Sunday, September 11, 2011
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.
Thursday, September 01, 2011
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/
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.
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/
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.
Thursday, March 10, 2011
YOU WILL HAVE BEEN WRONG AND WON'T REMEMBER
Moloch fucking killed poetry, just as Moloch did the air, water, and earth, even the moon for all we know, took Whitman’s liberation and crammed it into a useless degree program, with right ways and wrong ways and bottomless scorn, shaming the expressers, correcting the hopeful, becoming the decider, critiquing those just wishing to smell a gardenia again, a carnation, using old semiotic systems to re-encrypt the banality of goodness, dashing the mere glimmer of a dare-I-say-it dream upon the profaned, plastic oil littered stelae of packaged Machu Picchu tour trams. And the vain protesters nuzzle their way into the web, clueless, providing the new dictionary of sneers, neologisms that deflate all humor, morph joy into Schadenfreude, archiving away generosity in long abandoned dust-buried subway stations, and the Good Gray Poet’s arm over the shoulder of a comrade becomes a television commentary for the news entertainment industry without the slightest sensation. The electricity of touch was the first thing to become extinct. No one remembers that. No record exists. The pliant organ donors die before the billionaires and in the end it doesn’t matter, who is to say the cocktail party with the excruciatingly perfect cocktail dress and purchased smile sculpture is preferable to the shit-covered egg plucked for hunger from the straw in the shack with the tin roof in the vertical housing in the valleys of the impoverished town of Bucaramanga? In the end, I say, I prefer the egg, I prefer to watch the cocktail party on TV, a black and white TV without cable, and if the picture goes out when it rains, I still have the egg, for now, and the rain.
But know ye this, O Congregation of Moloch, you will have been wrong and won’t remember, you don’t remember the name of the street corner where you stood when they threw bottles and hosed down the marching or which side you were on, what colors your cheerleading uniforms bore as the blood flowed down the streets and while you faintly remember thinking, “It’s not time,” at the time, and now, the echo is faint, you think, “Later, later, later does seem a familiar song, one I might sing even now without looking it up in the Hymnal of Despicable Thoughts, although it is quite possible that I only heard others singing, others saying, others preaching, others chanting, perhaps while Walter Cronkite spoke, I don’t remember, and yes I have heard of Laos and Chile and might generally be able to assemble the map pieces, jumbled in a jigsaw, with a hint regarding their shapes, is Guatemala squarish?, but listen, as if it mattered, time passes and what happened then is not what is happening now, this time it is different, this time I will remember, if I have time,” you say, but the truth is, you will have been wrong and won’t remember.
Validation of a life on the verge of exhaustion or extinction comes with the thump of the stamp in the passport, the status travel that the congregation, one by one, stands to announce in sharing time, humbly as a peacock, these necessary mission positions and dining undertakings in Pakistan, Zimbabwe, Peru, Turkey, Colombia, Ukraine, New Zealand, with a quick stop for espresso in a Paris bistro for two weeks, they call it living well, revenge, yet unacknowledged torture, varicose veins standing in lines, uncomfortable sensations in the stomach, sunburn, salt water in the snorkel mask, sad altitudes, forced itineraries no better than the memories of production standards meetings minutes, minutes in the boardroom and the hospital, same deal, far, far away. Not travel that is desired at all, but lust for having traveled, for telling of having traveled, for showing the artifacts of having traveled, just as the poet loathes to write, disdains to compose the undeniable truths, these heartbreaking facts, this awful editing, the blood that flows from the chewed fingernails. But, to have written! That is something else. To have written is to have the refuge and the reward and meaning itself lasting longer than the day on the beach, the rough draft, the sand crabs, the italicization and missing quote marks, the forced relaxation, dietary changes, mundane addictions, and odd toilet papers of the world.
Is that snow I see outside my window again? If I stop writing for a week, force myself to abstain like a Zen monk without wine, fasting so my consciousness hovers above my desk or hammock, out of body, seeing myself in this state of dis-composition, this is not a pretty picture, unbearable in a sense, but the meditation sets in and reveals: some faction of the world must relinquish life first. Better over there than over here, as they say, better they die than we do, for now, although inevitably, every number wins the lottery, every number completes, war or no war, civil rights marches or gay pride parades, the funerals are coming, more rapidly now than ever, more and more, visitations, obituaries, familiar dead, faces that fade and tones of voice that sound funny in the recordings that were preserved for just such an occasion as this. And all the members of the congregation begin to forget what they were supposed to remember to forget and what they were supposed to forget and who, and that disease begins to infect them all, the disease of not remembering, the disease of blank stares and horror at what was forgotten more than what was remembered, most of all for what was deliberately forgotten, of what was ignored, of the deaths that preceded over there by the congregation's will, the deaths that they thought could forestall their own, and for what, which could be formulated into a question if the difference between a question and a statement made any sense to anyone in the congregation any more, even at all, even a little, even an atom's worth if difference. Now I will try to remember. I have to follow the incredible shrinking man as he crawls down between the stitches of the white Fruit of the Loom underwear he once was able to wear, now to live within the threads, slipping with brilliant resolve past eternity
– March 8-10, 2010
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