Of Disoriented Penguins, Bartleby, and the Search for Self

In his 2008 documentary Encounters at the End of the World, Werner Herzog visits the McMurdo Research Station in Antarctica, the largest habitation at the southernmost reaches of the earth.  There he finds an assortment of eccentrics, adventurers, and gifted visionaries who have come to perhaps the last true frontier in order to find themselves and study nature in its most rugged forms.  Among the oddballs and misfits he finds there is one scientist that Herzog makes a point of introducing by saying even the other researchers and support staff at the station seem to leave alone.  He is a man who has gone off to live with the penguins, and Herzog says that he rarely speaks to other humans.  The man, identified as Dr. Ainley, has agreed to give Herzog an interview, but throughout the interaction the viewer can see that clearly he is uncomfortable.  He acts almost as if he has lost the function of language, pausing before every answer, trying to finds the words.  Herzog seems oblivious to this, plunging in with his characteristic style, asking in a thick, articulate enunciation whether penguins have homosexual relationships.  One shivers a little at the question, if only out of empathy for the struggling scientist, who seems to be out of his element in the company of another man.  Couldn’t Herzog have started with a simpler line of questioning, one wonders?  He shows no mercy, however, pressing the scientist, when the scientist denies that he has seen gay penguins, by asking whether penguins show signs of insanity.  The viewer winces a little, wondering what point, exactly, Herzog is trying to make – whether he means, in fact, to couple homosexuality with insanity.  But Dr. Ainley soldiers on and claims that, no, he has not seen crazy penguins either – he has never seen, for example, one bashing its head against a rock.  Herzog simply will not let it go, and he keeps pushing the scientist, as if he means to make him admit that penguins are ultimately just like humans, gay and crazy.  The scientist wants to be helpful – this becomes obvious.  He struggles to accommodate Herzog in making the comparison of penguins with humans, and in the end he offers an enticing observation:  “They do get,” he claims, “disoriented.”

In the next scene, Herzog follows a group of penguins as they move off screen towards the water where their feeding grounds lie, following their colony across the snow, walking in single file.  He pauses the camera on one particular penguin that has stopped midscreen and turned its back toward the camera.  The penguin faces the inland mountains straight ahead and stands stock-still for a moment, as if deep in thought, contemplating the mountains, entranced by something it sees in them.  Then it slowly begins to make its way inland toward the mountains, turning plaintively for a brief and wistful look back at the camera, before trudging away toward what Herzog points out is 5000 kilometers of rugged, untamed territory.  Herzog voices the question that arises in the viewer’s mind as the penguin walks away, skirting past the humans who stand in its way but refuse to stop it because they argue that it would be pointless to stop it, because the penguin will simply return on its path toward a “certain death” –  Why?  Is the penguin operating from some Freudian drive toward self-destruction?  Is it simply, as Herzog suggests in his commentary, deranged?  Has it had enough of community?  Then one comes to the realization that the penguin, while perhaps neither gay nor crazy nor deranged nor disoriented, is certainly like the humans who have come to study it.  One realizes that the scientist, Dr. Ainley, who has just described the penguin’s odd behavior has more in common with it than perhaps even he might admit.  The penguin has set off after adventure, seeking unexplored frontier.  The scientist, too, has become a disoriented penguin, stepping off the face of the earth, becoming dislodged from his community.  He has come to the end of the world in a march to a drummer that no one hears but himself.

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When I was in college my favorite writer was Melville and my favorite Melville story was “Bartleby the Scrivener.”  I was intrigued at the fascinating story of this odd little man who answered every query about why he would make no effort to fit in, to do what was expected of him, with the retort “I prefer not to.”  I found his story –  as an existential crisis that led him ultimately to prefer not even to eat, to live – to be troubling in the extreme.  At the time I was an ambitious young man and thought I had the world at my feet.  I couldn’t understand why he would prefer not to, when he could so easily prefer otherwise.  To be or not to be? I wanted to be.  I remember identifying with the Wall Street lawyer who narrated the story and lamented the fact that he could not find a way to make Bartleby see the error of his ways.  Caught up as I was in the world’s understanding, I could not understand why this man, Bartleby, who seemed to be good at his job, who seemed to show great potential, would simply decide that he didn’t want to participate in the human community.  Ahh, the humanity, indeed.

As a reader and also a seeker, even at that early age, I wanted to find meaning in Bartleby’s story.  In attempting to give a name to the cause behind Bartleby’s actions I settled on a psychological one – depression.  As I read Melville’s enigmatic story, I thought I saw in the episodes in which Bartleby stood for long periods in the frame of his office window, staring out at the brick wall of the building adjacent to his office, an inner tension, a disappointment with life, that I was familiar with through the person of my own father.  I thought how my father seemed to struggle for most of his adult life with periods of depression and regret.  I remembered coming home in the middle of the night during my teenaged years and finding my father sitting in the dark in his underwear smoking a cigarette, the bright red point of fire punctuating the night, hidden behind a penumbra of smoky haze.  I knew that my father was a man of considerable intellect and social ability yet I knew that he felt he had never quite reached the height of that potential.  What I couldn’t understand at that tender age was why he would, like Bartleby, give up trying.  When I suggested that it was never too late to pursue whatever dreams gnawed at him, I was dismayed at his wave of the hand, his dismissal, his preference to remain in a standstill.  I thought I was, like the lawyer, attempting to bring him back around and he, like Bartleby, refused to be swayed.  I decided that Bartleby, like my father, had simply stopped trying to scale the walls of his self-made prison in order to pursue his dreams.  I thought he had thereby squandered his potential.  I was determined not to do the same.

The walls in Melville’s story are everywhere pronounced.  There are walls that enclose and surround, that seem to protect but also contain.  They are, like the setting in a Wall Street law office, economically determined.  But they are also psychologically and sociologically impenetrable.  Bartleby stands at his window and contemplates his predicament.  He has very little room for maneuver and so, it seems, he sits down and turns inward.  He gets lost inside himself and seems cut off from the human community by something that he cannot name.  Or, at least, that is the interpretation that presents itself from a consideration of the story through the lawyer’s eyes.  It is natural to read his tale, I think, when reading from the viewpoint of society, as if he were a deranged and disoriented penguin, voluntarily trudging into the wilderness of his soul, and cutting himself off from the community that wants to save him.  It is easy to feel pity and remorse for him, as I did in the case of my father, and to wish he would come back to the fold.  And yet, like all tragedies, there is another way to view the story that understands his actions not as a signal that he is lost forever, but as an example of a man who has found the only possible path to redemption.

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There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, of an exchange between Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau that occurred while Thoreau was in jail for refusing to pay his taxes in protest of the Mexican-American War.  It’s a story that revolves the moment when Thoreau penned “On Civil Disobedience,” in which he writes that he was never more free than when he was jailed for acting on his convictions.  Emerson, the story goes, walks around the jail to the window of Thoreau’s cell and lifts himself up to peer in on his young friend.  He asks Thoreau in a voice that is somewhat disapproving, “What are you doing in there?” – to which Thoreau replies, “Waldo, what are you doing out there?”  There is something in this story that I think speaks to the question of why Bartleby, and my father, in their refusal to bring themselves around, can be seen not as depressives but as men who have sought the last refuge left to them.  In refusing to accommodate they are perhaps not models of lives lived in waste of potential, but lives lived in contemplation of something higher, something offering freedom even within the walls that society builds around them.

What I don’t think I understood when reading Bartleby as my youthful self, and what I only now beginning to understand well into my middle age, is that society wants to fashion us, as much to control us as to free us.  I heard one of my elderly uncle joke once that you spend the first thirty years of your life digging a hole and the next thirty years digging your way back out.  That has certainly been the case in my own life – although I am not yet through the maddening cycle and so I cannot say yet whether his timetable is correct.  As a young man I entered the workforce and tried to do what society expected of me.  I took all the necessary steps – climbing the corporate ladder, building a family, participating in my community, voting, paying taxes.  For my troubles, I found one day that, waking up, I was confronted with what Nietzsche speaks of when he writes that philosophy comes whistling through the keyhole saying “come away with me” only to find the man chained to his bed, unable to follow.  Having become indoctrinated into the reality of the world, the expectations of the community, I slowly realized that my father in his underwear and Bartleby at his window may not have been merely feeling sorry for themselves.  They may have, in fact seen a higher calling, one that could only be contemplated in silence, one that could not be pursued except from within.  Of course, some come to this realization earlier than others do, and for these we often reserve terms like “rebellious youth” or “artist.”  Such people are eventually either brought around to “maturity” or else they lead their lives as outliers.  The problem is that once one sets in with the herd, it becomes more and more difficult to extract oneself, and the walls that are set up around a man or woman become higher and more difficult to scale.  They often become impossible.  And so the only choice is to break through them entirely or to take the ladder down and begin to confront the soul.

In his 1957 review of Kerouac’s On the Road, Gilbert Millstein in the NY Times paints the picture of a set of youthful extremists in a bygone era who have come to embody one of our cultural notions of the type of people who refuse to accept socialization, the beats.  He argues that in the characters of Sal Paradiso and Dean Moriarty we find two of the tendencies with this youthful generation that ultimately come to react to the world in different ways.  Paradiso, as a young man, seems to long for freedom and to be fascinated by his free-wheeling, free-thinking, free-living friend, but he is ultimately headed towards an acceptance of his place in society.  Moriarty, on the other hand, is portrayed as a man lost to his times, who ultimately breaks our hearts because he breaks himself upon the ideas of an all-but-impossible freedom.  Millstein writes that the variety of beat intellectuals, wastrels, oddballs, and outlaws that these two comes across in their travels seek a life of freedom but that such a seeking frequently ends “in death or derangement.”  He calls the search for belief and for meaningful, purposeful freedom “very likely the most violent known to man.”  When one is free and can roam about the country without cause or destination, this search can be told in all its epic grandeur.  When one grows old and can merely lie in bed or stare out the window in thought, it becomes sad in a way beyond words.  But I believe it is the same search for freedom.

There is another moment, more recent in our popular culture that I like as an example of this search.  In one of his many temporary dalliances with smart and resourceful women on Mad Men, Don Draper is asked by one of them why he won’t come with her, why he won’t allow himself to be caught up in their relationship.  What, in fact, is he looking for?  He shakes his head as if unable to even contemplate it.  “It’s so big,” he replies.  This man who, as a fictional character has come to represent our most skilled and passionate wordsmith, cannot bring himself to define what he seeks.  Like the words of the U2 song, he simply knows that he still hasn’t found it.

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So what to make of this story, this man Bartleby, my father’s search, my own, yours?  I think that we are all like that penguin.  Disoriented, perhaps.  But faced with a choice.  We either take up our cross and follow our dreams.  Or else we let them die.  But even if we let them die there is a search to be made.  Sometimes we find that we cannot leave.  Sometimes, we are bound within walls of our own making and walls we have accepted from others.  I no longer think it a sin to sit up at night and contemplate those walls or that path.  They are by their very nature uncertain.  We do not know what is on the other side, or whether we will find suitable travel companions.  Certainly there are vast and untamed wildernesses.  And certainly there are those who will go the ends of the world to help us if we stay but won’t lift a finger to help if we go.  I would still like to think of myself as having the spirit of Whitman, who seemed to have no limit to his freedom or his willingness to pursue.  But I also realize that even Whitman found himself homebound in his later years, his mind ranging across the free universe but his body crippled and insecure.  I take some comfort in that.  The choice is ultimately up to us, to each of us.  Will we turn within and seek what may seem a negation but can be, at last, an example of freedom as renunciation, or will we renounce society and trudge across the snow and tundra in pursuit of our better selves?

Happy trails.

(Picture Source: link)

Resolution

Henry Miller wrote somewhere in the Tropic of Cancer that if just one man were to drop his pretense and address the world with complete and utter honesty, the world would tilt on its axis.  Something like that.  That's probably not exactly how he put it, but it gets at the point.  Which is that we hide behind convention, and expectations, and fears, and ourselves.  And we shouldn't.

I want to be that guy.  I want to open up and just say everything that comes to mind.  Not to censor myself one whit.  Not to care one iota whether anyone is listening to approve.  But to do so, of course, of course, in a way that does not sound like an ego's raw nerve... or a homeless man's mindless rant.  In other words, I want to be honest, but to do so in a way that allows me to be authentic in the world, centered in myself, learned where I can be, thoughtful everywhere else, whether the world cares or not.  I demand honesty from myself not so much because I want to turn the world on its ear, but because I am so sick and damned tired of being other.

So I will confront the world.  I will see beauty in the shifting light.  I will accept the judgment of others if and when it is offered.  But I will stay true to myself.  That is the iron string to which my heart will vibrate.  My life will be, as Emerson said somewhere, although I forget where...  a life, and not an apology.

Grand dad

He came from the oilfields of West Texas, but he might just as easily have hailed from the coalmines of Kentucky or the steel mills of Pittsburgh.  He was the kind of man who would fit in as easily in one place as in another, but only because he fit in nowhere.  He was a square peg.  The earth was, for as far in the distance as anyone could see, a round, dry hole.  This is not meant to be a metaphor.  It is not meant to suggest that here was a man who found no sex or had no intelligence or lacked mechanical skill.  He had all of these, and in abundance to hear him tell it, though they rarely served the purposes one might expect.  He was small man with a thorny nature and no amount of hammering, no cunning or crafty reserve, could force him past the gates and into the human community in a way that would stick.  If it were what it is not, if it were a metaphor about sex or intelligence or skill, it would be an inadequate one.  It would suggest that, but for the mere shaving off of a few rough edges, this man might find a way to belong.  But that was not the case at all.  In fact, he was unsuited by nature to find a true home.  His thorns kept folks at bay.  Even his own reach was not enough to overcome them.  In those moments when it seemed that he had slipped right in, that he blended with his surroundings, he would ultimately come up short.  Like a peg in a hole, there was always space and distance to be weighed.  He had points of contact as he rattled around the perimeter, but he could never mold himself to the smooth even lines of social acceptance.  His edges were too straight, too hard, too set in their linear ways.  And so the large round earth would swallow him up in its rolling, beckoning topography.  He was angular and it was curving. And he searched the distant horizon for a line of fit, but as he cut across her form, he always found that the line moved further into the distance.  He wore out his boots as he sought the line, but the caliche sand didn’t stick as he walked.  He couldn’t find a place to belong, try to fit, that is, as he might.

 And he did try, too, this man who did not belong.  For a stone-cold loner he spent a great deal of his life looking for a place to hang his hat.  He became at one time or another throughout his long life, an Optimist, a Shriner, a Mason, an Odd Fellow, a Baptist, a Methodist, a Democrat, a Dixiecrat, a Republican, and even, for  one very short period of time in the 1930s,  a Klansman.  This final misguided attempt to fit in occurred while he worked as a rough-and-tumble roustabout during the Great Depression in the deadset middle of the Permian Basin, in the modern desertfloor that once was a prehistoric swirling seabed.  This land was, like the man himself when I knew him, an ancient dusty joke, a shadow of its former self.  It had once been rich with minerals and teeming with life, until the inevitable sun dried up the last drop of moisture and the ineluctable winds covered the flat dead basin with a thick layer of dust, like a dry sink in a dirt-caked Men’s Restroom at an abandoned gas station in a ghost town.  And the land had come, like the man himself, to bend to the inexorable pull of the earth, her minerals crushed under her weighty embrace, as they squirmed and twisted, the minerals did, to get out of those meaty arms, that sweaty Sunday clutch, and they ran when they broke, ran fluid from the room, all wild abandon and innocence, a swirling burbling jumble,  through the parlor and out of the infernal heat and the noise of the adults in the kitchen, and through the swinging screen of the back door and into the whitebright yard,  through the sandbrown crust  of the earth’s embrace and into the sky’s oceanblue.  And he came to live, like the minerals, in the freeing airless air that is the vast skyless plane of the barren West Texas oilfields.  He came to live in the wind.  This happened, this part of the belonging story which marks our man with a mark as black as tar, and sticky, like crude, when the man became a Klansman,  in a small town that was a drive of, at least, 300 miles distance from the nearest black man  –  “As the crow flies,” to hear the folks tell it. This man who lived in the wind, who strafed across the earth in search of a home, tried at last to join by signing on to a cause that was ugly in its heart. And he failed even here because he didn’t have it in his own heart, either the will to stick or the hate to stay.  Still, he would try, when I came to know him and asked about it, to pass it off like it was youthful indiscretion.  He would tell anyone who would listen to him that the group disbanded after only a handful of meetings because they didn’t really have anything to do.  He was the kind of guy who’d say things that weren’t funny just to watch folks twitch.  And though there was probably some truth in his excuse, there was surely more in the fact that, even if he’d been born in Mississippi’s Hill Country, he wouldn’t have lasted in the Klan.  He didn’t know how to hate because he never figured out how to love.  I think that he was a little embarrassed by the fact that he couldn’t even fit in among the rabble-rousers.  He had a little too much good in him, and a little too much wrong with him.  He was a square peg and life a round hole.  He was a gypsy, a roamer, a tumbleweed.  And so he remained alone.

I knew him only briefly during his final years, meeting him by one of those chance-of-fate encounters that bring all people together.  We were never really properly introduced.  He just stuck his face in mine one day, on an early Tuesday morning when I was resting in my bed, contemplating the daylight creeping across the wall, and the world outside and my own place in it.  He had let himself in, evidently, like he owned the place, and had made his way up the stairs to my bedroom and, as I lay there resting and contemplating.  He suddenly burst into the room and walked over to my bed and leaned over my startled body, and put his face into mine.  He made these strange, and strangely aggressive, gargling noises.  Something like a catch in the throat,enunciated with his thick burbling lips.

Ah-bubbbb.  Ah-bubbbb.  Then, just like that, he growled and moved on. And out of the blue, we came to make each other’s alarming acquaintance.  I didn’t have any say in the matter.

The next day he did the same thing.  And the next, he did the same.  This went on for a time, this bursting in and leaning over and this weird aggressive gargling.  Each time he’d end with a growl.  Each time he’d stay only a moment.  And then it would end as abruptly as it had come on.  He’d disappear quickly, as quickly as he’d appeared, shaking the dust off his boots as he walked down the stairs.

This odd how-do-you-do continued to occur on almost a daily basis for probably a year or more.  It happened for so long, in fact, that it eventually became of little notice to me.  And then, when he noticed that I’d stopped being impressed, he began, through a series of interactions that grew increasingly sophisticated, to sharpen his approach.  He would sometimes push his face near my own as if he was tempting me to touch it.  I sometimes gave in to the temptation and reached out a tentative hand to push at his gnarly whiskers.  He’d wait until my fingers had almost reached their mark, and then he’d turn his head and snap at them, his bared teeth clicking in a snarling grimace, noise burbling up from his throat, forcing me to pull back in fear.

He wouldn’t leave me alone.  It came to a point, over a course of days, weeks, months, years, that, at any moment I might, for example, find the man  rushing from around the corner shouting epithets and running straight at me in a brazen attempt to pick me up and throw me over his shoulder.  Or else, I would be walking through a room somewhere, anywhere really, and I’d look up and see him sitting in a chair in the corner.  He’d be sitting there patting his knee with a flyswatter, a glass of bourbon on the table beside him, telling me to come over and take a seat beside him.  He spoke with a strange, measured lowness, slightly whistling through his teeth.  He was completely unaware  that I was terrified by his gruffness.  Or he knew and didn’t care. He was clearly unlike the others in the room.  He was, indeed, it seemed – it still seems – an Odd Fellow.

Actually, if truth be told, the oddest thing was that I found myself over time to be drawn to this man.  It was as if, even in those early encounters, when I looked in his face, when I reached out my hand, it was as much from a strange fascination as it was from a startling fear. When I saw in his face the structure and the story of the man, the creases in his eyes, his life’s experience, his wrinkling skin pulled tight around his sharp cheekbones, I found both the nature and nurture of humanity, or the lack thereof, played out in in his lanky frame.  It was as if, when I looked in his face, I saw a version of my own story, like a foreshadowing of things to come. I recognized, without being able to put words to it, a family resemblance and, more, a map of the fearsome world.  The deep-cut fissures in his once smooth skin told of rivers cut into the rock, of hardscrabble search for meaning.  His eyes were black as oil, and as suggestive of buried value.  Something stirred in my blood when I saw him.  As if I felt some ancient tug in his direction, drawn along by an odd warming of the blood.  This response was, as I have said, beyond my reckoning.  It ran fluid like rivers, deep like oil, and warm like the blood in my veins.  And the thick viscous pull of this man ran like blood, like oil, through my heart.  I came over time to warm to this man not just because he was strangely familiar but because he was angrily other.

Perhaps it was his scrawny-bone frame, or the fact that he hunched over slightly at the waist in a way that made him look somehow tough and mischievous and vulnerable, all at the same time.  I can’t really say, even now, what it was, but whatever the attraction, I came to be drawn ever more closely into his sphere.  He would sit with his flyswatter and curse at the TV, his web of arms catching me up as I ran past his chair – always slowing just a little, just a little, as I rushed by, cutting wide swath circles to make sure I didn't bump his table and spill his drink and block his view.  It was a game we played, we two, as he sipped on his bourbon and I dashed through the house.  He’d sit and curse as if I didn’t exist, and I’d dash around the corner with my sparkling eyes, and he’d slowly reach down with his glass, pressing his hand upon the table waiting motionless until I, like a fly to his swatter, came to rest within his reach.  And just when I thought I had made it past his reach he’d snap out his arm in a flash of light and catch me by an ankle, turning me head over heels in a pile on the floor at his feet.  Then I’d reach up and stroke those scraggly whiskers and I'd climb up in his lap and I’d  be caught in his web, where I’d sit with him and listen to his wild stories and watch his over-animated expressions.   I’d hold my sides and laugh.

It was then that the relationship transformed into something  miraculous.  When I say “miraculous” I know the weight that is implied.  I know it and I intend it.  I mean to say that the relationship was life-changing.  It was the kind of relationship that comes along only rarely, perhaps once or twice in a lifetime.  We two, this old man and I, came to know and to love each other, despite ourselves.  He was the source and I was the echo.  And yet through our prickly interactions, I became a source of my own.  He took on something like a second youth when in my presence and I benefited from the lift of colorful lies that he told with the wit of deep experience.  He became a wellspring of youthful vigor, I opened up to an ancient priming knowledge.  I drew from his well of wishful, whimsical memories and he from my unabashed innocence. Perhaps it was his withered body, its increasing frailty suggesting a kind of weakness, or a need where none had existed before.  Or perhaps it was the fact that he was small for a man, hunched at the waist to exaggerate the effect. But somehow we came to see eye to eye.  He was closer in height to my own small frame than other adults, and there was a comfort in his proximity, his frailty, his willingness to play the clown to cover over any weakness.  He was Shakespeare’s second childhood, having nothing but time left to lose. I was Shakespeare’s morning-faced school-boy, lost in the wilderness of endless fantasy.  We became lost, we two, in mere oblivion. Like conspirators, I became protective  of him, and he of me.

... to be continued

Polaroid

I miss those old black and white polaroids from the Sixties
in which everyone stood around in their sleek new kitchens
with their buttoned down shirts and upswept coifs,
as the kids ran through the living room,

in which even the frightened grownups in my redneck family,
secluded from the revolution in a Podunk town in Texas,
seemed somehow more sophisticated, and engaged, and alive.

Flesh

I sometimes feel my face freezing in place,
experience written across the eyes  -- scars, creases, repetition.
The laugh-lines and frown-lines of laughter and heartbreak set into my face like an early version of a deathmask.
And I wonder how I will be seen, how I am seen, by the world as it passes.
I fear that my face is settling not in hopeful happy lines – although I have these, as many happy signals written into my experience as sad, as many silly as angry – but in a dumbfounded slack-jawed yokel expression.

I spend so much time drawn into myself.
I fear I will make an ugly corpse.

All the sparkle, all the electricity that is in me and through me and with me is found in my eyes.  That’s where I spend the best of my time, in the inner reaches of my private self.  In my mind.
So the flesh that hangs on my skeleton, on my skull, my jawbone… hangs on with a loose, even slackness as the electricity is pulled inward, burning fires in the deeper hearth beneath my outward appearance.
Brain waves are my stock in trade, not smiles and waves, not happy to see you how’s the wife and kids --
The fuel that burns the energy that is me, and the flesh that hangs dumbly, awaiting instruction, do not often connect.  My mind has turned inward upon itself.  It’s mostly memory centers with me, logic not laughter.  It is thinking through a problem.  In solitude.

And so in solitude, the flesh hangs dumbly, the jaw goes slack.  Its long pointless jowels lengthen and release.
My thoughts send me skyward, cutting into the night.  Gravity pulls me earthward, down with the ever present pull of weighted experience.  I am a slack-jawed yokel thinking thought of the heavens.  Slowly being crushed until ending in dust.

And it is around the weight of that contrast, the soul of that electric spark fighting to break free, to break through to that loose-hung flesh, warming it from the inside like some universe of its own, threatening to collapse in upon itself like some tired supernova, that my world revolves.  The spark will be lost someday when the flame is extinguished, leaving only flesh, only the loose appurtenance of the worldly flesh.  A corpse.

And in my case, perhaps, an ugly one.

Hugo

A little piece I did for a poetry slam...

Hugo said that sometime in the middle ages the written word surpassed architecture as man’s chief means of communication with himself.  He claimed that the printing of Gutenberg’s--
What’s that?!  No, my cousin Hugo from Bayonne, motherfucker.  Of course it was Victor Hugo.  Stay with me.

He claimed that the printing of Gutenberg’s bible was the single most revolutionary event in the history of the world.
Something about “In the beginning was the word, and the word was made flesh, and the word was God.”
Do What?! No dude, I don’t know for sure if that’s exactly how he put. But it was some shit like that.

Anyway,  I gotta admit that when I was younger I didn’t think he knew what he was talking about.
I mean I read the Hunchback of Notre Dame in school and I’ve stood in the cathedral where the book was set and --
What’s that?  Yeah. You remember that summer when we were just out of high school and I went on that trip…?  We spent three days in Paris. It was cool.  Yeah I saw a woman who didn’t shave, she was kind of hot.  Dude, let me get back to my story…

So I read the book and I stood in the place, and in my mind there’s no comparison about which one was more impressive.  I mean you can read about the Gargoyles watching Esmeralda in the distance but when you stand there and look up at those bastards leaning out over the building, licking their chops, it’s fucking creepy.
Do what? No dude, of course I said gargoyles.  What’d you think I said “Gargles?”  Gargles?  Really?  Shut the fuck up.

So I thought he was being, I don’t know, pretentious or something.  I mean a guy who writes for a living… what’s he gonna think is more important, being able to write about a building or being able to build something worth writing about?  You know? It just seemed to be kind of self-important -- less about the truth and more about… I don’t know… job security.

Anyway, now that I’m a little older…
Fuck you, dude -- I’m only a little older --

All right, so now that I’m middle aged, I can see that the guy may have had a point.  I mean -- hell I spent twenty years buildings houses, and I can take you to a shitload of buildings that I’ve worked on. And they’re nice, I suppose, in their way, but somehow they don’t seem all that impressive to me anymore.  Not one of them has gargoyles.  You know?  And as for job security, please.  Really.

So anyway, the other day I was digging through my drawers and --
Oh, Christ a-mighty… I was digging through a drawer.  Grow up.

And I found a postcard that I had sent to myself inadvertently when I was on that tour.
Inadvertently -- it means accidentally.  Yes it does, look it up --  Whatever.

Yeah -- so I had actually sent it to my girlfriend at the time but I put my own address back in New Jersey down as the return, and while I was on the trip she met this other guy and one thing led to another… and she refused the postcard, had it returned to me.  I don’t know, it was kind of weird.  I don’t know why she did it.  And I really loved that girl, too.  When I got back I pined away for months. Hell she was the reason I got into construction.  Yeah I was accepted into a couple of colleges but I got a job with a builder my dad knew so I could stay home and try to win her back.  A twenty year mistake, bro.

Oh yeah, so the postcard was a picture of this place called the Fountain of the Innocents.  Yeah. It’s this really cool fountain, the oldest one in Paris.  It was built in the 1500s before mechanical pumps, so everything had to work by gravity, and work right, too, because the people in the city used it for drinking water.  It has these nymphs and tritons all over it symbolizing natural spirits that are supposed to protect the source of a spring. And they are decorated with all these swirling undulating curlicues and scrolls, you know, so that it gives a sense of flow and movement.

Yeah but evidently Miss Nancy Hinglis-Smootfield couldn’t see any of that --  Yeah that was really her name.  She was from over in Ocean County.  Remember you met her at that party that time...?  Anyway, she missed the point entirely.  Missed what was written on the other side of the postcard, too, I guess, cause she dropped me like the plague.  Or didn’t care, or didn’t see… So she left me hanging and I stayed home from school and built track houses for a living and wasted twenty years for fucking nothing.

Hmmm?  Oh, that...  Humph -- It was nothin' really.  It said:  Life is beautiful.  Wish you were here.

Born in the Hearts of Stars

Despite what you may have read in your storybooks, in the moment before time began there was nothing but the void. There was no being to move across the surface of the water, and no water to be moved across. There was no god, no man, and no woman. No earth, or matter, or gravity. Darkness was the only vista, and silence the only music. Had language existed in that moment, had it merely existed to describe the lack, it would have consisted only of negation, indicating the absence of good and evil, the want of want or plenty. There were no planets, no stars, no shooting lights, no mountainous cavernous wastes of land, no gaseous opaque fogs. In fact, in the moment before time began, there were no such thing as anything. No tangible hopes or fears, or sensate life to hold such hopes and fears. There was no future and no past. No sexlovepeacewarhappinesspestilencejustice. There was only a perfect, utter stillness.

Then all hell broke loose.

Cosmologists tell us that in an instantaneous instant, almost 14 billion years ago, in a super massive explosion, the entire mass of the universe, having been compressed into an infinitely small super-heated ball, having been defined down to nil, inflated. That’s the term the scientists use, inflated. As if the making of everything we see, or imagine we see, or imagine but know that we will never see, could be described by using a term that signifies the raising of prices on milk. It’s really kind of sad, this notion that, even with the mountain of tears we‘ve shed since the spilling of milk across the galaxy, we still haven’t developed an ability to describe our feelings better or to put into words the reason for our troubles. It’s as if it left us speechless, breathless, our very thought -- the electrical patterns in our minds that shape concepts and give them voice -- defined down to nil. Nevertheless, despite our lack of language, or perhaps because of it, the resultant force of this explosion was almost unimaginable. Matter itself, and before that the building blocks of matter, and before that the forces which shape those building blocks -- electricity, magnetism, gravity -- were created in the blink of an eye. In fact, it took even less than a blink, it took the blink of a blink -- it took less than the time to imagine the blink of a blink or the time to imagine imagining. It was that damned fast. The universe was spilled across the whole of space like so many marbles tossed onto a table. It was unleashed like hormonal urges at a public high school dance. Chaos and collisions occurred, heat and light were formed. It was as if the whole of heaven had suddenly squeezed itself entire through the eye of a needle and came roaring out the other side with incomprehensible fury. It was if a woman had been spurned, and would now have her shrewish revenge.

As one might imagine, this process of inflation, this wild uncontained explosion, this colossal two-year-old’s outburst, had a number of odd results. Chief among them, perhaps, was the fact that, as the universe was exploding outward, particles were collapsing inward, driven by the introduction of forces that had been until then unknown. Quarks and leptons… electrons, neutrons, and protons… atoms and their resultant matter -- all were pushed and pulled by force and gravity at incredible unknown speeds. Energy and the attraction of harmonious vibrations unwound in a frantic dance. The fundamental particles that came to make up everything were all thrown outward like teenagers expelled from their homes. Understandably, they sought refuge in the attraction of like particles and substances. Suddenly finding themselves homeless, like disowned youth, like runaways, they needed a place to crash. So like sought like, and hydrogen formed, and helium, and spinning gaseous stars on the outer reaches of space. It’s kind of funny that helium and hydrogen were made first, and that they in turned formed stars. It was as if the universe, now barely seconds old, just minutes after birth, had decided to throw a party, and needed balloons and transport, maybe a disco ball or two. Accordingly, the material forces which shape matter, acting like a planning committee, began to decorate the broad flat gym of space. Banners were hung from the ceiling, and balloons were inflated and released, to hang in the still of space. The revelers settled in, and the stars heated up, and the expansion cooled down. A pleasant radiant buzz was felt as night came on.

Now as anyone who has been to such a party can tell you, it takes all kinds to make it work. If you invite too many from the same crowd you may get a lack of conflict, but you will also suffer from a lack of any fun. Someone needs to be the life of the party. And life, we are told by the scientists, requires carbon, as well as other elements to stand around and laugh at carbon’s jokes. So the universe added variety. Hydrogen and helium, as we have noted, had arrived first along with a few other stragglers, but they just stood in the corners along the walls and under the lights, and waited for the rest of matter’s constituents, half a billion years later, to show up fashionably late. This raises, of course, the question of where, in a universe of exploding, expanding simple gases, did all the variety come from? Where did the iron come from that gives tint to your blood and the calcium that gives strength to your bones? These are just a few examples, obviously, and they are drawn perhaps from the conceit that bones and blood are important. But ignoring this conceit, and overlooking the question of how the gases themselves seemed to come from out of nowhere, we may still reasonably ask: once the wheels were set in motion, once the party had begun, how did we get to the diversity of matter that we see all around us, that we stand or sit upon, that we feel in our hearts or that form our working minds? In a universe that started with a simple, brute exclamation point, in other words, how did we get to the periodic table? It is a question punctuated by an elementary curiosity about the curious elements which mark us. And for questions such as this, we have somewhere to turn for the answers, to satisfy our curiosity. In fact, we don’t even have to try that hard in order to seek the answers.

Imagine it is the morning after the party, or the morning after a thousand mornings, and we are standing in the same gymnasium, now lined up in neatly ordered rows of chairs, organized and rationalized, with only the unswept detritus from the party in the corners of the room, bits of streamers left floating along the edges of the room seeming to hint at the revelry from the night of nights before. A press conference has been called where we are seeking answers. Someone has posed the question. Where did all this stuff come from? We are sitting with bated breath. We are all pressed forward, waiting for the answer, and the line of cosmologists standing on the podium sways with anticipation at the first hint of the question. They hold their line for less than a second before the scientists push forward, rushing to the microphone, tripping over each other to be the first to get the answer out, to be heard by the assembled crowd.

We are born, the scientists tell us, in the hearts of stars.

Beat Box

A little piece I did at a poetry slam...

Watch out mister I’m about to throw down.
Step back sister I’m about to throw up.
I’m about to show up and bring my beat box.
Era, hiccup, I’ma pick up my beat box.

Stop. How come all the people on the radio are crazy
Thinking that they fucking with the alphabet like jay-z
Or eminem when him and him be swimming in a wave, gee.
So that the others just don’t phase me.

Go fuck yourself if you tell me that you don’t like their music
Hell I don’t give two shits, wait make it three. You know what? I don’t give four shits.
And I can’t wait til they do more shit.

Stop, I was only kidding ‘bout the part where I said fuck you.
Hell I don’t even know you. You could be a sweetheart. Shucks, you
Might even be the sweetest person who would ever eat cocks.
Naaah. I’m just fuckin’ with my beat box.

So… d’you ever notice anything you say that’s put to rhythm
Somehow goes down easier? I’m talking beef or schism,
Grief or jism, sidney moncrief, religion…
With beats we’re lief, clay pigeons

Put the proper gait to it and no one takes offense
 … well, maybe just a smidgen.

But still, isn’t pleasure measured by the fissures in the sheet rock?
Wasn’t the universe the first to curse and spit its heat shocks?
Hasn’t clever ever been a lever of the fleet fox?
Wasn’t rhythm with’em when your parents made their feet knock?

Ask me I think it’s cause we’re all a bunch of meat clocks.

So that is why I brought my beat box.

How I Write Poetry

A little piece I did at a poetry slam...

Words crowd upon the page like wait staff mimes
in a scripted banquet scene from a lesser known film by Fellini.
They flail their arms and bend their waists and tilt their heads --
their thin, wan smiles overexpressed and held, ridiculously, a little too seriously.  Tensed, they thus stand, their lips pursed and pursing in bright red lipstick on their pale white faces.
They have come to work the banquet without adequate training, they were hired not for their competence but because they were the only ones able to find the address,
to make their way down the dark alley and into the kitchen’s bright light.

The words stand in a line, waiting to be summoned.  They hold their pose
and refill glasses as they come to half full.
They have had a difficult night.  They have been clumsy in their flailing, and
have spilled food everywhere.
They have thrown wine in the faces and plates in the laps of their unhappy guests.
They are mockingly apologetic in response to the alarmed and questioning looks they find on the faces of the startled revelers.
They trace, with a finger, a tear down the cheek.
They bend to wipe the lap of the bespectacled intellectual.
They notice the overturned meats, the rolling olives, that  have been spilled onto the tablecloth of the  hungry workmen and they point and hold their bellies and act as if they are laughing.

The earth goddess sits alone among the luminaries, hangers-on, and wanna-be’s who attend the banquet. She is aloof, yet somehow embracing. 
She sits with her legs crossed, the smooth tension in her firm muscle bouncing in the lengthening light, outlined by the moon, whose purpose it is to reflect upon her.
She tosses her chin in conversation, perhaps smokes, her face covered in a sweeping white scarf and her eyes hidden behind overlarge sunglasses.
Her face is thin and angular and intelligent and glows with the glow of experienced youth.
Her body is lithe beneath a shimmering gown.
She has the soul of a mother.
She has the heart of a whore.
She is beautiful.
The mimes find themselves at a loss for words.

The scene is luminous in its overlit production, so that even if the stage lights extinguished,
the stars would flood the scene with a reticent glow.
Occasionally there are nights when the stage lights themselves seem redundant, when  the stars align, and the moons and the planets align, and the mimes serve their purpose with dignity and poise.
But usually it is like Jupiter is on her period
and Pluto can’t decide whether he’s in or he’s out.

On these nights, the mimes act badly, and they spill food and wine in the faces and laps, and meats and olives on the table of the guests -- and they seem to be mocking, almost sincerely so.
On these nights, the intellectual leans over to the workmen and makes, in a conspiratorial tone of his own, some comment about the mimes, how they can’t seem to get out of their box, how they walk across a highwire without a net.
And on these nights the mimes stand silent.

It is a silence in which one could hear a fork drop.
They stand in the silence of their black coats and ties, and their white painted faces, and their lips dripping Titian red.  And listen to the intellectual -- his voice being the only thing that cuts through the gauzy stillness. 
He’s saying something like…  If these were Saturn’s children
-- sweeping his hand across the nighttime tableau in a way that made the workmen unsure whether he was talking about the mimes or the stars, or the moons and planets aligned behind them--
He’d eat them.