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.

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.

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.

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.

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.