and quick-stepping on earthen dams: which all nicely echo the "Work" of "Water-Works", and perhaps says something about the restorative simplicity of manual labour. (Romanticizing again?!!)

I should add that nowhere in the film was anyone wearing those stereotypical head coverings, the big straw umbrella hats that harken back to feudal peasants (and which I see, now that I've been able to search on-line, sometimes go by the politically incorrect name "coolie hats") . Actually, the main character wore a small straw fedora, dyed a garish fuchsia! But I took the liberty of the out-dated stereotype to emphasize uniformity: that is, the subordination of the individual to the community.

And those reviled adverbs again! Here, I succumbed to "tightly" and "nimbly". If acknowledging my sins confers absolution, then I am duly excused!

Ground Level
July 7 2014


The unsettled weather
of the last few years
has me wondering what normal was.

And of the curse, the blessing
may you live in interesting times.
With its wearying lesson
of humility, and dread.

Unprecedented cold, this winter.
When snow fell, and stayed,
accumulating
compressing under its weight.

How a glacier begins, incrementally,
homes disappearing

in silent drifts,
then forever iced-in

And summer rains, in wind-whipped torrents
too fast for roads to drain,

low-lying land, laked-over.

I thought of the Biblical flood,
and the righteous man, tasked by God
to select who lived
would not.

His creation destroyed
by our hand, our greed.
Our apathy, at least.

But now, green growing things
are over-taking my world,
a warm wet June
knee-deep in weeds.
And the air thick with bugs
who may out-live us all.

So will it end
a planet locked in ice,
a brilliant point of light

in the cosmos' freezing void?

Or verdant, smothered,
a steamy jungle, strangled by giant vines?

And at ground level
a dead dark desert.
Extreme weather
is the new normal;
I forget what came before.


Climate change is bringing extreme weather. I feel whip-sawed, day-to-day and season-to-season.

The planet will survive, of course -- only a super-nova or cosmic burst will do it in. But it will be deeply changed: its biological diversity diminished to jelly-fish and cockroaches; or life extinguished entirely. And our brief civilization a forgotten footnote, where even its material remnants are barely legible.

I mentioned apathy and greed; but I should also have mentioned stupidity and wilful ignorance.

The reference to God is a bit mischievous. I am, after all, a committed atheist. It's a jab at the Biblical fundamentalists/literalists, among whom are numerous climate-change deniers.

I think they are rendered complacent by their misplaced faith in a benign and all-knowing God. Or limited by their mistaken belief in the exalted place in creation presumably conferred on mankind: created in His image and given dominion, after all(!)

So while I grant the believers "His creation", I hope to imply that by "dominion", we are meant to be its stewards, not its exploiters.

(But my generosity is sorely strained, and in the end I couldn't resist the cheap shot at a "loving" and righteous God:   who doesn't hesitate to kill, or to assign collective guilt.)

My apologies to the entomologists, who quite rightly insist on "insect". Rhyme and cadence dictate the technically inaccurate "bug".

The original title was The New Normal. Another alternative was May You Live in Interesting Times. But Ground Level seemed more tantalizingly cryptic. ("Level" also sets off the opening rhyme, resonating nicely with "unsettled" and "weather"; not to mention the short "e" of "blessing" and "lesson".) Here, it refers to the understory of a tropical (or, for that matter, temperate) rainforest, where little light penetrates and the soil is relatively unproductive. I like the idea of a rich verdant planet that has no place for such undeserving ground-dwelling creatures as us. And the call-back to the title in the closing stanza gives added weight to its bleakly prescient "dead dark desert."

This piece is a rare departure, because I assiduously avoid writing poems about public policy. I think that's where the essay form excels, and poetry fails. (And deep down, I'm much more essayist than poet. Poetry is for me more of a discipline and a challenge than any natural inclination.) No reader wants to plod through poetry that seems political or propagandistic. And it's frustrating as the writer, because in a good poem I can't be as comprehensive, sequential, and argumentative as the topic demands: that is, say and explain everything I want. Not in the way an essay is so neat and clear: how a good one says what you're going to say, says it, and then says what you said.

Although it helps knowing I can elaborate and drill down deeper, “blurbing” (an acceptable verb?) like this. Having that outlet allows me to focus on imagery, narrative, and sound without feeling as obligated by the rigour of ideas. I can enter into the poem free to distil down my thinking:  to select what’s truly important, to say it simply, and to be unafraid of feeling and emotion.

Drift
July 4 2014


Spilling over the dam
water flows so evenly
you can imagine nothing falling at all,
the illusion
of dark concrete
beneath a smooth reflective curtain.

Betrayed

by run-off,
a line of froth, along the bottom
its white hypnotic noise.

The thing about rivers
is how inexhaustible they are.
Or seem,
because rivers do run dry, estuaries recede,
leaving empty deltas
a saltier sea.

You could look down from heaven

at rivulets carved into sun-baked silt,

a web of intricate fingers

dividing thinly

spreading wide.
Like a branching tree
stripped of leaves,
capillaries
that have bled out.

A river
that never makes it to sea
seems without purpose.
Not like a man
cut down in the prime of life,
but one who simply runs out
of meaning, direction
will.

Who can stand still for hours
watching water fall,
seeking comfort
in its soothing sound.

Imagine himself submerged
in quiet darkness.

Carried
by its cool current

steadily downstream,

so temptingly close to the sea.

Several disparate strands seem to have converged in the genesis of this poem.

I was reading Alan Gopnik's piece in the recent New Yorker (July 7 and 14, 2014) about the 9/11 memorial/museum at the site of the World Trade Centre. He mentioned the reflecting pool, which is actually a smooth wall of water, descending deep into the footprint of the fallen tower's preserved foundation.

I thought about the concrete dam near me, with its soothing sound, its inexhaustible flow, its smooth reflective surface.

And, from my days as a white-water kayaker, I thought how treacherous low-head dams can be. We called them "drowning machines" because of the hydraulic at the base of falls: which appears benign, but will hold you in its powerful grip, helplessly submerged.

And I thought about a movie I'm in the middle of watching. It's called Watermark, and one of the many gorgeous images it contains is an aerial shot of a dried-up delta. Not only is it beautiful, and not only does its context and scale catch you by surprise, but it is evocative of the recurring patterns of nature: a branching tree, the circulatory system.

I can never resist writing about rivers. (Much like trees. Which is a good thing, since those are pretty much all there is around here!) So with all this in mind, I set out once again: as usual, letting stream of consciousness take over the creative process. Which, as I've said before, feels like automatic writing, or channelling: I can be a surprised as anyone at what comes out!

"Inexhaustible" naturally led to its opposite. And then the dismal imagery -- of skeletal trees, of vessels drained of blood, of a river that does not make it to the sea -- must have put me in a negative frame of mind, and led me to see the possibility of metaphor.

In my own life, I certainly do consider the existential dilemma of meaning, purpose, usefulness; but please do not mistake me for the suicidal character in the poem. ...Nevertheless, I think we have all had times in our lives when we would identify with this feeling: the passivity implied by quiet darkness, steadiness, and being carried; a fatalistic desire for peace, surrender, drift.

Doing Unto Others

July 3 2014

I am most in awe
of unconditional love.

Which is easiest, perhaps
when loving in the abstract
-- love for the poor, the oppressed,
the good intentioned, gone bad.

But most of us
are far too needy,
fall in love
expecting to be loved back.
Only saints
are filled with human kindness
no matter what.

Sinners, who try to love
give up more easily.

Anyway, giving is its own reward.
Not only because
we are, by nature, altruistic,
but because when two feel as one
to give, is to receive.
For lovers

self-interest is mutual,
every act

impure.

Forgive
spurned lovers, old flames
and those who once betrayed you.
Excuse their weakness
by accepting your own.
Self-love, not free love,
because it only seems unconditional

and nothing passes easily –
harsh judgement
contingent
on quick forgiveness.

Even Mother Teresa
struggled for inner peace.
That tough ascetic servant
doubted God
and failed at loving herself.
But she was kind
and did unto others
with all her strength.
A saint
who shared everything,
reservations excepted.


I have so much trouble with the idea of unconditional love. I can accept the concept as aspirational; but to actually expect to attain that level of ego-free enlightenment seems impossible. And if the foundation of inner peace is self-love, then this seems even more delusional: the most you can hope for is resigned acceptance ...forbearance ...forgiveness.

Any poem that begins with "love" is immediately presumed to mean romantic love. But, of course, there are many loves: filial, fraternal, maternal; love of country and beauty and ideas; the "agape" of wonder and fellow-feeling. Here, there is an intermingling of romantic love and a somewhat less theological version of agape.

But in the end, it's not about one's precious feelings and sense of serenity; it's about acts of love, and acts withheld. Which is all that really counts.

Throughout the poem, the "un" of "unconditional" isn't quite so absolute: it is qualified/modified/softened by words like "contingent" and "reservations" and "acceptance". Which seems a lot closer to the human condition than "unconditional" 's unattainable state of spiritual purity.

It was just a small part of this article (below) that inspired the poem. If you skip down to the first of the "5 qualities", you'll see where unconditional love comes in. This piece is from the Atlantic Wire, and was posted on roughly this date. I've previously heard David Brooks speak, and was then also quite impressed.

David Brooks's 5-Step Guide to Being Deep
by Uri Friedman

ASPEN, Colo.—David Brooks doesn't subscribe to the Pharrellian school of life. It's not that he begrudges Pharrell for being happy. It's that he believes American culture is too centered around attaining happiness, at the expense of "a different goal in life that is deeper than happiness and more important than happiness."

We're not only obsessed with happiness. The New York Times columnist argues that we focus on accumulating power, material wealth, and professional achievements instead of cultivating the kinds of qualities that will be discussed at our funerals. As Brooks phrases it, we emphasize "resume virtues" over "eulogy virtues."

Brooks's objective is to establish a "counterculture" to our happiness culture and our resume culture. It's to fashion a path to "inner depth." In a talk at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is sponsored by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic, he did just that. Expanding on a column he wrote in March, Brooks wove together various philosophical, theological, and biographical threads to define what it means to be "deep," and how to lead a life of depth.

                                                            ***

As Brooks sees it, resume virtues and eulogy virtues represent two sides of human nature. In a 1965 essay, the American rabbi and philosopher Joseph Soloveitchik developed a dichotomy to capture this phenomenon. He distinguished between "Adam I" and "Adam II."

"Adam I is the external Adam, it's the resume Adam," Brooks explained. "Adam I wants to build, create, use, start things. Adam II is the internal Adam. Adam II wants to embody certain moral qualities, to have a serene inner character, not only to do good but to be good. To live and be is to transcend the truth and have an inner coherence of soul. Adam I, the resume Adam, wants to conquer the world…. Adam II wants to obey a calling and serve the world. Adam I asks how things work, Adam II asks why things exist and what ultimately we're here for."

(Brooks didn't get into this, but Soloveitchik actually conceived of Adam I and Adam II as a way to reconcile the fact that Genesis offers two accounts of how God created man. As an Orthodox Jew who believed in the "divine character" of the Bible, Soloveitchik didn't accept the explanation that the stories sprang from different authors and sources. Instead, he argued, they existed to illustrate "dual man." In the first account, in which man is created "in the image of God," Adam is tasked with "filling" and "subduing" the earth. In the second account, in which man is created out of dust and God's breath, Adam is charged with "serving" and "keeping" the Garden of Eden.)

"We live in a culture that nurtures Adam I," Brooks said. "We're taught to be assertive and master skills, to broadcast our brains. To get likes. To get followers."

Being deep doesn't preclude you from being, well, shallow, he added. "Some days we want to be externally successful, some days we want to be internally good. The question is whether your life is in balance."

So how do we nourish Adam II—the deep Adam? For that matter, what does it even mean to be deep?

"I think we mean that that person is capable of experiencing large and sonorous emotions, they have a profound spiritual presence," Brooks said. "In the realm of emotion they have a web of unconditional love. In the realm of intellect, they have a set, permanent philosophy about how life is. In the realm of action, they have commitments to projects that can't be completed in a lifetime. In the realm of morality, they have a certain consistency and rigor that's almost perfect."

Deep people also tend to be old.

"The things that lead you astray, those things are fast: lust, fear, vanity, gluttony," Brooks observed, in religiously inflected language. "The things that we admire most—honesty, humility, self-control, courage—those things take some time and they accumulate slowly."

Albert Schweitzer, Dorothy Day, Pope Francis, Mother Teresa. These are deep people, according to Brooks.

                                                         ***

What qualities spur us to plumb the depths of our being? Brooks outlined five:

1. Love

The love Brooks has in mind is of the transformational, unconditional variety. "It could be love for a cause, usually it's love for a person, it could be love for God," he said. Love issues the humbling reminder that "we're not in control of ourselves," and also "de-centers the self"—a "person in love finds the center of himself is outside himself." It “complicates the distinction between giving and receiving, because two selves are so intermingled in love that the person giving is giving to him or herself." Brooks cited the French writer Michel de Montaigne, who, when asked why he had such strong affection for a friend, replied, simply, "because I was I, and he was he."

2. Suffering

"When people look forward, when they plan their lives, they say, 'How can I plan ... [to] make me happy?'" Brooks noted. "But when people look backward at the things that made them who they are, they usually don't talk about moments when they were happy. They usually talk about moments of suffering or healing. So we plan for happiness, but we're formed by suffering." Like love, suffering exposes our lack of control over our lives. But it also encourages deep introspection and equips people with a moral calling. "They're not masters of their pain, they can't control their pain, but you do have a responsibility to respond to your pain," Brooks explained. He gave the example of Franklin Roosevelt, whose character was forged through his battle with polio.

3. Internal struggle

"Here, I don't mean the struggle involved in winning a championship, starting a company, or making a lot of money," Brooks cautioned. Those who have depth are "aware that while they have great strength, great dignity, they also have great weakness. And they are engaged in an internal struggle with themselves." Consider Dwight Eisenhower, who constantly tangled with his bad temper. "Internal struggles are the logic by which we build character," Brooks said.

4. Obedience

Brooks took aim at the common message in commencement speeches that students should turn inward to discover their passion and vocation. "If you look at the people who are deep, often they don't look inside themselves. Something calls to them from outside themselves," he said. They obey a cause. Brooks mentioned Frances Perkins, who watched in horror as people leaped to their deaths during the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, and then devoted her life to workers' safety (she eventually became FDR's labor secretary).

5. Acceptance

Brooks also calls this "admittance," seeking to shake the word's association with exclusivity (think a nightclub or college). He likens the concept to the religious notion of "grace." It is "unmerited, unearned admittance"—belonging to "some sort of human transcendent community." Whereas Adam I wants to "work" and "sweat," Adam II "simply accepts the fact that he's accepted. Adam II, the spiritual side of our nature, stands against the whole ethos of self-cultivation, which is the resume side of our world. The ethos of scrambling, working, climbing." Just as the journalist and activist Dorothy Day brimmed with gratefulness after the birth of her child, acceptance energizes the accepted. "They want to honor the people who gave them that gift and they want to pass on the gift that they didn't deserve," Brooks said.

What's perhaps most interesting about Brooks's schema is how it inverts the reigning culture of self-help in this country. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People this is not. Rather than suggesting depth-seekers take control of their lives, Brooks is urging them to surrender control to external forces, at least to a degree. With the exception of "internal struggle," we can't readily act on his advice. We don't necessarily choose when we fall in love, or whom or what we fall in love with. We don't decide when suffering is visited upon us. Obedience and admittance, by Brooks' definitions, cannot be willed into existence. The most we can do is accept invitations to a more meaningful life, whenever and wherever they arise.

All Straight Lines
July 1 2014


In the rear view mirror
the city recedes.
I ascend into cooler air, a soothing darkness,
the island of heat
well behind.
Just imagine
a million people
converging on a point of light.

Where every person
is her own small universe.
Colliding like stars
that have strayed too close,
torn apart
by tidal forces.
Or passing through, uncannily,
retinues of planets
drifting past
untouched.
Or blissfully oblivious
that extra-terrestrial life
even exists,
so tightly contained
in her own gravitational pull.

The sky glows
against high amorphous cloud;
in the middle of nowhere
civilization
declaring itself.
Even in the clear
there is a lightening,
where the celestial void
is not quite so black.

The curve of the earth
has come between us,
and I am a rogue planet
far from the gravity
of its native star.
Who knew
that there was no true vacuum
in outer space.
Or that all straight lines
are really curved,
so it only feels
like escape.

The car is idling
on the sloping shoulder
of a gravel road.
The cone of my high beams
is alive with moths,
fireflies
pierce the dark.

I'm reworking a lot of old tropes here. There is escape, flight, freedom ...the myth of the open road ...the idea of alienation from city life, while being renewed by nature -- or, even more, a connotation of misanthropy ...the astronomical metaphor ...and the viewpoint that telescopes from microcosm to cosmological. There is also a theme of light and dark, both observed and felt.

So, as is often the case, it's a poem I've written before. And I'll probably write again. Which is OK, plagiarizing myself. Because it's all process, not product; and in the end, I may actually write the one great poem that's worth keeping. Or at least get better each time out: experiments in variation on a theme. At best, it keeps me from over-writing: having said it before, I feel less pressure to get everything out; and having said it before, I'm better able to distil it down to the essentials; and having said it before, it's easier to avoid falling in love with a word and only using it for its own sake. Still, like most other poems I've written, I feel this one has too many words. This seems an essential paradox of poetry: to be in love with words, yet have to mercilessly cut and slash. Pulled in both directions, I most often surrender to love!

I dislike adverbs, and assiduously avoid them ("assiduously" and "mercilessly" notwithstanding!) As I've said before, an adverb is a lazy way of telling it, when showing it is far more powerful. And they strike me as patronizing: if the context doesn't allow the reader to infer that something happened "suddenly", you're either writing poorly, or not giving the reader enough credit. These are two cardinal rules of poetry, and probably all good writing: show, don't tell; and trust the reader. So my use of the word "uncannily" -- and at the end of a line, and highlighted by the preceding comma, no less -- may seem uncharacteristic. But I think it's a great word, and works really well here. So, as in all rules, they are proven by the exception.

I used "her" instead of "his" (twice, in the 2nd stanza) not out of political correctness, but because that pronoun works better. I think it gives the poem a kind of authenticity, a hint at something autobiographical -- especially when the reader knows the author is a man. But it also works better in general: while "his" is glossed over as the impersonal pronoun, "her" catches one off-guard, and immediately evokes something more singular, more personal.