I’m not teaching any longer – another quickly exhausted career – yet even so, I’m spending the three months of summer in the hammock, imagining myself in other places, dredging up reflected memories like light in a drop of dew.
And I will write in the new rhythm that has evolved with the loss of deadlines. It has taken me some years to understand this pace and what expectations one should have. Those deadlines? Another past life, another half-career turned memory.
One book has been finished in this method. Two others are in process at the moment, in between spells in the hammock.
I had to admire the short story by Henry Roth in the current New Yorker called “God the Novelist.” Roth worked for decades on the novel this excerpt was adapted from. The unedited manuscript was over 2,000 pages long and he just kept writing. You can sense what that means in the story itself, how one becomes lost within one’s mind writing all the time.
In the subsequent two stories of the same issue, other writers are discussed. Harper Lee, the author of a single novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” is the subject of a new biography, written without the consent of a single interview. She refused publicity and never got over the publication and acclaim of that first novel. (The article also takes pains to demonstrate that, when all is said and done, the book is overrated and not that well written; the movie is better, the author claims.) Harper Lee, like Melville, and like her friend Truman Capote in a way, followed the writing life into a strange cul-de-sac. Nothing was published after a time. Decades passed.
The third article is yet another revisionist review of Dan Brown’s writing abilities for “The Da Vinci Code,” which has been roundly trounced for its prose style, opinions all given in retrospect and unrelated to the movie. I said from the outset that the book was ridiculous – I could probably dig up the emails I sent at the time to this effect – but I didn’t believe then or now that the writing was any worse than that of any other potboiler writers raking in fields of cash for their enterprise.
Actually, Anthony Lane’s review of the movie is a very funny, well-written review of the writing style of Dan Brown. (His review is fun to read, reminding one of Pauline Kael’s writing in the same magazine, something more often good to read than to rely upon as insightful criticism. I'm sure reading the review is more fun that going to the movie would be.)
One of the two new books I am writing took a decisive turn over the Memorial Day weekend. I was reading a seminal book of Mennonite theology, “The Politics of Jesus” by John Howard Yoder, as I rocked in the hammock, imagining I was on the diesel-smelling ferry between Brindisi, Italy, and Greece. Yoder’s book is almost impenetrable in reference and footnotes. It was written in 1972, but I’d never read it. And for the first time in recent memory, I found myself understanding Christian theology and practice with a positive and meaningful purpose.
I’m still elated at this discovery, made while doing nothing, far from my keyboard, swinging in shade, and reading what almost anyone would agree is a book rich, meaningful, valuable, and badly written.
Tuesday, May 30, 2006
Sunday, May 28, 2006
He encontrado alguien
que tambien escribe en dos lenguas y que tambien que a el no importa si nadie lo lea. Es http://josekblog.blogspot.com/ y el dice que, "Bitácora de José Carlos Cortizo Pérez, aquí hablo de lo que me resulta interesante, así como cuento todo aquello que me apetece contar pese a que nadie le apetezca escuchar."
Memorial days
A vacation, or holiday, supposed, but the hammock waits every day, faithful, regardless, for the taking.
The career never came; instead, the hammock, landlocked, constricted by the copse of cool trees. Yesterday, he saw an oriole. Or something orange enough to make him gasp.
Mary sang to him, enlightening, "He has shown strength with his arm, He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts, He has put down the mighty from their thrones, And exalted those of low degree; He has filled the hungry with good things, And the rich he has sent away empty."
So Luke recounted to him, as he paged through "The Politics of Jesus" by John Howard Yoder, a book picked up some 35 years belated, alternating as he rocked with a Spanish translation of El hombre duplicado of Saramago. And drank coffee, colder and sweeter with each sip before setting it back in the dirt.
He went to church, late, wearing short pants, while a convert, a friend, delivered his first-time-to-the-pulpit sermon, wore a tie. The novice preacher spoke the serenity prayer to begin, setting a perfect pitch of humility. He spoke of power and peanuts, of sharing and service and selflessless.
The sharing time involved many proclaiming their careers, their travels, their sabbaticals, their plans to relocate to lakes, to Ontario, to other Edens, temporarily, and the clarity of their requests for prayers seemed more like boasts when they should have been laments. They would miss the return of the oriole, probably.
He left church early, so as not to diminish the thoughts with coffee and conversation and the cheer of fraternity. The fellowship needed another day, not this day, not this morning, when he realized how much apart from love he had strayed, how eaten up he had become with the strife from the evangelical dogma of neighboring congregations, with the anger of letters, of killing, of justification, of politics, of wrangling by those who refute reason with misinterpreted law.
When he got home, he made more coffee and returned to two-fisted study, Yoder and Saramago, peace and mystery, until the bird returns.
He did not want to go shopping for the holiday. He did not want to move. He did not need to move. It all came back to him. A smell of Mexico City. A flavor of Provence. A street sound that positioned him in Manhattan. Everything is illuminated and rocks. He rocks.
The career never came; instead, the hammock, landlocked, constricted by the copse of cool trees. Yesterday, he saw an oriole. Or something orange enough to make him gasp.
Mary sang to him, enlightening, "He has shown strength with his arm, He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts, He has put down the mighty from their thrones, And exalted those of low degree; He has filled the hungry with good things, And the rich he has sent away empty."
So Luke recounted to him, as he paged through "The Politics of Jesus" by John Howard Yoder, a book picked up some 35 years belated, alternating as he rocked with a Spanish translation of El hombre duplicado of Saramago. And drank coffee, colder and sweeter with each sip before setting it back in the dirt.
He went to church, late, wearing short pants, while a convert, a friend, delivered his first-time-to-the-pulpit sermon, wore a tie. The novice preacher spoke the serenity prayer to begin, setting a perfect pitch of humility. He spoke of power and peanuts, of sharing and service and selflessless.
The sharing time involved many proclaiming their careers, their travels, their sabbaticals, their plans to relocate to lakes, to Ontario, to other Edens, temporarily, and the clarity of their requests for prayers seemed more like boasts when they should have been laments. They would miss the return of the oriole, probably.
He left church early, so as not to diminish the thoughts with coffee and conversation and the cheer of fraternity. The fellowship needed another day, not this day, not this morning, when he realized how much apart from love he had strayed, how eaten up he had become with the strife from the evangelical dogma of neighboring congregations, with the anger of letters, of killing, of justification, of politics, of wrangling by those who refute reason with misinterpreted law.
When he got home, he made more coffee and returned to two-fisted study, Yoder and Saramago, peace and mystery, until the bird returns.
He did not want to go shopping for the holiday. He did not want to move. He did not need to move. It all came back to him. A smell of Mexico City. A flavor of Provence. A street sound that positioned him in Manhattan. Everything is illuminated and rocks. He rocks.
Monday, May 22, 2006
Autobiographical note
bricolage \bree-koh-LAHZH\ noun
: construction achieved by using whatever comes to hand; also : something constructed in this way
Example sentence:
Knowing that the motor was assembled from a hasty bricolage of junk parts, Raphael had little hope that it would run effectively.
Did you know?
According to French social anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, the artist "shapes the beautiful and useful out of the dump heap of human life." Levi-Strauss compared this artistic process to the work of a handyman who solves technical or mechanical problems with whatever materials are available. He referred to that process of making do as "bricolage," a term derived from the French verb "bricoler" (meaning "to putter about") and related to "bricoleur," the French name for a jack-of-all-trades. "Bricolage" made its way from French to English in 1966, when Levi-Strauss's The Savage Mind was translated from his native tongue to ours. Now it is used for everything from the creative uses of leftovers ("culinary bricolage") to the cobbling together of disparate computer parts ("technical bricolage").
Fame
I had a book about invisibility once. It outlined arcane methods of achieving invisibility. To walk through life unseen. William Burroughs also had a short piece once about this, about how to walk down the street unnoticed by those passing you by. You focus your own eyes on the color yellow, for example, and what you see forces others to look aside. It's a form of sleight of hand taken to an entire corporal level.
Maybe the book is still around someplace, if I sorted through all the detritus of my life. I should dare to throw most of this stuff out in the process. It accumulates in mountains, making it hard to even walk through my office, and I balk, pour another cup of coffee, try to think through the loss, and hesitate. Someday, maybe even today, I'll throw huge chunks of stuff away.
Transparency appeals more than actual disappearance. To be there, to create, and to see the results of one's efforts without having to bear the burden of acknowledgment.
To direct a play and let those on stage win the applause... I don't want to wear the clothes necessary to say "thank you." Is that so strange?
One thinks of Patti Smith, who achieved her name and then retreated into a kitchen in Detroit for a full decade, out of the public eye. (She did come back, once the kids were grown. It is hard to completely renounce the rush of acclaim.)
Or Lao Tsu, whose words are beloved and concise, but who apparently wrote nothing with his own hand.
Or Herman Melville, who faded from view, despite having written great works. By the time of his death, he was so forgotten by the public that the newspaper misspelled his name, called him "Henry" instead of Herman. Was he resentful? Or was his retreat from the spotlight deliberate? Was there enough satisfaction in having written Moby Dick and The Confidence Man and Bartleby that there was no need to be reminded of it by others? Could he hold the volumes in his hand and feel content, with no need to wave the paper in his hands and announce, "I did this."
All these books, finished and unfinished, hidden in closets or left lying on the global streetcorners of unpublicized blogs, waiting to be discovered, home movies with nameless faces, discovered in garage sales and attics...
Somewhere in the stars, there is a reader. I walk through the flowers and spot foxes. It is enough. It should be enough.
Maybe the book is still around someplace, if I sorted through all the detritus of my life. I should dare to throw most of this stuff out in the process. It accumulates in mountains, making it hard to even walk through my office, and I balk, pour another cup of coffee, try to think through the loss, and hesitate. Someday, maybe even today, I'll throw huge chunks of stuff away.
Transparency appeals more than actual disappearance. To be there, to create, and to see the results of one's efforts without having to bear the burden of acknowledgment.
To direct a play and let those on stage win the applause... I don't want to wear the clothes necessary to say "thank you." Is that so strange?
One thinks of Patti Smith, who achieved her name and then retreated into a kitchen in Detroit for a full decade, out of the public eye. (She did come back, once the kids were grown. It is hard to completely renounce the rush of acclaim.)
Or Lao Tsu, whose words are beloved and concise, but who apparently wrote nothing with his own hand.
Or Herman Melville, who faded from view, despite having written great works. By the time of his death, he was so forgotten by the public that the newspaper misspelled his name, called him "Henry" instead of Herman. Was he resentful? Or was his retreat from the spotlight deliberate? Was there enough satisfaction in having written Moby Dick and The Confidence Man and Bartleby that there was no need to be reminded of it by others? Could he hold the volumes in his hand and feel content, with no need to wave the paper in his hands and announce, "I did this."
All these books, finished and unfinished, hidden in closets or left lying on the global streetcorners of unpublicized blogs, waiting to be discovered, home movies with nameless faces, discovered in garage sales and attics...
Somewhere in the stars, there is a reader. I walk through the flowers and spot foxes. It is enough. It should be enough.
Big Screen TV
He perdido los zapatos.
Nothing new in this house.
"Twenty years of schooling
And they put you on the day shift,"
or, better,
No hay nada.
Nada menos a house filled with so much
A vulturous music
Tarkovsky influences in Mexican cinema
That you have forever
to sift it out
Time to find the missing shoes.
The children come
and go
The house is quiet, empty
and they never leave, ever, either.
It is the best of
Quantum mechanics
Waves and Particles
Bouncing in stillness.
To speak words
that communicate too well
Despite all fatal attempts
to color the meanings
Soy acostumbrado de ser desmudo.
And there is a shelter
en la lengua
in the tongue
If I can shift into a new idiom
y lose el viejo
Swim in a new baby voice
and perder the old one
At least temporarily.
Always writing now
Like the Stone Reader said,
"I think like a writer, it's all that matters."
My collection of neo-Nietzscheisms
Wittgenstein (and I have the right, the simple do, we do)
"So past enlightenment,"
say New Yorker cartoon monks.
What I was getting to:
Wife goes to technology store.
Doesn't like Is not impressed a ella no importa
the CDL HDTV plasma LCD 50 52 56 64
It's relative. Sizeism.
We have everything we need.
The children are out.
The fan comforts.
I wonder about my prostate, a little.
Now, that Mexican movie, Japon.
Friday, May 19, 2006
My mantra reaches middle age
I walked past the campus building the other day – the old squat office on John Street, near the railroad tracks – where I learned to meditate.
That was back in 1971, I think. The early 1970s blur together for me. I lost a year or two along the way. No mental record or chronology.
Unofficially, it was still the Sixties, but we didn't know the revolution had already ended. We were chomping on life and when you're eating quickly, you don't feel full for 20 minutes.
Thanks to the Beatles, and Donovan, and the Beach Boys, and Mia Farrow, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's teachings were in Life Magazine and on the front page of the News-Gazette. We listened to Sgt. Pepper and Good Vibrations and all wanted to be enlightened.
At least I did.
So I signed up to get my mantra. I went to a lecture in the Illini Union and then went to the initiation, a two-day operation of training and practice and the bestowal of the mantra.
One had to come to the teaching place – the TM offices there on John Street – with fresh fruit, a white handkerchief, and the cost of enlightenment, which at the time was $15 for poor students like me. Today, poor student or not, the cost is closer to $1000 for the same thing.
And it is worth it.
I have been meditating ever since, twice a day. There have been lapses of days, weeks, months without meditating, yet once I find myself back in seated upright position, taking 15-20 minutes with eyes closed, letting the mantra roll in my head, I wonder how in the world it may have been that I stopped doing this, even for a short time.
I have never revealed my mantra aloud to anyone, ever.
Science tested the Maharishi's methods and found that the "relaxation response" was effective in reducing metabolic rates and blood pressure and other quantifiables. Science claims you can use any syllable, no special mantra needed. But I think to have something one accepts with ritual, with sacrifice (even if only $15, a hankie and a banana), with purpose, and something given to you by another, carries more meaning and keeps you motivated.
We're still waiting for the world peace Maharishi promised, but I'm not cynical about meditation.
Over all these years, I have learned to let thoughts come and go like leaves floating across a wind-swept pond during these brief daily sessions. Without sleeping, I have found myself aware and yet transported. I may forget where I am and when I end the practice, open my eyes refreshed, in a new place, as though waking from an eight-hour sleep.
I have meditated on Mayan pyramids in Mexico and Guatemala. I have meditated in flea-bitten hotel rooms in Paris. I have meditated on beaches and mountains, in closets and offices, alone and with others.
Have there been benefits? Or has it been a waste of time?
A waste of time? Sitting still, doing nothing... Some would say that is the very definition of creative productivity.
I have never known insomnia.
I don't preach TM. I almost never speak of it and certainly make no show of it. We're supposed to pray in closets, not on the street corners, after all. Maybe I'm mixing up my religions, but that's all right.
I'm wary of even writing this. Regarding Transcendental Meditation, it wouldn't yet be right for me to draw conclusions at this point. I'm not finished.
That was back in 1971, I think. The early 1970s blur together for me. I lost a year or two along the way. No mental record or chronology.
Unofficially, it was still the Sixties, but we didn't know the revolution had already ended. We were chomping on life and when you're eating quickly, you don't feel full for 20 minutes.
Thanks to the Beatles, and Donovan, and the Beach Boys, and Mia Farrow, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's teachings were in Life Magazine and on the front page of the News-Gazette. We listened to Sgt. Pepper and Good Vibrations and all wanted to be enlightened.
At least I did.
So I signed up to get my mantra. I went to a lecture in the Illini Union and then went to the initiation, a two-day operation of training and practice and the bestowal of the mantra.
One had to come to the teaching place – the TM offices there on John Street – with fresh fruit, a white handkerchief, and the cost of enlightenment, which at the time was $15 for poor students like me. Today, poor student or not, the cost is closer to $1000 for the same thing.
And it is worth it.
I have been meditating ever since, twice a day. There have been lapses of days, weeks, months without meditating, yet once I find myself back in seated upright position, taking 15-20 minutes with eyes closed, letting the mantra roll in my head, I wonder how in the world it may have been that I stopped doing this, even for a short time.
I have never revealed my mantra aloud to anyone, ever.
Science tested the Maharishi's methods and found that the "relaxation response" was effective in reducing metabolic rates and blood pressure and other quantifiables. Science claims you can use any syllable, no special mantra needed. But I think to have something one accepts with ritual, with sacrifice (even if only $15, a hankie and a banana), with purpose, and something given to you by another, carries more meaning and keeps you motivated.
We're still waiting for the world peace Maharishi promised, but I'm not cynical about meditation.
Over all these years, I have learned to let thoughts come and go like leaves floating across a wind-swept pond during these brief daily sessions. Without sleeping, I have found myself aware and yet transported. I may forget where I am and when I end the practice, open my eyes refreshed, in a new place, as though waking from an eight-hour sleep.
I have meditated on Mayan pyramids in Mexico and Guatemala. I have meditated in flea-bitten hotel rooms in Paris. I have meditated on beaches and mountains, in closets and offices, alone and with others.
Have there been benefits? Or has it been a waste of time?
A waste of time? Sitting still, doing nothing... Some would say that is the very definition of creative productivity.
I have never known insomnia.
I don't preach TM. I almost never speak of it and certainly make no show of it. We're supposed to pray in closets, not on the street corners, after all. Maybe I'm mixing up my religions, but that's all right.
I'm wary of even writing this. Regarding Transcendental Meditation, it wouldn't yet be right for me to draw conclusions at this point. I'm not finished.
Wednesday, May 17, 2006
Eavesdropping during the years of schizophrenia
Maybe it could all be explained better, this attempt at simultaneous privacy and exhibitionism, as encouragement in the practice of eavesdropping.
During those years of paranoid schizophrenia, on the street without medication, you heard every voice cohere into the perfect grid. That's what paranoia really means – everything relates to you. You are the crown of creation. It all makes sense, a terrible and thrilling burden of centeredness.
You have heard it, nervously dismissing, when you were shopping at Target and the child with Down's Syndrome wandered away from his mother and walked up to you and spoke aloud the very words that were in your head. Coincidence, you thought as you hurried to the checkout, because later that afternoon you had a meeting. You tried not to listen and started counting the agenda items, one, two...
Or the homeless guy on the corner. He seemed to be babbling to the stars that only he could see at noon, and yet when he wiped the greasy locks of hair from his face and looked in your eyes, he knew the game you played and saw each sin and laughed. That pierced. His inchoate words you heard, eavesdropping what went on between him and God, and you couldn't believe. You couldn't believe that his prayer was for you.
You can go there (if you can) or you can pretend (as you must).
It changes nothing to know.
During those years of paranoid schizophrenia, on the street without medication, you heard every voice cohere into the perfect grid. That's what paranoia really means – everything relates to you. You are the crown of creation. It all makes sense, a terrible and thrilling burden of centeredness.
You have heard it, nervously dismissing, when you were shopping at Target and the child with Down's Syndrome wandered away from his mother and walked up to you and spoke aloud the very words that were in your head. Coincidence, you thought as you hurried to the checkout, because later that afternoon you had a meeting. You tried not to listen and started counting the agenda items, one, two...
Or the homeless guy on the corner. He seemed to be babbling to the stars that only he could see at noon, and yet when he wiped the greasy locks of hair from his face and looked in your eyes, he knew the game you played and saw each sin and laughed. That pierced. His inchoate words you heard, eavesdropping what went on between him and God, and you couldn't believe. You couldn't believe that his prayer was for you.
You can go there (if you can) or you can pretend (as you must).
It changes nothing to know.
The First Last Good Name
This is the first post of The Last Good Name. Or, rather, it will be.
The grey plastic top sheet of the Magic Slate is being lifted.
The table holding the sand mandala that was painstakingly drawn by Tibetan monks is tipping.
Words are evaporating into the atmosphere we breathe.
Someday all will be a memory, a vague memory perhaps, or, more likely, a missing memory.
What is the nature of a missing memory?
The Last Good Name will become a missing memory.
The grey plastic top sheet of the Magic Slate is being lifted.
The table holding the sand mandala that was painstakingly drawn by Tibetan monks is tipping.
Words are evaporating into the atmosphere we breathe.
Someday all will be a memory, a vague memory perhaps, or, more likely, a missing memory.
What is the nature of a missing memory?
The Last Good Name will become a missing memory.
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