THE ALL PROMISED CYCLICAL NATURE OF MATURITY AND INNOCENCE

THE PROSE VERSION OF THE POEM

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Innocence renewed

I tried to spare the details, to avoid too much information about those unpleasant bodily functions and fluids generally not described in polite company. But genteel avoidance proved too obscure. Almost certainly as the result of anniversary grief, stress, and exertion, a volume of blood, clotted and liquid, began to manifest in my urine in June, perfectly timed with the date of Lee's death. It was not the first time. Previous Junes had seen similar occurrences and all medical tests proved nothing. The mind is a powerful thing. I resisted returning to the doctor, but my friends would not have it. “Go to the doctor,” they demanded, reciting their own experiences of kidney failures and such. 

The blood persisted for three days, five days, a week, and on. There was no pain, only the dread of watching the blood and clots emerge consistently in terrifying spurts. Blood would leak out in the night, during sleep.

For two weeks, all sexual desire was extinguished, evaporated. I didn't even want to risk excitement. At the same time, as I walked through the quotidian routines of spring (also attributing the blood to annual allergies of the season), I found myself lifted into a sense of peacefulness. My own death was constantly a thought and possibility and, more, an inevitability to be accepted without complaint. 

I felt at peace, strangely. And I almost remembered what life was like in days of innocence. The world was new again, different. And I attributed my ability to see the world like this, at least in part, to the fact that I had been faithful, on and off, in my particular, specific practice of transcendental meditation for almost fifty – count 'em, fifty – years. 

After two weeks, the bleeding stopped. I'm going back to the doctor, reluctantly, for another test next week. I feel fine and never really stopped feeling fine. I dreamed last night about Lee. We had a baby daughter who started taking in complete sentences as I carried her. Lee knew of her ability like this and had failed to tell me. We fought. I woke up.

The poem I wrote concluded with my predictable and not exactly explainable philosophy of eternity and eternal life. At this very minute, I'm flying from Oakland to Chicago, writing on my phone with one finger, listening with headphones to showtunes, including Bette Midler in Hello, Dolly, and Lauren Ambrose in My Fair Lady, my head bobbing no doubt to the consternation of the guy in the middle seat.

And there you have it. The annotated poem. Probably nothing what you imagined, but in my other philosophy of life, whatever you imagined the poem was about is equally valid and maybe even more so. Words just have lives of their own. We don't control them.

THE POEM

Those two weeks when innocence stood at the door

Hauling an urgent, primal, necessary spurt of blood 

Everything holy and flushed away 

Mortality came greeting at the dawn, doling itself out in flesh reminders 

Wounds spilling yet free of pain 

Breathing glorious 

With air visible and sweet 

A clownfish aware of water for the first time 

A child again, returning after 60 years of small steps into wilderness 

After 50 years of meditation like the gray bearded man on the crag 

Or the seeker trekking up to sputter a worn query on the meaning 

Of everything, although, thighs and ankles aching 

He had picked it up along the way 

He already knew before opening his mouth 

The bluebird’s eggs were in the basket all along all the time 

Because of all those years sitting still morning and night  

The guru of intention and will came through  

Precisely as promised 

And so here we are all three all one and nobody home 

This is what it means to be saved 

Since the afterlife left yesterday

Tiptoeing out in the dark

June 30-July 2, 2019 

TIJUANA Y TECATE

"I've been married four times," Rafael, the bartender told me. "Now I'm back with my first wife."

We were the only ones in Diana's Bar in Tecate, Mexico. I was waiting to catch the afternoon bus back to Tijuana where I had been spending a couple of days, just exploring. I'd intended to visit the Tecate brewing plant, but I was misinformed about tours. They no longer give them.  Free beers, though, are handed out in the beer garden. 

I chewed on some rich carne asada tacos and nursed another Tecate. The conversation with Rafael grew increasingly confessional. He wasn't really happy in Mexico, he said. He had spent four years in the States, digging up potatoes in Idaho and working a cattle ranch in Wyoming. He never had papers or learned English.

Tecate waits just across the border from California, an easier crossing point than Tijuana. All Mexican border towns clearly are Mexican in character, but I've never warmed to them. Their proximity to the States casts a blurred reflection, as though the richness of Mexican culture and the expansiveness of the U.S. both were denied and barely out of reach.

Since the time I left Illinois for a couple of weeks to spend time with Henry and family, I had never been far from immersion in Spanish. In Los Angeles and Lynwood, signs may indicate "English Spoken" instead of the expected "Se Habla Español."

I took a Greyhound to Tijuana. Crossing the border over land was easier than by air in ways. You get off the bus, fill out the form, walk across the border and reboard the bus on the other side. There was no sign of turmoil or smugglers or caravans. Business as usual, people crossing in both directions.

Downtown Tijuana, Avenida Revolucion, is undeniably a tourist strip, with sombreros and painted donkeys  -- Mexican zebras -- chewing on corn husks and waiting for tourists to have their pictures taken.  I used Google maps to find a barber shop nearby and got my traditional Latin American haircut. I don't generally shop for souvenirs. I have no need to accumulate more t-shirts and tchotchkes, so I get a haircut instead.

I ate a tlayuda at an Oaxacan restaurant and then took an Uber to the apartment of my Couchsurfing hosts, Ignacio and his girlfriend Adele. He has offered a spare apartment next to his own to Couchsurfers for several years now. We went out for dinner that evening at Caesar's downtown, the upscale restaurant where the Caesar salad was first created. 

Ignacio makes a good living driving Uber in San Diego. We discussed our own experiences as Couchsurfing hosts. His only bad experiences were with indifferent backpackers who are looking for a free place to crash and offer little, even in the way of conversation, in return . In my case, the only poor experience was with a Chinese student coming to attend UI and suffering from nervous culture shock. But it all worked out. 

In the morning, Ignacio and Adele walked with me through the early street market, looking over the goods for sale and then stopping at Adele's favorite restaurant for some birria and crazy good mole and pollo tacos with peanut sauce and cinnamon coffee.

It wasn't my first time in Tijuana. Years ago, when the boys were still small, Lee and I drove through on our way to take the Copper Canyon train ride across northern Mexico. We also had eaten downtown. The restaurant menu was simple, offering a single order or a double order or a triple order.  But of what? An order of what?, I asked the waiter. He pointed to the stuffed goat heads on the wall. Goat meat birria is still prevalent here, prized and hefty chunks of meat swimming in delicious red broth. Topped with onions and cilantro, birria beats ayahuasca any day.

Earlier, back in Los Angeles, Henry and I drove downtown to the Mark Taper Forum to see Dianne Wiest performing as Winnie in Samuel Beckett's "Happy Days." LA has never been renowned as a big legit theater town, HBO's "Barry" to the contrary, and the audience at the Forum was California casual, not the same half tourist/half theater crowd you would get in Manhattan.  A fair number in the audience were simply not eager to see a known movie actor like Wiest delivering Beckett's existentialist monologue while buried in sand up up to her waist, and after an intermission that saw a number of patrons exit, buried up to her neck.

Still, it can be watched as a comedy, mostly, and people did respond with generous laughing, at the play and at themselves. I had to watch and reflect on the entire moment as if the bartender, the couchsurfing host, myself, Henry, and the whole messed up world were similarly stuck, a world in which we stuff hungry children in crowded, filthy cages and shrug it off on the way to dinner.

We can't go on like this and yet, we go on.

Test airplane

Luis Buñuel and Federico Garcia Lorca in a plane.
Dada is 100 years old.
Next year.
Or the next.

IT BREATHES ME

2:30 a.m. Start route. First tube. No cars.

2:36 One skunk.

2:38 Swerve around discarded paper bag, beer cans. No moon. Replacements. Police.

2:39 A kitten in the ditch. The Turtles. New white gravel reflects on brights.

2:40 Gliding hawk or owl.

2:43 A single rabbit.  Remove seat belt for right window deliveries.  Happy Together.

2:48 Meet oncoming headlights. “How is the weather?”

2:51 Mist. Slow wipers. Pair of raccoons. Fat raccoon hides in the ditch, looks back.

3:00 a.m. Hit first benchmark, right on time. Thirty-six down. Bagging some, banding some.

3:08 Android alert: New York Times. Scan headlines.  Queens of the Stone Age.

3:11 Stop sign. One motorcycle followed by one car. Unusual amount of human activity.

3:13 Branch stuck under car.  Drive in reverse to dislodge.

3:14 Motorcycle and car stopped ahead on County Road 2500 E. Window down. “Is everything OK?” “Just didn’t want to slide on the slick pavement.” “OK, be careful.”

3:16 Baron von Tollbooth and the Chrome Nun.

3:22 A little Pet Shop Boys.

3:23 Fox!

3:25 Birds playing chicken with headlights, fly up from pavement along 2600 E.

3:28 Slurp of coffee. Marlboro peppermint snus. “Wud’ve I wud’ve I wud’ve I done to deserve this.”

3:40 Corn stalks half dry, brown.  Didn’t notice yesterday.  Elton John. Teacher I Need You.

3:42 Predictable barking dog runs up to window.  Phone battery down, plug in. Elderberry Wine.

3:47 Hippie rarity. David Crosby. If I Could Only Remember My Name.

3:49 A few minutes early.  Missed farmer’s truck leaving for work. Catch him tomorrow.

3:58 Alice’s house now empty, dark.

4:00 a.m. Second benchmark.  Halfway done. Running a little early.  Incomprehensible tweet from insomniac Sponberg.  Pass through Broadlands.  Run both stop signs. Rain long stopped.  Warm.

4:10 Stop to void on CR 100 N.  No stars.  Lonely tree on landscape dark as shadow.

4:12 Sing along. “I wonder who they are, the men who really run this land. I wonder why they run it with such a thoughtless hand. What are their names and on what street do they live? I'd like to ride right over this afternoon and give them a piece of my mind about peace for mankind. Peace is not an awful lot to ask.” Could have been written yesterday.

4:16 Glide through silent Allerton. Turn off music. No signs of life, not even a rabbit in the gardens. Deliver thirty more.

4:33 Exit Allerton. Cricket chirps.

4:42 Three mile stretch of nothing in Vermilion County. Flip open paper to scan for angry letters.  Champaign-Urbana glows 30 miles off. Nobody seen since the motorcycle.

4:55 Erik Satie piano music in the form of a pear.

5:00 a.m. Turn on NPR News. Republicans announce they will “disagree completely” with Obama’s jobs plan, one day before he announces what that will be.

5:02 Turn off NPR News. Return to Satie.

5:03 Semi-truck on highway 49.

5:04 Brake for two young deer.

5:10 Coyote dashes into corn.

5:12 GPS screen as blank as the sky, save for single straight line, CR 2800 E.

5:15 Closed RR crossing, detour through Homer. Three cars. Marathon Station, gas $3.75.

5:25 Turn onto last gravel mile before Homer Lake.

5:32 Woman walking dog. Still very dark.

5:39 Homer Lake Road. Man jogs, wearing reflective tape.

5:40 Slurp tepid coffee.  Slight pain in chest.  Think about mortality. Contemplate how Satie piano music compares with Ryuchi Sakamoto.

5:43 Conclude South Homer Lake Road run. Lake still. No sunrise until Daylight Saving Time.

5:46 Train whistle three miles off.

5:49 Slow down for deer bounding along corn rows.

5:51 The last mile. Birds start to chirp. A rooster crows. Pre-dawn clouds looming and black.

5:58 a.m. Final paper stuffed into orange tube. 157 papers total.  Dawn behind me. Gnossiennes plays on, indifferent.

WARREN

Around 4 a.m. the other day, three cub coyotes, testing their adolescent oats in the middle of County Road 500N,  stared into my approaching headlights.  At the last minute, when it was clear that this big thing coming at them wasn’t a burning bush or a wayward tree, they ran off together into the cornfield.

It is my impression that coyotes abandon their companions, their siblings, after a while.  I could be mistaken, but by and large the older coyotes I see run alone.  Deer, on the other hand, continue to associate much longer and sometimes even the young antlered stags can be seen leaping together in pairs over fences early in the morning.

Fall, winter, spring and summer, I drive the mean back roads of Champaign and Vermilion counties and I see a lot of weird animal behaviors.  Whatever god or evolutionary force designed the waddle of the skunk had a perverse sense of humor.  Rabbits zigzag, almost as though they were daring you to run them over, but I understand that this is a protection against hawks.

This summer, when I wasn’t delivering newspapers in the dark, I spent a fair amount of time reading philosophy.  One theory I have is that most of the world’s philosophy — particularly that of the last 100 years, and most particularly that of the French —  was written for entertainment rather than enlightenment.

Probably about a century ago, about the time Wittgenstein said “that of which we cannot know, we must not speak,” the French philosophers thought, what the heck.  Let’s just make complicated stuff up.  It’s all just language anyway.

So, for me, this was the summer of four things: 1) Jacques Derrida, 2) coyote cubs, 3) obtaining an old Smith-Corona typewriter, and 3) arguing.

(To recklessly summarize Derrida, try this.  All language is ambiguous.  There may be a central meaning and a marginalized meaning.  If you take the marginalized meaning and make it the central meaning, you throw everything out of whack.  It’s called deconstruction. * Then, if you’re a smartass, you’ll make up a pun in French. )

I argued with my family.  It’s nothing new; I’ve argued with them since the start of the Iraq war, if not before.  This summer, when I wasn’t sweating and reading Derrida, I argued with my family about language and God.

I’d like to point out that the word “family” is ambiguous.  I’ve decided to retire this imprecise word and split it into two other words.  I have chosen the words “kin” and “brood.”  Kin will refer to parents, siblings, and all the other relatives that at my age are largely relegated to greeting cards and holiday status.  Brood isn’t the best term to use for referring to the mate and the children and any subsequent additions that may be coming down the line (not yet, please), so I’m still working on a better term for that crowd.

The kin are the ones I’ve been having the argument with, mostly about Biblical literalism.  Every single last one of them, bless them, seems to believe that every word in the Bible is not only true, but that they themselves are capable of explaining what every single word in the Bible means.  Or else.

Despite all the translations, multiple transcriptions, old illiterate monks with bad eyesight, centuries of corruption and changes, misprints, typos, international languages in differing alphabets, and bugs squashed against the scrolls mistaken for commandments, they still think it makes literal sense.  Nothing deters them.

For me, that kind of literalist perspective in the attempt to prove God’s existence  (apart from being an utter linguistic impossibility) destroys mystery and awe and demonstrates the absence rather than the presence of faith.

My most vigorous opponent in argument has been Warren, the father-in-law of my nephew, a relation for which there is no known English word.  Warren is a true believer, educated and articulate.  Among the things he insists are true are that Jesus will ride down to earth on a white horse, that Noah was born with white hair and red skin, that the earth is 7000 years old at most, that the human lifespan before the Great Flood could approach 1,000 years, and that if evolution were true we shouldn’t be able to suntan.  He says he reads the Bible “the way it says it.”

If his views were in any way devastated by the recent story about the Bible Project [LINK: http://news.yahoo.com/jerusalem-scholars-trace-bibles-evolution-092932128.html], wherein Jewish scholars have been working for 53 years and counting to trace the evolution of the Bible, he didn’t let on. That project has shown the many changes and mistakes in our current books of the Bible, including the “prophecies” that had been added into the texts after the events already had taken place.

Do I have to add that Warren is a Republican and a fan of the Tea Party?

Come to think of it, the Tea Party’s use of language actually resembles the arguments of modern French philosophers, finding new meanings for words and tap-dancing around reason. Sarah Palin’s explanation of Paul Revere’s ride — it was a noisy warning to the British that he wasn’t going to give up his guns — might be related to the deconstruction method of seeing stories in a new way and reducing history to non-existence.  It sent Palin’s followers scrambling to Wikipedia to edit the past accordingly.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, testifying to Congress, gave us the extreme expression, “I don’t recall remembering.” Derrida would have been proud of such dizzying wordplay.

Senator Jon Kyle stated that “well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does”  is abortion, before retracting it with a textual analysis that claimed it was “not intended to be a factual statement.”  I actually think some people understand this explanation. They realize that language is manipulable and the literal is impossible, just as the French philosophers have been saying all along.

And then there is the queen of French linguistic philosophy, Michele Bachmann. On the one hand, she insists that the Founding Fathers “worked tirelessly” to end slavery, and on the other she recommends books that claim Southern slavery was a benevolent time and a good system for establishing stable Christian families. She let her husband Marcus push her into politics because of her belief in the Bible verse, “Wives, you are to be submissive to your husbands,” but she explains that the real meaning of the word “submissive” is “respectful.”  She must own a different Funk and Wagnalls.

Whether you are reading the Bible or running for President, you can use language to your own advantage. Literalism is impossible. Can we accept that this is the bottom line?  May we?  Mais oui.

The problem is that human animal behavior often reveals people herding together in tribal and warring packs, following like sheep the so-called authorities who play on their fears or say the things they want to hear.

Better still, they behave like frightened rabbits trapped in a pen, another word for which is a warren.

* FOOTNOTE
* I got into a rather heated argument once with someone who assumed the title of the Susan Sontag essay, "Regarding the Pain of Others," meant "let us consider the pain of others." Given that the book deals with violent imagery and photography, I insisted that the essay meant to explain "how we LOOK at the pain of others," since "regard" (in English and especially in French) also means "to look at". Sontag was, of course, playing on the multiple meanings of the word "regard." The "correct" interpretation is that the meaning of the title is undecidable.