Almost the solstice 2019. After our 6,000 mile ! road trip to Minnesota and back, seeing wonders and marvels and lots of very nice folks, we're here in Laytonville. Finally. Late, too, for planting tomatoes, basil, cucumbers, arugula, et al. but we're going to try. The results are usually too good to pass up the opportunity to be able to harvest food from our own garden.
The book was published at last and mailed out in late April 2019 after all the work on it last summer. (There is also my gratitude to Mary's yoga group here for its steady encouraging friendship.) That feels good. The book looks good, too. Thanks to Alex, the editing and the photos and the layout of the poems turned out nicely, and Finishing Line Press did a good job; the paper, the ink, the work, all make the book as handsome as possible. And finally and the best, there are folks who have read the book and seem to enjoy the poems, at least they say they do. What more can I ask! (In an odd turn of events, when I look at the book, of course I recognize it as mine, yet there's some part of me that also hardly remembers the book, and a surprise that this thing in my hands is mine! Odd. Maybe that's what's called letting go. It's out there. And it's time for me to move on.)
And I am. Slowly. Plans for a second poetry book--this time, maybe a full-sized book and not a chapbook. --I don't regret the chapbook at all. It helped me get my feet wet. In addition, I have a mind to take a second whack at Ever Your Affectionate Mother. --Not as it was formerly organized. But there is some good stuff in it that will benefit, I hope, from my older perspective. And, I'd like to do something small re: the trip we just made via Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, the Dakotas, Wyoming, and Montana again and Oregon and Washington. There were so many convergences as we went along: reading Ta Nehisi's Eight Years in Power; Don's pioneer family settlement in Chief Joseph's land; the Trail of the Nez Perces as they fled the US Army; folks abandoned by the government; the Crow Reservation and the Battle of the Little Big Horn; perseverance; the Big Horn Range; the beautiful land; the sky; hearing the MN Orchestra and Chorus performances of Verdi's Requiem--their drive to make something perfectly beautiful; the drive of so many, through the years, who have wanted to make something beautiful; the good folks who always manage to remain rooted in place, their kindness, their resolute behavior. Etc Etc.All of these threads seem to me to be one piece of fabric.
My brain was at a boil by the time we got back home.
At my desk, then.
Tuesday, June 18, 2019
Monday, May 7, 2018
ten mile creek almanac chapbook has publisher
ten mile creek almanac, my chapbook, has a publisher.
Proving that sooner or later the right bus comes along, Finishing Line Press accepted my manuscript. Exclamation point. That was on April 25.
By May 7, the ramifications of this excellent development were clearer. Lots of moving parts to publishing even a small book, parts for the publisher, parts for the writer. For the writer to consider: art work for the cover? black and white? vertical image/horizontal image? permission for use of the image? short bio for back cover? longer bio for the inside? endorsement blurbs or blurb? who will write the blurb? who has written one already? acknowledgments of the magazines that published poems in the chapbook, have you left any out? thank you to? and a myriad more questions plus worry--lots of worrying over undetected stupid writing errors; all leading to the big worry, who will buy this chapbook? Who indeed will purchase a small chapbook written by an unknown writer? And in these latter days of publishing, a press can only publish what the writer can sell.
Not to be a whiner or even to seem like a whiner, who knew beforehand that things are not like in the movies--how can I still be so impossibly naive? How, never to have stopped to wonder anything at all about how a book gets to be how it looks? How never to have thought much except to have a general feeling of I like it/I don't like it. How, to be surprised to discover, yet again, that every action has a full range of consequences. For instance, well before, when I did not even dream of a book but only hoped that one other person might read something without yawning, was my goal, in those dark ages, the owner of Cover to Cover bookstore, here in SF, said, Let me know now when you have a book, I'll have a reading here. And I thought, a book? is she crazy? but instead I said, isn't that nice of you! Then she went out of business. I remember that offer of hers now. Then, ten years after that book store closed, and I growing closer to being able to get my mind around the idea of a book of mine--forget the book!--two more bookstore owners, one by one, said, Remember now, let me know and we'll have a reading here! Now they're out of business too. Sic transit gloria mundi.
My daughter says, Mom, you know lots of people, go through your address book, remember anyone at all and alert them. And I'm thinking now, really thinking, and I see even more clearly how hard it will be to find readers, those elusive readers who even acknowledge poetry as a living, a breathing activity. In my walking-around experience, I know of only two such people, count them, two, who do not flinch when they hear that I write poems, two who read poetry, two who actually hunt it out and read it. Others say they like poetry and I guess they do, but they don't read it, seek it out, find it a necessary part of their lives. That's ok, but it's that hard pit we find at the core of a real apple. Every part of the deal is hard, the writing of it, the getting it right, the sending it out, the rejections, the waiting around, the not losing heart, the stubborn optimism, then the acceptance, the hooray! and then the publishing with its ever present moving parts. That's the all of it.
All of which brings me to a favorite rant, the rant of mine that places much of the blame for people "hating" poetry on English teachers and I claim my right to say this as a former English teacher. It is also a fact that I have had many folks who upon hearing I write poems say to me, God, I hate poetry. It's kind of kick in the gut to hear this said aloud but they say this with real despair/gut feeling/animus. It is the rare student--the rare student who's had the even rarer teacher who demonstrated, who helped that student see that poetry is everywhere, that poetry belongs to everyone. No, most teachers beat poetry to death, pull it out by its roots, shoot it dead. Read Billy Collin's poem, Introduction to Poetry, "all they want to do/ is tie the poem to a chair with rope/and torture a confession out of it."
Granted, in this poem Mr. Collins is talking about his students. I correct him to say that the true source of all the torturing is a some funky, wrong-headed teacher, possibly an errant parent. They're the ones who brought on this animus. It's as if the kid, hungry as a bear, were to sit down to dinner and the dad or mom plunked a hunk of raw beef, a couple of whole onions, chili peppers, a bag of uncooked beans, plus a blunt kitchen knife, on the table saying, "This will do it!"-- What is the rhyme scheme, does it even rhyme? No! O God. How many feet in each line--feet--what? trochee? spondee?--Look, look there's an enjambement! --No, no. Save the mechanics of it for some other time. Don't do that to a poem: Poetry fills a need each of us has. The trick is finding the poem(s) that describes your need, that fires up an image in your mind, shows you what you had not seen but which is there. The right words are everyone's right and heritage, not to be messed about with, too sad to be denied.
All this to say, selling a book of poems is a small mountain to climb but a worthy one--after all we've been writing poems, reading poems, seeking poems, since we came down out of the trees--maybe poetry was the reason we found our way down out of the trees. That first human who found the right words in the right order to express the right thing was the true Eve the true Adam, glorious.
Proving that sooner or later the right bus comes along, Finishing Line Press accepted my manuscript. Exclamation point. That was on April 25.
By May 7, the ramifications of this excellent development were clearer. Lots of moving parts to publishing even a small book, parts for the publisher, parts for the writer. For the writer to consider: art work for the cover? black and white? vertical image/horizontal image? permission for use of the image? short bio for back cover? longer bio for the inside? endorsement blurbs or blurb? who will write the blurb? who has written one already? acknowledgments of the magazines that published poems in the chapbook, have you left any out? thank you to? and a myriad more questions plus worry--lots of worrying over undetected stupid writing errors; all leading to the big worry, who will buy this chapbook? Who indeed will purchase a small chapbook written by an unknown writer? And in these latter days of publishing, a press can only publish what the writer can sell.
Not to be a whiner or even to seem like a whiner, who knew beforehand that things are not like in the movies--how can I still be so impossibly naive? How, never to have stopped to wonder anything at all about how a book gets to be how it looks? How never to have thought much except to have a general feeling of I like it/I don't like it. How, to be surprised to discover, yet again, that every action has a full range of consequences. For instance, well before, when I did not even dream of a book but only hoped that one other person might read something without yawning, was my goal, in those dark ages, the owner of Cover to Cover bookstore, here in SF, said, Let me know now when you have a book, I'll have a reading here. And I thought, a book? is she crazy? but instead I said, isn't that nice of you! Then she went out of business. I remember that offer of hers now. Then, ten years after that book store closed, and I growing closer to being able to get my mind around the idea of a book of mine--forget the book!--two more bookstore owners, one by one, said, Remember now, let me know and we'll have a reading here! Now they're out of business too. Sic transit gloria mundi.
My daughter says, Mom, you know lots of people, go through your address book, remember anyone at all and alert them. And I'm thinking now, really thinking, and I see even more clearly how hard it will be to find readers, those elusive readers who even acknowledge poetry as a living, a breathing activity. In my walking-around experience, I know of only two such people, count them, two, who do not flinch when they hear that I write poems, two who read poetry, two who actually hunt it out and read it. Others say they like poetry and I guess they do, but they don't read it, seek it out, find it a necessary part of their lives. That's ok, but it's that hard pit we find at the core of a real apple. Every part of the deal is hard, the writing of it, the getting it right, the sending it out, the rejections, the waiting around, the not losing heart, the stubborn optimism, then the acceptance, the hooray! and then the publishing with its ever present moving parts. That's the all of it.
All of which brings me to a favorite rant, the rant of mine that places much of the blame for people "hating" poetry on English teachers and I claim my right to say this as a former English teacher. It is also a fact that I have had many folks who upon hearing I write poems say to me, God, I hate poetry. It's kind of kick in the gut to hear this said aloud but they say this with real despair/gut feeling/animus. It is the rare student--the rare student who's had the even rarer teacher who demonstrated, who helped that student see that poetry is everywhere, that poetry belongs to everyone. No, most teachers beat poetry to death, pull it out by its roots, shoot it dead. Read Billy Collin's poem, Introduction to Poetry, "all they want to do/ is tie the poem to a chair with rope/and torture a confession out of it."
Granted, in this poem Mr. Collins is talking about his students. I correct him to say that the true source of all the torturing is a some funky, wrong-headed teacher, possibly an errant parent. They're the ones who brought on this animus. It's as if the kid, hungry as a bear, were to sit down to dinner and the dad or mom plunked a hunk of raw beef, a couple of whole onions, chili peppers, a bag of uncooked beans, plus a blunt kitchen knife, on the table saying, "This will do it!"-- What is the rhyme scheme, does it even rhyme? No! O God. How many feet in each line--feet--what? trochee? spondee?--Look, look there's an enjambement! --No, no. Save the mechanics of it for some other time. Don't do that to a poem: Poetry fills a need each of us has. The trick is finding the poem(s) that describes your need, that fires up an image in your mind, shows you what you had not seen but which is there. The right words are everyone's right and heritage, not to be messed about with, too sad to be denied.
All this to say, selling a book of poems is a small mountain to climb but a worthy one--after all we've been writing poems, reading poems, seeking poems, since we came down out of the trees--maybe poetry was the reason we found our way down out of the trees. That first human who found the right words in the right order to express the right thing was the true Eve the true Adam, glorious.
Wednesday, February 28, 2018
time, our resource
It's already the end of the second month of 2018, and what I'm going to write in this entry today I wrote several years ago. It's old hat, I know, but it's still something I want to say before I forget.
A friend and I were talking about writing a will, getting long term care health insurance, living in old age near a good medical center, living in old age near family that cares: in other words, we were discussing all the sensible strategies that people take, if they can, as they are confronted by their old age. --This is us.--
As we went on and on about what to do, it came to me that we do these things so that we may cheat our inevitable end. Well, cheat it, for a while. If we do such and such, we'll be better prepared, we say. I truly believe that in some very basic, secret, part of our hearts we think we might get out of this intact. We know this isn't so. We have evidence everywhere that as Brendan Gill said, "it ends badly for us all." But we also know that responsible people should look to their old age and make sensible decisions for themselves, hiding away from the fact that the sensible preparations are easier than thinking about what will really happen to us afterward, after we can't live.
We fill up our time with activities that will distract us from the coming calamity. And that's good. We're allowed, as they say. But, what we are really seeking is endless youth, the exuberance of youth when we had no future beyond a month or a year or two, when who knew what might happen. We long for our youth when we had time enough. We thought. Time. And, now we see how finite time is and we fill up our time. We fill up our time and we lose time. We forget the gift that time is--time our only resource. We overlook the beauty that is everywhere. How gorgeous a smile is. How incomparable a kind gesture. The completeness of an iris that does not need us, only the sun and dirt and water. And, paradoxically, or maybe comically, we only manage now and then to think of the gift and are brought round again to our mortality and the realization that we must leave all this beauty behind!
Still, the ancients tell us that wisdom comes with age and that we are meant to grow wiser as we grow in age. Wisdom as a compensation? I'm not sure I think I know how we attain this wisdom. Does it come on its own, naturally? Do we not do anything and it comes to us? Or does it come to us and we must be seeking its arrival and be ready to greet it, ready to recognize its presence? And what would this wisdom be like? Is it acceptance of our fate? Is it good humor? Is it living more and more in the minute and less and less and less for things and false gods? Is it grace that we seek when we reach for wisdom? the grace to be like the trees and the birds and animals who have not been gifted, we believe, with speech and an intelligence like ours, but who instead live completely and unalterably in the minute? Whose joy appears to be unalloyed?
What to make of all of this? Every bit of us, and every thing in the universe, are bits of stars, living and dying, and dead stars. Is this what we must accept and luxuriate in, this underlying oneness? Is this wisdom? (And, how to cope with our stupidity when we cannot see this oneness in ourselves or in others?) It comes to me that perhaps we are unable to accept completely because of a failure of imagination: Being cannot comprehend non-being. We can't imagine it. If everything around you is, how can you imagine the interstitial space, the blank space, the nothingness that non-being is. I think this is the fear that paralyzes us and makes us petty and foolish, fearful and less than ourselves. This is the fear that overwhelms us and can make us sick.
Rabindranath Tagore says in one of his poems that we must "embrace death as we embrace life." Is this the wisdom that we seek? How does that work?
A friend and I were talking about writing a will, getting long term care health insurance, living in old age near a good medical center, living in old age near family that cares: in other words, we were discussing all the sensible strategies that people take, if they can, as they are confronted by their old age. --This is us.--
As we went on and on about what to do, it came to me that we do these things so that we may cheat our inevitable end. Well, cheat it, for a while. If we do such and such, we'll be better prepared, we say. I truly believe that in some very basic, secret, part of our hearts we think we might get out of this intact. We know this isn't so. We have evidence everywhere that as Brendan Gill said, "it ends badly for us all." But we also know that responsible people should look to their old age and make sensible decisions for themselves, hiding away from the fact that the sensible preparations are easier than thinking about what will really happen to us afterward, after we can't live.
We fill up our time with activities that will distract us from the coming calamity. And that's good. We're allowed, as they say. But, what we are really seeking is endless youth, the exuberance of youth when we had no future beyond a month or a year or two, when who knew what might happen. We long for our youth when we had time enough. We thought. Time. And, now we see how finite time is and we fill up our time. We fill up our time and we lose time. We forget the gift that time is--time our only resource. We overlook the beauty that is everywhere. How gorgeous a smile is. How incomparable a kind gesture. The completeness of an iris that does not need us, only the sun and dirt and water. And, paradoxically, or maybe comically, we only manage now and then to think of the gift and are brought round again to our mortality and the realization that we must leave all this beauty behind!
Still, the ancients tell us that wisdom comes with age and that we are meant to grow wiser as we grow in age. Wisdom as a compensation? I'm not sure I think I know how we attain this wisdom. Does it come on its own, naturally? Do we not do anything and it comes to us? Or does it come to us and we must be seeking its arrival and be ready to greet it, ready to recognize its presence? And what would this wisdom be like? Is it acceptance of our fate? Is it good humor? Is it living more and more in the minute and less and less and less for things and false gods? Is it grace that we seek when we reach for wisdom? the grace to be like the trees and the birds and animals who have not been gifted, we believe, with speech and an intelligence like ours, but who instead live completely and unalterably in the minute? Whose joy appears to be unalloyed?
What to make of all of this? Every bit of us, and every thing in the universe, are bits of stars, living and dying, and dead stars. Is this what we must accept and luxuriate in, this underlying oneness? Is this wisdom? (And, how to cope with our stupidity when we cannot see this oneness in ourselves or in others?) It comes to me that perhaps we are unable to accept completely because of a failure of imagination: Being cannot comprehend non-being. We can't imagine it. If everything around you is, how can you imagine the interstitial space, the blank space, the nothingness that non-being is. I think this is the fear that paralyzes us and makes us petty and foolish, fearful and less than ourselves. This is the fear that overwhelms us and can make us sick.
Rabindranath Tagore says in one of his poems that we must "embrace death as we embrace life." Is this the wisdom that we seek? How does that work?
Saturday, July 8, 2017
After 87,765 days
Must be a new year...I just got back to make a new posting on July 8, 2017...
Always time for a rant and never more than now, four days after the Fourth of this year:
360x241years=87,765 days. The 87,765th day of the republic, +/-, and it seems too small a number to encompass all of the 241 years since the signing of the Declaration. "A republic, madam, if we can keep it," Benj. Franklin is reported to have replied to a woman's question re: the government of the new country. So. how are we doing? Ben, would you say? What would you think of our government's direction? What's your prognosis? Will we survive--should we survive?--Trump and his depredations? What about the trajectory of the nation, besotted now by wealth, money-grabbing, overweening influence of special interests, "corporations regarded as citizens" by US Supreme Court ruling, incivility, disdain for learning, experience and scientific evidence, such that we voted in such a one as our president? And, what of the electoral college and its legal precedence over the popular vote? Wasn't it designed as a last measure against demagoguery? a safeguard against rabble vote?
We're in a mess, Ben, and this one citizen, at least, though I know of many who are equally worried, sees no path ahead.
The one possibility for future sanity may be that Trump's inept shenanigans may bring us down a peg internationally--we've gotten way off track there, arming the world, meddling and messing with others' affairs; maybe this period will knock some sense into us? Maybe strengthen the hand of those who've been warning against our near-mindless policy in the middle east, et al.)Maybe, but I don't count on history's rewarding the stupid, not for long. We have, via our election, destabilized international affairs. Is China really the nation the world wants to look to for leadership?
(Ours has been an imperium that has nearly bankrupted us, not so say made a mockery of our ideals of self-government, democracy, liberty et al.) Trump has been let loose on us--our bad--and on the world--our bad, their bad luck. His vanity, desperate personal insecurity--his insecurity of person--his coarse language, simplistic and vindictive language, deliberate ignorance--or maybe he really doesn't know anything much--his lack of learning, his vulgarity, to say nothing of his appalling behavior toward women--is all of this a mirror of who we are? Is this caricature our nation? Is my ideal so far removed from what the whole body of this nation wants?
Mass pop culture spawned Donald Trump--TV, reality (!) shows, glitz, five minutes of fame, low voter education, little interest in history--he is this culture's baby, and he plays out its baseness. There is nothing that such a world finds too base, apparently. Even our quite a few "educated young people" our new writers, seem to fear sincerity, clarity, deeply held beliefs in their writing, favoring instead an adolescent preference for a shrug, a joking sneer, an ironic pose. Even if they don't express Trump's views, like Trump they have no shame. None that they are willing to claim out of fear of derision by their peers. And, by saying all of this, I do not support the right's so-called values of a blind belief in the bible, its distortion of science, and its insistence upon the subjugation of women, however couched in laudatory platitudes about motherhood, femininity.
No doubt, we are in crisis--so many people without work; so many who have no skills for the work there is; so much poverty; children without proper care and parenting; parents without any help when in difficulty. And what about health care?--you legislators in Congress who have your own superb health care, good salaries, and generous pensions, and offer no hope for those less fortunate?--Why do we keep voting in these jokers? Watch them in an interview. When I listen to their words--blah blah words that bear no resemblance to anyone's truth, I'm almost, almost, inclined to take up Trump's complaint of fake news! Almost. For nearly seventy years the specter of a nuclear holocaust has hung over us and the nations, ours, in particular, have been playing with that fire. We have within our power to create the sixth mass extinction of the species on the planet. Plus, we go on, like drunken sailors, drilling, fracking, despoiling the planet, kowtowing to big business' bottom line rather than doing something about climate despoiling. With all of this on our shoulders it is lunacy to have given the nuclear codes to such a one as Trump. With Trump at the top, the tool of powerful business leaders, our nation is now securely a triumph of the uninformed, the ignorant, the uneducated--money rules, making money rules. The frosting on this poisonous cake is that looking-powerful trumps (I can't help it!) being powerful and embraces ignorance of facts and rules: Alice's Wonderland is here.
Each morning, I get up happy to be alive, to be here, and think that we'll get over this. Somehow. Then, as the day progresses, I see this is wishful thinking. I read more, see more, remember more and I despair. Annie Dillard, in her book For The Time Being, writes of the wrong-headedness of thinking ourselves exceptional, of regarding our time as the most valuable, as being the most vulnerable ever, the dangers as the most extreme. She reminds us that we are in no way exceptional! The world has been ever thus, different, but ever in peril. She reminds us that there already have been at least 5 mass extinctions! And, further, she writes that reputable scientists assure us that within 400 years nearly all of today's mammals and birds will have been made extinct: The Earth really is bigger than our species, however smart and however stupid we are, and I suppose this is consolatory news.
Really? When it breaks your heart to see how beautiful the planet is, as it is, as it has evolved. Consolation? To be a human being and not kill oneself, finally, seems to involve a great act of hopeful prestidigitation--the sure act of annihilation balanced with Emily Dickinson's small bird of hope against hope. This is our profoundest tragedy: We are NOT gods, at all. There is not a god who will come to our aid and undo what we have done. We are not powerful. We are bits of dust. Dust. Is this consolation? Neither Annie Dillard nor Emily Dickinson try to paint it as such. This is my cry, not theirs. How does one face the inevitability of our stupidity, our incompetence, our fallibility and not despair? Christianity seems to say, lead a life of belief in Jesus and you will be rewarded in the next life. Really, a next life? Where's the evidence for that? Other religions have their answers to this conundrum. The American answer seems to have been: human kind is perfectible, get involved in your community, help lift your fellow-citizens, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And all around me I see this answer in shreds. The exceptions (and they most magnificently exist) are lone tattered islands in a vastness, struggling against the disintegration of the continent. Wake up. We are not exceptions. We die. Versus. Wake up. Get back up on the horse. We live. Then we die.
Always time for a rant and never more than now, four days after the Fourth of this year:
360x241years=87,765 days. The 87,765th day of the republic, +/-, and it seems too small a number to encompass all of the 241 years since the signing of the Declaration. "A republic, madam, if we can keep it," Benj. Franklin is reported to have replied to a woman's question re: the government of the new country. So. how are we doing? Ben, would you say? What would you think of our government's direction? What's your prognosis? Will we survive--should we survive?--Trump and his depredations? What about the trajectory of the nation, besotted now by wealth, money-grabbing, overweening influence of special interests, "corporations regarded as citizens" by US Supreme Court ruling, incivility, disdain for learning, experience and scientific evidence, such that we voted in such a one as our president? And, what of the electoral college and its legal precedence over the popular vote? Wasn't it designed as a last measure against demagoguery? a safeguard against rabble vote?
We're in a mess, Ben, and this one citizen, at least, though I know of many who are equally worried, sees no path ahead.
The one possibility for future sanity may be that Trump's inept shenanigans may bring us down a peg internationally--we've gotten way off track there, arming the world, meddling and messing with others' affairs; maybe this period will knock some sense into us? Maybe strengthen the hand of those who've been warning against our near-mindless policy in the middle east, et al.)Maybe, but I don't count on history's rewarding the stupid, not for long. We have, via our election, destabilized international affairs. Is China really the nation the world wants to look to for leadership?
(Ours has been an imperium that has nearly bankrupted us, not so say made a mockery of our ideals of self-government, democracy, liberty et al.) Trump has been let loose on us--our bad--and on the world--our bad, their bad luck. His vanity, desperate personal insecurity--his insecurity of person--his coarse language, simplistic and vindictive language, deliberate ignorance--or maybe he really doesn't know anything much--his lack of learning, his vulgarity, to say nothing of his appalling behavior toward women--is all of this a mirror of who we are? Is this caricature our nation? Is my ideal so far removed from what the whole body of this nation wants?
Mass pop culture spawned Donald Trump--TV, reality (!) shows, glitz, five minutes of fame, low voter education, little interest in history--he is this culture's baby, and he plays out its baseness. There is nothing that such a world finds too base, apparently. Even our quite a few "educated young people" our new writers, seem to fear sincerity, clarity, deeply held beliefs in their writing, favoring instead an adolescent preference for a shrug, a joking sneer, an ironic pose. Even if they don't express Trump's views, like Trump they have no shame. None that they are willing to claim out of fear of derision by their peers. And, by saying all of this, I do not support the right's so-called values of a blind belief in the bible, its distortion of science, and its insistence upon the subjugation of women, however couched in laudatory platitudes about motherhood, femininity.
No doubt, we are in crisis--so many people without work; so many who have no skills for the work there is; so much poverty; children without proper care and parenting; parents without any help when in difficulty. And what about health care?--you legislators in Congress who have your own superb health care, good salaries, and generous pensions, and offer no hope for those less fortunate?--Why do we keep voting in these jokers? Watch them in an interview. When I listen to their words--blah blah words that bear no resemblance to anyone's truth, I'm almost, almost, inclined to take up Trump's complaint of fake news! Almost. For nearly seventy years the specter of a nuclear holocaust has hung over us and the nations, ours, in particular, have been playing with that fire. We have within our power to create the sixth mass extinction of the species on the planet. Plus, we go on, like drunken sailors, drilling, fracking, despoiling the planet, kowtowing to big business' bottom line rather than doing something about climate despoiling. With all of this on our shoulders it is lunacy to have given the nuclear codes to such a one as Trump. With Trump at the top, the tool of powerful business leaders, our nation is now securely a triumph of the uninformed, the ignorant, the uneducated--money rules, making money rules. The frosting on this poisonous cake is that looking-powerful trumps (I can't help it!) being powerful and embraces ignorance of facts and rules: Alice's Wonderland is here.
Each morning, I get up happy to be alive, to be here, and think that we'll get over this. Somehow. Then, as the day progresses, I see this is wishful thinking. I read more, see more, remember more and I despair. Annie Dillard, in her book For The Time Being, writes of the wrong-headedness of thinking ourselves exceptional, of regarding our time as the most valuable, as being the most vulnerable ever, the dangers as the most extreme. She reminds us that we are in no way exceptional! The world has been ever thus, different, but ever in peril. She reminds us that there already have been at least 5 mass extinctions! And, further, she writes that reputable scientists assure us that within 400 years nearly all of today's mammals and birds will have been made extinct: The Earth really is bigger than our species, however smart and however stupid we are, and I suppose this is consolatory news.
Really? When it breaks your heart to see how beautiful the planet is, as it is, as it has evolved. Consolation? To be a human being and not kill oneself, finally, seems to involve a great act of hopeful prestidigitation--the sure act of annihilation balanced with Emily Dickinson's small bird of hope against hope. This is our profoundest tragedy: We are NOT gods, at all. There is not a god who will come to our aid and undo what we have done. We are not powerful. We are bits of dust. Dust. Is this consolation? Neither Annie Dillard nor Emily Dickinson try to paint it as such. This is my cry, not theirs. How does one face the inevitability of our stupidity, our incompetence, our fallibility and not despair? Christianity seems to say, lead a life of belief in Jesus and you will be rewarded in the next life. Really, a next life? Where's the evidence for that? Other religions have their answers to this conundrum. The American answer seems to have been: human kind is perfectible, get involved in your community, help lift your fellow-citizens, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And all around me I see this answer in shreds. The exceptions (and they most magnificently exist) are lone tattered islands in a vastness, struggling against the disintegration of the continent. Wake up. We are not exceptions. We die. Versus. Wake up. Get back up on the horse. We live. Then we die.
Sunday, April 24, 2016
Garden update: Up here in the country every green thing has re-appeared. Every year is its own magic in spring. Finally, the oaks are leafing out from their original pink! toward green greener and dark green. At the moment, toward a light green. Even the 275 year old Resident Spirit oak never looked younger.
Because there's been over 70 inches of rain as well as days of over 90 degree weather, roses are coming on fast. In fact, the Cecile Brunner in the fir tree has come and gone, bloom-wise. The Souvenir de Malmaison has fat buds and they will very probably not last long because of the extremes of temperature, especially the hot days. This is one rose intended for a temperate clime. That's not here, I've learned. Snow and hard frosts are not unheard of in late April. Heat waves are common in early May. The sun's higher now and we should be starting with vegetable planting but we dare not before the end of May. Still I persist in treasuring the one in ten years when everything comes right and all the early roses bloom together, the plants we foolishly plant too early survive.
The apple trees have bloomed and set fruit, all of them, except for the Jonagold. It's an every other year producer. Even the Santa Rosa plum which usually gets caught by frost has little fruits on it. The quince trees, the two older ones and the two younger ones, the hardiest fruit trees anywhere, I contend, are covered with astonishingly porcelain-like flowers. The fig's doing well though it really shouldn't here in this sink of ours at the bottom of Cahto Peak. We'll have a crop. Maybe enough for a real dessert, maybe enough for scarfing down as we stand there looking at the tree, one evening.Then there are the crabapples so excellent in bloom so much work later. I'm not looking forward to the way the labor takes over whole days with making crabapple jelly--the two trees went crazy earlier with blooms every inch. Still crabapple jelly on a breakfast biscuit is pretty special.
Don's busy getting the vegetable beds ready--these are round beds! old wine barrels. This year they need to have gopher-stopping material put in the bottoms. Lots of hard work removing the dirt, fortifying it, then putting it back in over the new wire cloth. Last year the critters broke through the wood bottoms. Down the road, Cindy and Eric have put in huge numbers of strawberry plants--the rows of them are doing fine. Last year it was several rows of strawberries and quantities of kale. This year they have reversed the order. I don't know how they deal with the gophers. Maybe they don't have them. Maybe the gophers haven't made over there. Yet. We tried berries for a couple of years, raspberries, ollalieberries: what the scarlet tanagers didn't get, the robins did. We'd think we had closed up every gap of the net and still the birds, clever guys, found ways in. --I'll never understand why people use the term bird-brain as an insult. We're too greedy for berries for ourselves and too lazy to beat off the birds with complicated netting systems.
We gave up with berries though we persist with a few grape vines along a fence. When the grapes are ready we scramble around finding the ripe bunches. Meanwhile, the pileated woodpeckers scream at us akk-akk-akk-akk, hammer d-d-d-d-d-d on the fence wood, and stare us down--we want those grapes/they REALLY WANT those grapes. It's hard to stare down a woodpecker's unstaring eye. Actually, we grab some bunches anyway and leave the rest to them. Then somehow or other tanagers hear about the crop and they arrive--they come by stealth rather than by woodpecker noise--and flock into the vines saying nothing. Unlike the woodpeckers who eat one grape by one grape, the tanagers strip the stalk--no idea how they manage so many grapes in one gulp. Some old-timers contend that the grape berries can ferment in birds' stomachs, making the birds drunk--? Who knew getting drunk could be so simple--all that smashing and stomping and crushing and straining, refining and bottling is completely unnecessary.
It's overwhelming to go out in the garden right now: everything is healthy and growing fine and this is a good thing, and you feel right too. Then you look at all the jobs that need doing in the next two months, the weeding, the planting, the water system, the mowing, the hauling, and creaking about on old knees, and you don't feel right. Every year I forget the garden's rule: one thing at a time. I eat too fast.
Because there's been over 70 inches of rain as well as days of over 90 degree weather, roses are coming on fast. In fact, the Cecile Brunner in the fir tree has come and gone, bloom-wise. The Souvenir de Malmaison has fat buds and they will very probably not last long because of the extremes of temperature, especially the hot days. This is one rose intended for a temperate clime. That's not here, I've learned. Snow and hard frosts are not unheard of in late April. Heat waves are common in early May. The sun's higher now and we should be starting with vegetable planting but we dare not before the end of May. Still I persist in treasuring the one in ten years when everything comes right and all the early roses bloom together, the plants we foolishly plant too early survive.
The apple trees have bloomed and set fruit, all of them, except for the Jonagold. It's an every other year producer. Even the Santa Rosa plum which usually gets caught by frost has little fruits on it. The quince trees, the two older ones and the two younger ones, the hardiest fruit trees anywhere, I contend, are covered with astonishingly porcelain-like flowers. The fig's doing well though it really shouldn't here in this sink of ours at the bottom of Cahto Peak. We'll have a crop. Maybe enough for a real dessert, maybe enough for scarfing down as we stand there looking at the tree, one evening.Then there are the crabapples so excellent in bloom so much work later. I'm not looking forward to the way the labor takes over whole days with making crabapple jelly--the two trees went crazy earlier with blooms every inch. Still crabapple jelly on a breakfast biscuit is pretty special.
Don's busy getting the vegetable beds ready--these are round beds! old wine barrels. This year they need to have gopher-stopping material put in the bottoms. Lots of hard work removing the dirt, fortifying it, then putting it back in over the new wire cloth. Last year the critters broke through the wood bottoms. Down the road, Cindy and Eric have put in huge numbers of strawberry plants--the rows of them are doing fine. Last year it was several rows of strawberries and quantities of kale. This year they have reversed the order. I don't know how they deal with the gophers. Maybe they don't have them. Maybe the gophers haven't made over there. Yet. We tried berries for a couple of years, raspberries, ollalieberries: what the scarlet tanagers didn't get, the robins did. We'd think we had closed up every gap of the net and still the birds, clever guys, found ways in. --I'll never understand why people use the term bird-brain as an insult. We're too greedy for berries for ourselves and too lazy to beat off the birds with complicated netting systems.
We gave up with berries though we persist with a few grape vines along a fence. When the grapes are ready we scramble around finding the ripe bunches. Meanwhile, the pileated woodpeckers scream at us akk-akk-akk-akk, hammer d-d-d-d-d-d on the fence wood, and stare us down--we want those grapes/they REALLY WANT those grapes. It's hard to stare down a woodpecker's unstaring eye. Actually, we grab some bunches anyway and leave the rest to them. Then somehow or other tanagers hear about the crop and they arrive--they come by stealth rather than by woodpecker noise--and flock into the vines saying nothing. Unlike the woodpeckers who eat one grape by one grape, the tanagers strip the stalk--no idea how they manage so many grapes in one gulp. Some old-timers contend that the grape berries can ferment in birds' stomachs, making the birds drunk--? Who knew getting drunk could be so simple--all that smashing and stomping and crushing and straining, refining and bottling is completely unnecessary.
It's overwhelming to go out in the garden right now: everything is healthy and growing fine and this is a good thing, and you feel right too. Then you look at all the jobs that need doing in the next two months, the weeding, the planting, the water system, the mowing, the hauling, and creaking about on old knees, and you don't feel right. Every year I forget the garden's rule: one thing at a time. I eat too fast.
Thursday, August 29, 2013
A photo of a woman with wrinkles!
OK. The New York Times Style magazine is not
my go-to section. But this last past Sunday, August 25, I thought that maybe I
should take a look. One more time, take a look, see if anything had changed,
see if the models still looked...well... miserable. I did find a very
happy looking guy, on page 169, selling Andrew Fezza ware. That was a nice
change of pace. And there was Andrew O'Hagan's article, Laws of
Attraction. "No one can deny the glory of youth, but when a woman's
experiences can be read on her face...it is then, and only then, that her true
beauty appears," I read this and was hooked.
"There has probably never been a period so
youth-obsessed as ours: we speak of unlined faces as we once spoke of noble
minds..." I liked that, too. By the end of the article, I got the
part about the beauty of youth and the loveliness of aging with confidence and
intelligence and the part about women nowadays maybe doing a better job of
combining looks and intelligence, feeling better about themselves.
But I was puzzled, too. Very puzzled, and I wondered a lot about the
photos accompanying the article. Were they really Mr. O'Hagan's choice, and if
so, what was he thinking? Weren't there any available photos at all of
beautifully grown women?--They exist. I know they do. But rarely, if ever, in
this part of the newspaper. How odd. If the choice was not Mr. O'Hagan's then
who was it at the magazine who could have been so laughably (and rather
pathetically) out of touch with what's out here in the world, as well as, so
wrong about the gist of Mr. O'Hagan's article? Who was it who thought
that photos of young women would make a good match for an article about the
beauty of old (older) women? Is the fashion world really that afraid? A photo
of a woman with wrinkles or a woman with a figure? O shock, o horror. Can
someone there at the magazine or newspaper explain this to me? What century is
this?
Saturday, February 2, 2013
Back Again
No entries here in 2012. Hm-m. I'm still not sure that my venture into blogdom isn't delusional. Still. There are some more of my poems at Yourdailypoem.com (look in the Archives drop-down) and at Haiku.com. Thanks for having a look. Contact me if you'd like to see more. GHC
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