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Posted on by Dave Bonta

When it breaks

This entry is part 25 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

 

I’m reading Paul Zweig. This is the seventh poem in the third (“Eternity’s Woods”) section of his Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See here for details on this experiment in responsive reading.

A Fly on the Water
by Paul Zweig

        I
It is eating me.
It is everything hungry in the world,
And wants me, and I’ll tell you, I don’t mind. . . .

[Remainder of poem removed 11-06-05]

* * * *

Qarrtsiluni

It isn’t death I dread, but the lidded coffin
& all that soil coming between me & the sky.

The earth is for living in, or under,
safe between the third and fourth ribs
of the great land whale.

Chewing the fat
with our boneless ancestors,
we could relearn the art of metamorphosis –
from the larval worm, how to wait
in the darkness for a stone
skin to split

& mixing dust & water,
bring clay to life with our own
perilous breath.

It isn’t death we fear, but the pain that precedes it
& this waking, all alone, in a strange bed.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Thousand Steps

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There’s a place a few miles southwest of here called the Thousand Steps. It’s an old ganister quarry on the side of Jacks Mountain just north of the water gap known as Jack’s Narrows, named for an early settler who achieved great fame as a serial killer of his Indian neighbors. A narrow-gauge railroad on a steep, switch-backing grade hauled the quarried rock down into the Narrows, thence to the refractory in nearby Mount Union. Workers built the dry stone steps in the 1930s in order to make a faster commute.

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The steps climb a steep ravine where hemlock, Table Mountain pine, birches and maples have grown up in the more than fifty years since the quarry ceased operation. The old switchbacks make for convenient landings on which to pause and catch one’s breath. Since the acquisition of the Steps as part of a state gameland some ten years ago, they’ve become very popular with local people in search of spectacular views of mountains and forests and the winding Juniata, most poetic of all eastern rivers.

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Another attraction of the site is the fortress-like building that used to house the dinkey locomotives, made of the same stone as the talus slopes that surround it. An immense red oak tree stands directly below it; it’s easy to imagine the quarrymen resting briefly in its shade after trotting up the side of the mountain.

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Sunday was chilly – a good day to make the climb. Although the air was very clear, the sky was not. A pale mortar connected heavy blocks of cloud, sometimes gapping just enough to permit a brief view of the sun.

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Whenever that happened, cameras came out of pockets to record the instant transformations in the landscape. The few trees that had already turned color blazed like torches against the dark pines.

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The wind blew in strong gusts out of the northwest. Turkey vultures rose in tight circles above the Steps, catching whatever slight heat must still have been rising, despite the chill in the air, from all those open patches of bare rock. By the time we returned to the car, our legs felt like rubber from the long descent.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Robert Hass on poetry and activism

From the on-line environmental magazine Grist comes a brief but thought-provoking interview with California poet Robert Hass.

Q. You studied biology in college, but it seems like today colleges cast students as either science or literature people. In your class, do you find that people aren’t communicating between the two sides of their brain?

A. I think people do try to communicate between those two sides of their brain. I think part of the interest of the intelligent design/evolutionary biology debate is about how the implications of science talk to the rest of our feeling, affective selves. To try to figure out how to put those together is the fun of this class.

My partner, a science professor, gets the poetry people who are worried that they can’t get the science, and I get the science people who are worried they can’t do the poetry. So I’m sitting in my office with some really bright young people who can do neurobiology or astrophysics but say they can’t understand poetry. And I’m inclined to get down a poem off the shelf like Wordsworth’s sonnet, “All things that love the sun are out of doors,” and I say, what don’t you understand about that?

Can poetry save the world? Maybe – but it’s no substitute for activism, says Hass. In either case, we need to start by noticing what’s around us. I agree.

I found a longer, less focused interview with Hass, conducted right after his inaugural reading as Poet Laureate in 1997 and published in American Poetry Review, online here. At one point, Hass advances an argument that should be familiar to readers of this weblog:

I think that to praise or dispraise, to enchant or disenchant, both of which functions art has – you have to include a lot of the one if you’re going to do the other. I think poetry that says yes has to swallow great goblets of darkness; and poetry that says no has to say no in the face of the fact that there must be reasons why the poet has chosen to continue to live in order to say it. I always think in this connection of Monet because I read that his water lily paintings were begun as a response to reports he had read of the dead in the trenches in the first world war.

Grace Cavalieri: Have you used that in a poem?

Robert Hass: No I haven’t used it in a poem. I mean, I think it’s already there. It doesn’t need to be. But the reason those paintings seem to us so supremely great and not wallpaper is that they are full of the dead. They’re full of all those, all those colors, full of the colors of the bodies in the trenches as he imagined them. Poetry that praises the world has to have immense ballast.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The watermelon revelation

watermelon-peace-miracle

They had been eating a large watermelon, each night slicing another cross-section and dividing it in thirds. They agreed that it was one of the sweetest watermelons they had ever tasted. “The last of the season,” the mother said sadly.

It was only on the third night that the father felt moved to get up from his chair and watch the cutting of the melon. And father and son together were given to see what neither of them might have ever have noticed alone, distracted by the task at hand. The pink flesh bore no mere random pattern of splits, they saw, but a sign – and a well-known one at that.

“It’s a message!” the son cried.

“You take pictures! I’ll email the Vatican and the White House!” said the father.

“Oh, for God’s sake!” said the mother, hungry for her slice. “It’s just a watermelon!” But her objections were brushed aside as the son raced for his digital camera.

*

They took still pictures from several angles, then got out the video camera and shot footage of the miraculous melon, which by this time, they noticed, had begun to emit a kind of faint bioluminescence. The father hurried to his computer and began to assemble pictures and text into a basic Dreamweaver template while the son interviewed his mother – “the resident skeptic,” he called her. “Look, it’s just a watermelon!” she reiterated for the benefit of the soon-to-be hordes of virtual pilgrims.

“But can you verify for our visitors that we have not tampered with the natural pattern in any way? You saw me each night. What did I do?”

“You sliced it cross-ways with a bread knife, taking off a third at a time. You started using those splits as a guide last night, I guess.”

“So even though you personally don’t think this is anything special, you can assure our visitors that we did nothing to alter or enhance this Sign?”

“Yes, I can attest to that,” she said, sighing.

*

Less than twenty-four hours later, the site went live – watermelonrevelation.com. Within the first twelve hours of operation, the hit counter logged over five thousand unique visitors. This was going to be big.

The splash page featured simply a photo of the melon against a black background and an audio clip of a church organ playing “Give Peace a Chance.” Inside were more pictures, the videos, and a user-friendly form to allow visitors to record their own reactions to the melon and its message. This quickly took on a life of its own. A man from Connecticut, who described himself as a Quaker, denounced “the primitive, superstitious credulity of anyone who takes this so-called revelation seriously.” If we want authentic revelation, we have to learn to follow our Inner Light, he said. But a “Diana in Phoenix” testified that viewing their website had brought her violent, alcoholic husband to his knees in front of the monitor, weeping and pressing his hands against the glass. And someone with the handle AgnesofBlog sparked a lively debate by wondering whether a watermelon was a vegetable or a fruit.

While the father turned out press releases, the son combed the Internet for suitable Pentecostal, Catholic and New Age blogs and message boards on which to leave provocative comments hinting at a divine message of great import. Creative use of Google and Technorati led him to hundreds of faith-based bloggers who made a habit of reporting similar, albeit lesser, revelations, such as the widely publicized Lady of the Grilled Cheese Sandwich.

That’s when it hit him: a sudden inspiration that flooded his veins with an almost unbearable sensation of melting sweetness.

“E-Bay!” he gasped.

And so it was that, by the grace of God and the invisible hand of the market, peace, in all its pinko glory, finally got a chance.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Holes

If only the personal weren’t, as they say, so political. If only the person-holes called leaders were a bit less personable. If only the suction from those walking vacuums weren’t always so goddamn difficult to resist.

Autumn is the time for longing thoughts, they say; rapid change makes us yearn for stasis. It’s autumn, it’s raining, & I crave the familiarity of cliché. What is a cliché, after all, but an aborted proverb? One man’s culture of life is another man’s petri dish. (To say nothing of the women, of course.)

If only failure were not, as they say, an option. If misery really were capable of love, what loving company a miserable failure might find himself in. The great and powerful POTUS side-by-side with a scruffy, self-promoting documentary filmmaker: what fearful asymmetry! If only a mere Google bomb could blow the manhole cover off that septic stream of lies. But the lies are old news, and in the U.S.A., old news is no news – good news for those who stand to profit off the unstoppable buck, the bull market, the zero worship.

The rain started two hours before dawn while I was in the shower, so that when I stuck my damp head out the door, I heard the soft deliberate footfalls of a burglar in the grass, on the porch roof. Take all you want, I said – as if anything here were mine to part with in the first place.

Every morning I scan the headlines, shaping my lips & tongue unconsciously around the new-yet-strangely-familiar-&-comforting litany of other people’s misery. (I’m only a fully silent reader in company.) Earthquake, hurricane, I whisper, mudslide, flood. A school roof collapses like a sick joke on the heads of schoolchildren; an art museum is flattened by a floating casino. Whole towns are buried under suddenly wakeful, supposedly sacred mountains. Library collections turn gray & mushy in the mouths of their most thorough readers ever.

All that future, down the shit hole. All those centuries of incense & slow fasting.

What does it mean to be a lyric poet in times of widespread disaster & a global extinction crisis? What does it mean to cherish quietness, faced with the absolute silence of the null set? Words too easily succumb to a dervish vertigo. I am bone-tired of this present tense, its tightly wrapped present of tension, waiting for an epiphany that may be nothing like what we have ever imagined that we deserve. I am sick to death of the prayerful moment. I want to tell the wonder-junky in me, shut your goddamn slavering cake hole with some actual cake, for once. Fill your glistening eyes with some light-hearted miracle, some fancy contraption involving hidden wires & gaps in the fabric that earns a standing ovation from your pants. Get a real job. Consume. Obey.

Last month I lost my only set of keys & ever since, everywhere I look, there’s another keyhole right at eye-level. No peeping, now, I have to admonish myself. The world can go to hell, and maybe it will; a wrong thing never turns right. Someone lives in there, I have to think.
__________

With gratitude for the influence of Chris Clarke’s much more analytical series on The Anatomy of Bad News (here, here, here, and here, with more to come, I hope).

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Juarroz on waking up

This entry is part 35 of 38 in the series Poetry from the Other Americas

 

I woke up this morning with a poem about waking up (how self-reflexive is that?!). I was struck by its argument that humans are basically crepuscular critters.

The Argentinean poet Roberto Juarroz (1925-1995) won international recognition as a master of the modern philosophical poem. He is often compared to Octavio Paz, but I find his work more reminiscent of Rilke and Juan Ramón Jiménez, with a dash of Laozi. Both W.S. Merwin and Mary Crow have authored book-length translations into English of selections from his multi-volume magnum opus, Poesí­a Vertical (Vertical Poetry). I was drawn to the following poem (found in Crow’s bilingual edition) not simply by the subject matter but by the fourth line of the third stanza, in which “huecos” reminded me of home: water gaps, hollows, coves. I chose “coves” over “hollows” simply because I think it might be more widely understood outside Appalachia, and I felt “intemperie” justified my addition of the modifier “mountain.” I also felt Crow mistranslated in two places, justifying my own, fairly free attempt.

Poesí­a Vertical
Novena.34
por Roberto Juarroz

Despertar es siempre
una difí­cil emergencia:
reencender la lucidez
como quien recomienza el mundo.

Por eso nos quedamos
en los estados intermedios.
El hombre no es una criatura despierta:
desconoce lo abierto.

Llamos que se consumen a medias,
párpados que se olvidan del ojo,
jardinez paralizados en la noche,
huecos de la intemperie acorralada.

Los caminos se aglomeran en vano:
despertar es borrar los caminos.

* * * *

Waking up is always
a difficult emergence:
a re-ignition of lucidity,
as if one were starting the world all over.

That’s why we abide
in the in-between states.
Man simply isn’t a wakeful creature:
he lacks familiarity with the open.

Flames that burn themselves out halfway through;
eyelids forgotten by the eye;
gardens paralyzed in the night;
mountain coves socked in by bad weather.

In vain the roads multiply and converge:
to wake up is to wipe the map clean.

__________

Those who read Spanish might be interested in Juarroz’ reflections on his craft, Un rigor para la intensidad, which begins with a somewhat different take on “lo abierto” than the above poem:

Yo me he sentido atraí­do en primer lugar por los elementos de la naturaleza. Nací­ en un pueblo al borde del campo. Mi padre era jefe de la estación de ferrocarril y tení­amos enfrente el horizonte abierto. En esa pequeña ciudad de Coronel Dorrego me acostumbré desde muy chico a los silencios. Esas noches abiertas en donde se veí­an las estrellas, la luna ní­tida, los vientos, el agua, el árbol que para mí­ es un protagonista de la vida.

(I have felt an attraction from the first for all the elements of nature. I was born in a town on the edge of the country. My father was a railroad stationmaster and we had the open horizon always in front of us. In that small city, Coronel Dorrego, from a very young age I grew accustomed to silences. Those open nights in which one could discern the stars, the crystal-clear moon, the winds, the water, the tree that was for me an active protagonist in my life.)

Posted on by Dave Bonta

A beach in hell

This entry is part 24 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

 

I’m reading Paul Zweig. This is the sixth poem in the third (“Eternity’s Woods”) section of his Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See here for details on this experiment in responsive reading.

The Perfect Sleepers
by Paul Zweig

The light flooding my chair
Is too strong at six in the morning;
It was meant for the policeman prowling
In a room around a criminal…

[Remainder of poem removed 10-21-05]

* * * *

In the Hold

The sealed cracks around the permanently locked door between the two apartments were no barrier to the flood tide of her enormous need. I had seen them sitting outside until well past dark, his jeep riding considerably lower on the passenger side as they took turns drinking from a paper bag. They came in around ten & went straight to work – an all-night shift.

Sleep was impossible for me as well as for him. Every half hour, just as I started to doze off, her shrill voice would jerk us back to full consciousness: I haven’t seen you in three months, and you’re just going to SLEEP? He’d answer in a low murmur I couldn’t make out. Then the asthmatic creaks of her long-suffering box spring as she once again mounted the ladder that led – Oh dichosa ventura! – out of the dark hold of her hated flesh.

As the night dragged on, my annoyance gave way to admiration for her persistence & her unwillingness to abandon her partner to the vicissitudes of sleep. I knew well enough how the rungs of that ladder multiply toward the top, crowding more & more closely together until, inevitably, we lose our footing & fall back into ourselves: ragged breathing, the soaked sheets, dust mites swarming in the drifts of shed skin.
__________

The Spanish quote (“oh happy chance!”) and the image of the ladder are from St. John of the Cross’s mystical poem La Noche Oscura, or The Dark Night.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Eight ways of looking at an octopus

1. They are voracious predators, though they have no backbone – no hard parts at all, in fact. They often change color to match their prey, and when threatened, they attempt to hide in a cloud of ink. And sometimes, for no known reason, they go on a frenzy of self-consumption, ending in their own death. Republicans?

2. Octopuses (see here for a discussion of other plural forms) have long been known to commit autophagy – that is, to eat themselves, starting with the tips of their arms and working their way up. The precise reason isn’t known; stress and infection by some unknown virus are the reasons most often postulated. One of the few other creatures known to commit autophagy is the laboratory rat, so possibly a certain threshold of intelligence must be reached before a creature can attain this level of perversity.

3. Sometime in the late Renaissance, imaginative Christians began to associate the octopus with Christ. Whatever this may mean in evolutionary terms, it’s definitely a step up the food chain from the Jesus fish.

An on-line abstract of an article from a French journal discusses the persistence of this image of “The Autophagous Christ”:

Father Chesneau’s sixty-third Eucharistic emblem has the octopus as a symbol of Christ. This being justified by the fact both octopus and Christ are autophagous. So by the middle of the XVIIth century a theological treatise on the Holy Sacrament can put forward an extremely realistic proposition, thus resuming an astonishing point in the debate on the Eucharist: the autophagy of Christ. This article endeavours to seize [sic] how, after the Council of Trent, Catholics went on using the controversial figure of an autophagous Christ in their debates, and to question the way it came to be used in a book of emblems of Augustinian bent.

4. The Christ-as-octopus image is an interesting example of convergent mythological evolution. Samoans and Kiribatians believe in an octopus god named Na Kika, who assisted the trickster god Nareau the Younger in the creation of the world. In this case, the octopus’ ability to survive on land as well as in the water seems to have given rise to the conception of octopus as mediator between island and ocean.

5. Symbols, of course, have their separate evolutionary history; the ancestral symbol to the autophagous Christ is the ouroborus.

6. Philosophically, autophagy is the antithesis of autopoiesis, which any biological definition of life cannot fail to take into account. The capacity of systems to self-organize also constitutes the strongest argument for the viability of social anarchism. Note, however, that anarchists themselves, like Republicans, often resort to autophagy. Their inability to agree upon how to describe anarchism for the Wikipedia is typical, and also ironic, given that the Wikipedia is itself an outstanding example of a successful anarchistic system.

7. In my dreams about trees, whenever a tree walks, its roots move over the earth like octopus tentacles. Even waking, I’ve noticed that old yellow birch trees often seem on the verge of opening bloodshot eyes. Just look at the way their roots engulf the ground.

8. Of all their attributes, what I envy most about octopuses is their power to change color, and sometimes shape, to match the environment. If I could do that, I could sleep almost anywhere – the world would be my oyster bed.

Sleep in a state or national park and it’s called camping. Sleep in a town or city park and it’s called vagrancy. Sleep in a refugee camp and it’s called dispossession. In so many ways, it seems, one person’s vacation is another person’s prison sentence. And yet, when we sleep, don’t we all inhabit the same country?

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that this post was sparked by an e-mail exchange with my brother Mark, whose birthday is October 8. Happy birthday, buddy.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Ignoble

The spectacle of grown men and women competing for and/or gushing over prizes never fails to fill me with profound disgust for the human race.

The only prizes worth paying any attention to, I think, are the kind that draw attention to otherwise scorned or neglected efforts.

LITERATURE: The Internet entrepreneurs of Nigeria, for creating and then using e-mail to distribute a bold series of short stories, thus introducing millions of readers to a cast of rich characters – General Sani Abacha, Mrs. Mariam Sanni Abacha, Barrister Jon A Mbeki Esq., and others – each of whom requires just a small amount of expense money so as to obtain access to the great wealth to which they are entitled and which they would like to share with the kind person who assists them.

PEACE: Claire Rind and Peter Simmons of Newcastle University, in the U.K., for electrically monitoring the activity of a brain cell in a locust while that locust was watching selected highlights from the movie “Star Wars.”

Name me any other major awards ceremony the news of which must prompt tens of thousands of people all around the world to jump up and do a little jig of pure happiness. Truly ennobling.