Dirt

"I placed a jar in Tennessee."

-- Wallace Stevens, "Anecdote of the Jar"

--

Tomorrow, a celebration of my sister's and my graduation will take place in our house. I use the word house rather than home because we have successfully, in the last three days, sterilized the whole place, removing any evidence that people, rather than furniture and decorations, actually live here.

Cobwebs gone--a plus. Carpets free of pet stains. But also folded blankets growing cold on basement racks, books shoved into corners, and a pool table that looks too nice to touch.

Dad brought Lola back from the airport, and already she is scurrying about, tendering wounds with coffee, clucking advice to my mom, asking for cooking specifications. Lola is a Filipino word for grandma. At almost eighty years old, it's a wonder she keeps going. Three weeks ago she was diagnosed with gout, yet the lady walks, runs, and plays with puppies.

It's funny, the way my mom talks about my room. She insists that I sift my bookshelf and give her a box of books I'm willing to "get rid of," that I empty my closet, pack up my possessions. She's sure I'm never coming back once I leave. My parents joke and watch the mess accumulate, but not for too long. I think they want me to leave that room as pristine as the house currently is, in the hopes that it will seem as if I never lived there. It will be a museum exhibit of the past eight years--trinkets, posters, neat rows and stacks--but it won't smell, feel, or look the way I kept it. Those details, the dirt of life, like the dirt that had life breathed into it, will be gone.

It's not that they want to be rid of me; it's not that caustic. It's just good defense. The empty nest has to be bigger, scarier than you expect. Like chicks just out of eggs, you chirp at the sky and explore the new nothing around you. Like mothers and fathers, you soon set out to fill that nest, with whatever scraps are there.

But I'm reassured by the dirt still lying in corners, the clutter under cushions, the dust lining picture frames. Nothing gold can stay, and nothing clean can live.

Painting

An old gardener once said to me, "If there's a rock in the center of the pond, the carp will circle around it. But if there's no rock at the center, the carp don't eat well and they don't thrive."

-- Robert Bly, "The Translucent Stone"

--

If someone else would do the taping and the clean-up for me, I think I could get into painting.

I applied a second coat on my sisters' bathroom walls this morning. Pale blue over off-white. It looks nice. This specific shade makes me think of ocean water and Bubblicious gum at the same time. Maybe a bubble-gum ocean. One that you could bathe in.

Brushes, in my opinion, are better than rollers. Perhaps it is the intimacy of the brush: close, small, finishing details. The roller is big, obtrusive, like a road construction rolling machine, seeming to squash the paint against the wall, flat on flat, spitting paint flecks back at you, squeaking, peeling and sucking. It's like slapping a sweaty fat person with sunscreen. Using the brush, though, is like caressing the wall, applying paint rather than pushing it. I like watching the paint make its way out of bent bristles. It makes me think about children who get lost in the woods and find a way out of the trees. Maybe this is stupid, but it feels like I'm helping the paint get to the wall using the brush. A roller makes me feel like I'm forcing it where it doesn't want to go.

This might be stupid, too, but I don't like the shape of the roller. It looks sort of like a hanger, or a really conceited question mark. I decided a long time ago that hangers made me think of stuffy British people wearing my clothes.

My painting experience is limited to interior house jobs, with the exception of when we painted our deck, stage painting, and way back when, a lot of experimentation with watercolors and finger-paints. Cheap stuff, really. I wonder if painting a portrait is more or less stressful than painting a house.

Profile

"Don't surround yourself with yourself."

-- Yes, "I Seen All Good People"

--

In an effort to make things simpler, I downsized my Facebook account. I removed almost all of it, perhaps callously: movies, TV shows, interests, music, quotes, info, all deleted. I didn't plan to get rid of so much. I logged on because I wanted to add something, actually, and the thought occurred to me that the amount of "me" that I've tossed onto the Internet has become cluttered--has become clutter, actually. I guess I was just using Facebook to keep track of things I liked, but I don't need Facebook to do that. I know what things I like. That's why I like them. It's not like I'm going to forget all the movies I like if I don't keep them all in a big list. And if I'm not trying to keep track of all of them for myself, then it's an outward gesture. I'm trying to send some kind of message to anyone who actually reads my profile lists, and if that's what I'm really doing, well, I shouldn't be doing it.

So I won't.

In other news, the house cleans up nicely with every day. Sharon and I have our graduation party on Sunday, belated on account of the cruise and my closeness to home. I cut the grass for the first time in over a year, I think. For some reason, it feels easier now, more natural. Along those lines, I had to pull a monster weed. It was at least the size of a suitcase, about four feet tall, and it had dug a three-foot root under the sidewalk. Took almost an hour of hacking, digging, crunching, raking and yanking for it to give. It was thorny, too, and some of its plant venom is merrily numbing my palms. It was apparently an overgrown dandelion. The whole process felt kind of like defeating a nemesis.

--

I'll have to suspend my reading in about a week, pending my brief visit to Michigan before bunking down in Huron.

Perfect

"...nothing in life has any business being perfect."

-- Henry, in James Goldman's The Lion in Winter

--

I've always been leery of the act of praising an already-praised work. When someone tells me their favorite book is Huck Finn or their favorite play is Hamlet, I say to myself: Oh, sure. Who's going to argue with that? Not that I think either of them are poor choices. I guess I just wonder how truthful the opinion really is, whether it just happens to be a choice no one can shoot down.

The way I see it, a person with weak guts and a small stack of books in the "read" section finds it easiest to defer to history and popular opinion.

My favorite book is Hearts in Atlantis, by Stephen King. I won't sing the books praises (as they are few, anyway) or my own because I like something obscure and hidden. It's a book I strangely relate to, a book I seem to understand on some intangible scale. It seems honest to me, unfeigned, a departure from King's usual thrill-'em-dead tactics. It's a story told from five perspectives and epochs, a sort of sketch of the Baby Boomer generation, about books and youth and magic, a story about stories. Comparable books include Knowles' A Separate Peace, Bradbury's Dandelion Wine, and, well, Twain's Huck.

But that's neither here nor there. Once again, I have turned to the CD recording, read by Oscar-winning actor William Hurt and the author. I think it's terrific. Hurt has a famous voice, a sonorous, deep, enveloping voice, and the sections King reads are pretty good, too. But it's the story, not the speech, that keeps me coming back to the recording, twenty CDs long, during road trips or long stretches of summer where my only task is "cleaning my room."

It's a touchstone, I suppose, a kind of base I keep running back to touch in the great relay of life, to boost, recharge. It's like the books I own whose binding splits from all my years of cracking open the pages, so much that you sometimes can't decipher what the spine is trying to tell you because the hairy white lines like VCR tracking--or oddly straight bolts of lighting--have eroded away the letters. For example, the pages are falling out of Jurassic Park, especially the part where Dennis Nedry gets eaten in the middle of the hurricane, and the cover has been reattached with scotch tape probably five times. Now, Jurassic Park isn't the best book ever, but it's a pretty good one. I think I learned more about genetics and dinosaurs in its 300-something pages than I did in two years of high-school biology. My copy of The Catcher in the Rye has seen better days, too.

I used to go to yard sales all the time in high school. Every Saturday, I'd get up at 7am, tag along in the family van, and only get out if I saw books, in cardboard boxes, on card tables, blankets. Most of my Clancys and Grishams (I admit ruefully) came to me for a quarter or less. My anthology of Frost's poems and Little Big Man have been worth the buck each I dropped for them.

Which brings me back to Hearts in Atlantis. It was free. My sister nabbed the CD case when a local library was chucking old and unread material to make room for newer, more readable books. There's something cheaply romatic about taking the scraps, like dogs that hang around the back door of a restaurant. I had read the book the summer before, had enjoyed it, and had returned it to the library where my sister found it for grabs.

Nothing in life has any business being perfect.

Review

"Don't gobblefunk around with words... Meanings is not important. I cannot be right all the time. Quite often I is left instead of right."

-- Roald Dahl, The BFG

--

I can't remember when I first read The BFG. It was years ago. It must have been in fourth grade, a year that upsized my reading. It was a year of firsts: Hatchet; The Giver; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; Number the Stars; The Spanish Kidnapping Disaster; The Accidental Detective series by Sigmund Brouwer, one of my all-time favorites; The BFG; Stepping on the Cracks; Bridge to Tarabithia; and Tuck Everlasting.

The BFG was the first Dahl book I read. He's first on my list of whimsical writers, beating out Carroll and Baum with great words like "whizzpopper" (fart) and "scrumdiddlyumptious" (really tasty). Eyeing cliches with distaste, Dahl splits them and restacks them like Legos, coming up with "trunder and thumpets," "once in a blue baboon," "One right is not making two lefts," and "before you can say rack jobinson." He also has fun with Nicholas Nickleby, by Charles Dickens, whom the BFG calls "Dahl's Chickens." Nickleby is the only book the BFG owns.

The stuff about dreams surprised me. The BFG is a dream-catcher, and he stores the zozimus-based things in jars. He uses a trombone-like instrument to blow the dreams into the minds of little children, rather than preying upon them like the other nine giants. Fanciful enough. But the commentary about idealism is what hit me this time around:

"[Dreams] is always invisible until they is captured."

"Dreams ia lots of fun but nobody is believing in dreams either. You is only believing in a dream whie you is actually dreaming it."

"Don't try to understand dreams."

"A dream is not needing anything. It if it is a good one, it is waiting peaceably forever until it is released and allowed to do its job. If it is a bad one, it is always fighting to get out."

--

A word about Dahl. He wrote about children under adult thumbs, Mathilda, Charlie, Sophie, James, and on. As a child he was apparently abused in boarding schools following the deaths of his sister and parents. He missed his mother. His friend was caned in a Catholic school by a man who would later become the Archbishop of Canterbury.

It's clear in his books, which seem to be meditations on that common theme. He writes of orphans, the abandoned and lonesome, also the ones with the most ardent imaginations and optimistic spirits. Suffering's peculiar quantity of joy, or the poetic happiness of the stomped-on, is a big part of his appeal. Children--and adults, who for Dahl are merely people who at one time were children--gravitate to those things they understand, or those people who they feel understand them. He's sure to refrain from indicting all adults; in The BFG, the Queen of England and the Big Friendly Giant are positive grown figures, though he's sure to point out that the Queen is short, and the BFG is half the size of a proper giant. Again, it's about the runts.

Dahl's childhood in Norway and England is the subject of Boy: Tales of Childhood, but I think the innocence and idealism comes across best in his novels, which are all simple and fun and short. Quentin Blake's rough illustrations are also a plus.

One last tidbit about Dahl: He fought in the Royal Air Force during WWII (great stories on Wikipedia), then married Patricia Neal, an American actress who later won an Oscar for her role in Hud, with Paul Newman. She also acted opposite John Wayne and Gary Cooper. Patricia had a nervous breakdown the year before Dahl married her, and their first child Olivia, to whom The BFG is dedicated, died at age seven. Measles. They later divorced, after Patricia had several strokes, yet she is still alive, 82, a big pro-life activist. Not sure what that all means in relation to Dahl himself, but I find it interesting anyway.

Stingrays

"Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!"

-- Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

--

I just returned from a ten-day excursion: three of driving, seven of cruising. The Carnival Conquest, a.k.a. "The Fun Ship," took us to Montego Bay, Jamaica; the Cayman Islands; and Cazumel, Mexico. In total, we went without land for more than four days, and on the first night, the moon was full and the sky was clear.

Two highlights. Swimming with stingrays a mile off the coast of the Caymans, that's one. And two, no kidding, art auctions. I saw--touched--the works of Dali, Goya, Rembrandt, Matisse, Miro, Kinkade, Rockwell, and Picasso. My mom jokingly bid $10,000 on a Rembrandt print, and was saved by a $12,000 bid. The auctioneer was a cool Spanish cat who talks like a Brit. Also got to see Destino, a short animated film created by Salvador Dali and Walt Disney, which was nothing short of stellar. The rights are exclusive to Park West, the auction agency, and the film is only available to private collectors. I also have some giveaway prints that will quickly become the only decorations in my Cincinnati apartment.

In Jamaica we sat in the bobsled and the bobsled cafe, bled time with rastafarians drinking Red Stripe, squatted rhythmically with Marley music blasted from passing radio vans, and haggled with native shop-owners. Interesting tidbit about the Jamaican economy: the government controls it. Souvenir shops are divvied out to those with cash. It's $6,000 up front to get the shop (a three-by-three tin shed with shelves) and all the souvenirs. But the thing is, the items are all part of the same package, so every shop (and there are colonies of thirtysomething shops, all vying for tourist attention) has the same stuff, at the same regulated price. Because it's incredibly hard, given those odds, to make enough ($2,000/mo.) to keep renting the shop, intrepid sellers get the most business. They leave their shops, run tourists down, and use every tactic they've learned to make a sale--any sale. I got a $35 mohagony mask for $10 after only a minute of hemming and hawing. "No problem."

The Cayman Islands claim to be paradise. Tour guides boast an almost-zero crime rate. "Drugs are the source of crime," our driver said, "so we just don't let drugs in." Hotels offer rooms for as much as $3 million a night, and the American tourist suffers a tough exchange rate. The workforce is mostly illegal immigrants who send most of their paychecks home to Indonesia, the Philippines, and Mexico. The people are not as interesting or courteous as the Jamaicans, though they know they don't have to be. They'll get the tourists and the movie stars anyway. They hide their dredge well, planting rows of ten-foot trees to surround the enormous dumps ("The highest peak in the Caymans," said our driver) and shoving the migrants and laborers to the interior of the islands, away from the tourist-trap coasts.

So Jamaica's got the spirit, and the Caymans have the dough. What Cazumel, Mexico, has, is the shopping. A mile-long strip of stores and restaurants line the eastern coast, flaunting strong margaritas and rare jewelry. Alexandrite, a stone that changes color in sunlight, is the world's rarest stone, and tanzanite sales form a huge part of the community's economy. Buggies drawn by horses in somber sombreros and American cars jostle in never-ending lines of traffic, but fifteen minutes west lie the beaches, salty, muddy pits of sand with clusters of small eateries. The sun seemed hottest there. A slim brunette walked around topless, tanning her pale nipples, unaware (or uncaring) of the packs of children ogling her. The taxi drivers hang out between trips in little huts with plastic windows, where they joke and smoke and make fun of tourists. There are over seven hundred of them, just in this one town, and when they see the cruise liner pull into port, they leave home, slap the sign on the side of their van or car, and get in line, like dirty pearls on a necklace. (Incidentally, Cazumel also sells "flat pearls," which are exactly what they sound like.)

On sea days, I read Capote's In Cold Blood and Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, and watched films. The ship's cable system apparently comes from Colorado, so we got regular updates on the weather in Denver and the tornadoes in Oklahoma. The film discovery of the trip, for me, was Becoming Jane, the true story of Jane Austen's love life, starring Anne Hathaway and James McAvoy. It's beautifully shot and a cunning commentary on Austen's works, showing her progression from teenage writer of family whimsy who read at parties, to a simple old maid who refused to answer to her name in public.

--

A long post after a long hiatus.

The Boat

"He touched the butt."

-- Finding Nemo

--

We won't get our schedule until we get on the boat, in our rooms, where (we are told) our bags will be waiting. They take no chances, these uppity cruise crews. They say people board as passengers and leave as cargo. As in, escargot, caviar, calimari.

I will surely tan and bloat, like some kind of tropical frog when it spends too much time in the sunshine. I will also see Mayan ruins and Bahaman beaches. I will kill Caribbean mosquitoes with my tiny pale American hands.

Sitting in this cheap motel lobby, I get this mental image of a pristine white ship waiting at the docks, a commercial, eight-floor swan, as full of promise as a new car. Then the rest of the prophecy is a jumble of snapshots, many stolen from the movie Titanic and TV commercials. I start imagining conversations with rich loungers, looks from dark strangers, drinks with exquisite women. I will see whales (do they have them in the Gulf?) and moonlight broken into reflections on an obsidian sea, palm fronds, skittish crabs. I will haggle with a native over the price of a new-age pair of shorts, and it will end in victory.

Right now, I'm somewhere in east Texas. I drove from midnight, Nebraska, to 8am, Oklahoma, with some pirated music, a cheeseburger from a McDonald's southwest of Topeka, and a small coffee that I got free with a coupon. We ate pancakes at IHOP and steaks at Applebee's. I swam in the motel pool and lamented the size of my gut. Incidentally, dinner tonight is on the boat.

Cell phones work within five miles of the American shore, and wireless internet rates are like Michigan taxes.

Home

Home can be the Pennsylvania turnpike,
Indiana's early morning dew,
High up in the hills of California--
Home is just another word for you.

-- Billy Joel, "You're My Home"

--

I thought I was busy away.
Ambidextrous from words,
I bled and backed out
to rest in what I thought was you
in my morning.

You, at sunset,
have sprouted
limbs that limp you around
as you jump and hurdle...

and you never rest
in your sunset.
Instead you breathe
your frenzy on my neck
and from my shoulder
and my two hands
restless music on the keys
like maniac monkeys
wailing on accordians.

Accordingly, the sun
quickens and sweats
and the highways never shorten.
Rest, rest, rest!
There is none for those who seek it.

2008

No Eulogy

"You're expected to be prepared and ready to deliver a thought provoking, touching, and meaningful speech. That is EXACTLY why I've put together this eulogy speech package. It's so that you, my friend, can put this worry behind you. You can have speeches, poems, and quotes that are proven winners that will touch the hearts of the audience."

-- Ryan Ringold, President of EulogySpeeches.com (http://www.eulogyspeeches.com/)

--

Lavon T. Davis
R. I. P.
(godfather, polio survivor)

--

Mother didn't like the flowers
and the easy laughter
we found at the viewing.
(I think if "ours is a world
of sweets and sours,"
we can afford
some salt for stewing
and mourning after
those who were ours.)

A woman next to me winked,
flipped out her card,
which she gave to me.
She said her house was near
and we could have a drink
(perhaps a beer)
and, wincing, I hardly
thought hard
before I declined.

But she gave to my mother
that same damn card
to sell her wares.
Too polite to say goodbye,
we left the casket and the others
and, wincing, I
went I-know-not-where,
behind gates which barred
us from their brother.

It was not "it,"
but some products for skin
she had for us.
Too polite to say goodbye,
we stayed where we were told to sit
and snarled at the sky,
filthy as dust
and darker than sin--
or what comes from it.

What woman can be so fickle?
What conscience canned?
Christ, what happened here?
--Well, hell, she must not know
Tolstoy's tricky trickle,
That morbid doctrine of woe,
The silly human fear
That we--You, I--can't
Escape the bending sickle.

Mother didn't like the lotion
or the easy dinner
that yanked her from the dead.
I don't blame her,
for the nagging notion
that we were
fawned upon and fed
while others got thinner
is like an execution.

May 15, 2008

Koran Reading

Lo! Allah disdaineth not to coin the similitude even of a gnat. Those who believe know that it is the truth from their Lord; but those who disbelieve say: What doth Allah wish (to teach) by such a similitude? He misleadeth many thereby, and He guideth many thereby; and He misleadeth thereby only miscreants;

Those who break the covenant of Allah after ratifying it, and sever that which Allah ordered to be joined, and (who) make mischief in the earth: Those are they who are the losers.

How disbelieve ye in Allah when ye were dead and He gave life to you! Then he will give you death, then life again, and then unto Him ye will return.

He it is Who created for you all that is in the earth. Then turned He to the heaven, and fashioned it as seven heavens. And He is Knower of all things.

-- The Koran, Surah II: 26-29

--

I've begun to read The Glorious Koran, translated by Marmaduke Pickthall, the Everyman's Library edition. Two other editions I glossed over because of egregious "thee's" and "thou's," or because of over-compensation the other way, replacing basic words like "Allah" with "the Unknown" or "the Eternal Being." Plus, I need footnotes.

Some first-impression thoughts on the Koran, by way of a sort of slapdash online reading journal:

1.) Language of distinction. I'm obviously reading this ancient text from a modern, westernized perspective, so I want to be careful I do not read into or read out the language of violence or peace that may or may not be there. But already I find that the focus tends to be on distinctions between people rather than ideas or world elements. For example, the first ten verses of the second Surah, "The Cow," meditate not on the difference between humans and deity, or good and evil, but between believers (the "successful") and infidels (the "losers"). The Preface says it was written during a time of economic strife among Jewish and Muslim tribes, so maybe that accounts for some of it.

2.) An active Allah. He is not active in the sense that he creates things and loves actively, but rather that he causes nonbelievers not to believe, and keeps vigil on wrongdoers. He seems the kind of deity who is chiefly concerned with his glory. But according to the second Surrah, Allah is the one who selects and trains those who glorify him, so free will seems a non-issue.

3.) Judeo-Christian foothold. Because it began in the sixth and seventh centuries AD, Islam has to be conscious of the popular religion of its two biggest rivals. So in the footnotes about Adam and "his wife," the translator explains that Allah's commands not only apply to the first humans but to humanity; and when in Surah II: 72-73, "ye slew a man and disagreed concerning it and Allah brought forth that which ye were hiding, / And we said: Smite him with some of it," most people see this as a reference to Jesus Christ, "on whom may be peace."

Walk

"Woo, college!"

-- Homer Simpson

--

Tussled tassel--
harried hassle--
worried weasels--
Isn't it feasible?

I take a long, short walk, and enter Tomorrow, today.
Four years of a blocked balk, a center of the Way,

To wit:

Proud and fine,
Loud and mine,
To win and wine
And live and die and dine
Like human turpentine

I walk today.

Tempos

"Change tempos. Pause from time to time. Consider your movements as little pieces of art... A sensation of calm, poise and psychological warmth will be your reward. Preserve these sensations and let them fill your whole body."

-- Michael Chekhov, To the Actor

--

"Read, to Act"

Wracked by books,
The sullen artist loomed above the stairs,
(Looking looks)
Like slicing swords to sway the wayward air,
And thought about the day ahead
And the night behind.

"Weep, then read,"
The sullen artist said to self, and grinned,
"Fret, then feed!"
The critics, sick with laughter, thick but thinned,
Were like to lap in days ahead
As in nights behind.

Without books,
The sullen artist would begin to break--
From the form--
But without text to help him make his looks,
He could not face the daze again,
Nor had in nights behind.

Words on words,
Like blocks on blocks, like papers in a tome,
(Or actors)
With unruly ruin, crowd to tombs,
Though made to face the dizzy days ahead
In spite of nights behind.

Wrecked by books,
The sullen artists fall to staring stairs,
Crazy cooks
To serve and sift and sway until they dare
To deign, to write for days ahead
Because of nights behind.

Precarious

NANCY. I suddenly feel so precarious.
BETH. It could happen to us all.
NANCY. No, but it's as if we didn't even exist. As if we were all just...ghosts, or something. Even her own sons. She walked right by them.
BETH. And guess who walked right by us.
NANCY. (Glancing off.) Yes... (Pause.) Do you know what I'd like?
BETH. What?
NANCY. A good stiff drink.
BETH. I'm with you.

-- A. R. Gurney, Jr., The Dining Room

--

"And and Ampersand"

I peeled an orange, read a book,
and hopped across a bleeding brook,
And in a folded, restful nook
One last look at life I took:

Duller than the fruit's sharp taste
And dumber than the words of waste,
My life was soon to be erased
And with the brook of time I raced

To beat the meaning into sand,
To carve of pieces something planned,
And dug once last to understand,
To make of And and Ampersand.

2008