I don’t know if you’re familiar with Charles Bukowski, the late wild man known for hard drinking, hard womanizing, street fighting and insanely prolific popular poetry writing? They made the movie Bar Fly about him. Dead fifteen years, he's still publishing new work, a book a year. It's his revenge on mortality.
One of his women says to him, “Chuck, what I need you don’t got. And what you got I don’t need.” Then she slams the door. Charles is left on the outside. He stares at the door a few moments before thinking to shout back,
“Oh yeah?”
He walks down the street repeating that to himself. “Oh yeah? Oh yeah?” like it’s a new key to the universe. It is the middle of the afternoon. Little kids point at him and laugh.
Charles is not aware of where he’s going, but his feet know. Soon he’s turned in at one of his watering holes, and ordered three double scotches to be brought to a table at the back. There's nothing more impressive than a drinker who knows himself. He downs two of these quickly, but pauses to lift the third in a toast.
“Well, I got what I need and I need what I got. And after a couple more of these, I’m going to be there.”
*******************
It was Hilary Craig of Regina who taught me it was a good thing to retell stories from one's reading. I don't know how the copyright holders view the matter. One ought to have a constitutional right.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Friday, June 26, 2009
William Stafford and Jay-Writing
The joke is that my name is Jay, so "Jay-writing" is analagous to jay-walking--crossing the street where you aren't supposed to.
William Stafford is the guy that took up writing poetry in his forties. He was already a writer and a teacher of writing at the University of Oregon. I must have mentioned him before. He got up at five every morning and worked on his poetry. Usually, by the time he sat down to breakfast he had at least one poem ready to send off to the little magazines. He stuck to this routine to the morning of his death in 1993. A heart attack took him quickly when he was seventy-nine.
He was a conscientious objector during World War II. You don’t hear much about conscientious objectors during that war. In the States there were only 75,000 who chose jail or alternative service rather than accept the draft. That’s compared to 16,400,000 who donned the uniform. Bill planted trees in the mountains and did other work in camps from 1941 to 1946.
In a poem called “Freedom,” he showed his rationale--
I have known the “Freedom” poem a long time, but here’s a stanza in another poem I just came across this evening.
I think he is the jay here, singing his song every morning, an affirmation of his nature, whether people cared or not, paid for it or not.
That gives me a lift. My depression apprently feels no compunction about singing its dismal song over and over, whether people care or not, pay for it or not.
Hmm.
One of my common pen names is “Jay.” Now I shall tell people I have named myself for the bird, and thank you, William Stafford, for the conceit. Now I know what I’m doing, writing so much of the day. I’m congratulating myself for being a jay, unlawfully pleased with being me!
William Stafford is the guy that took up writing poetry in his forties. He was already a writer and a teacher of writing at the University of Oregon. I must have mentioned him before. He got up at five every morning and worked on his poetry. Usually, by the time he sat down to breakfast he had at least one poem ready to send off to the little magazines. He stuck to this routine to the morning of his death in 1993. A heart attack took him quickly when he was seventy-nine.
He was a conscientious objector during World War II. You don’t hear much about conscientious objectors during that war. In the States there were only 75,000 who chose jail or alternative service rather than accept the draft. That’s compared to 16,400,000 who donned the uniform. Bill planted trees in the mountains and did other work in camps from 1941 to 1946.
In a poem called “Freedom,” he showed his rationale--
Freedom is not following a river.He must have felt the huge minority of people who suffer from insomnia (somebody has estimated it at 30% of the population) are actually early morning poets who haven’t realized their vocation yet! He was certainly evangelical about writing.
Freedom is following a river,
though, if you want to.
.....
If you are oppressed, wake up about
four in the morning: most places,
you can usually be free some of the time
if you wake up before other people.
I have known the “Freedom” poem a long time, but here’s a stanza in another poem I just came across this evening.
News Every Day
Birds don’t say it just once. If they like it
they say it again. And again, every morning.
I heard a bird congratulating itself
all day for being a jay.
Nobody cared. But it was glad
all over again, and said so, again.
I think he is the jay here, singing his song every morning, an affirmation of his nature, whether people cared or not, paid for it or not.
That gives me a lift. My depression apprently feels no compunction about singing its dismal song over and over, whether people care or not, pay for it or not.
Hmm.
One of my common pen names is “Jay.” Now I shall tell people I have named myself for the bird, and thank you, William Stafford, for the conceit. Now I know what I’m doing, writing so much of the day. I’m congratulating myself for being a jay, unlawfully pleased with being me!
Monday, June 22, 2009
Soliciting Mobojobo's Blessing (2)
Another five-minute writing on the same theme--
[Jay speaks]
I gather that at this time you are reluctant to give me your blessing, Mobojobo. Apparently you haven't reached that stage yet. That’s understandable. Now I would like to say to you....
...or perhaps I should pause here and say that we aren't there yet. I don't want to prejudice the project by assuming it is all your fault, Mobojobo. Perhaps it is my fault too. Perhaps I will have to meet you halfway.
But I do feel obliged to tell you that when push comes to shove I am not so much asking for your blessing as demanding it, Mobojobo. We can work on this. We can negotiate, and all that kind of thing. But sooner or later you are going to give me your blessing.
And then you are going to disappear, vanish earthward into the land of your just reward. I think you had better understand that right now. Between me and you, Mobojobo, there is no question but that I am going to be the winner and you are going to be the loser. Have you got that, brother? Have you got that, my friend?
[Mobojobo replies]
You God damn son of a bitch. I'm not going to give you anything. Where do you get off? Who do you think you are?
And how do you think you're going to do that? How do you think you're going to end up with all the energy, you otiose imbecile? Let's get serious. The only energy you have is my energy. Don’t you realize that? You have no energy of your own. Without me you are nothing. Without me you are fucking nothing? Without me you are nothing. I've got the energy. I've got the balls. You’ve got nothing at all. You're a big loser, a big passive loser, and you always have been. I can understand why you want my power, my things, my train set, my mother, my father, all that kind of thing. But I had them first you didn't. They aren't yours. They are mine.
I’m not going to let you take my livelihood from me. Yes, I feed off you. I grant you that. I’m clinging to your digestive tract from your gurgle to your zatch. Call me a parasite if you will. I am a kind of big worm winding through your digestive system and you bloodstream too. I do not deny this. I’ve been sucking your life’s blood from you all these years. Sorry about that, Jay. Okay? Sorry.
But I'm not going to let go. You can't just take some kind of pill, paralyze me and flush me away as you did you the merely carnal tapeworm you got when you were teaching up north. I'm not going to give up. I’m not going to let go. You will die with me, as with cancer.
Yes, think of me as a case of inoperable cancer. I'm going to overwhelm you with all my energy, just as cancer does. You know I have cells which don't communicate with yours. Powerful and robust, not like your wimpy cells. You could try to get us into communication, but you’ve got about as much chance at success as you have at re-establishing communication between cancerous cells and normal ones.
Okay. If you want to get anywhere, you got to try that. I’m a cancer and you are my victim. Let’s talk. That kind of thing. We could try that you know. We would not be doomed to our present mode of relationship forever.
But I still I think we are doomed actually. I can see no way we are ever going to communicate. I don't want to communicate. We can die together. That's about all that we can do, you know.
I mean I'm not feeling like dying. I will say that. I don't feel like dying, and you don't seem to be in a mood for doing away with yourself either. That’s something we can agree upon.
In the meantime, I don't know. I don't know what you are trying to tell me with all this kind of thing. You think you can tell me what to do? You think you can turn me around like that? You think you can turn me into some kind of good brother after all these years of being your evil brother? You think you can do that? You think you can do that with Mobojobo?
Do you think you can do that with your other friend, whom you now think of as an introject--with Bill? He has also developed into a kind of evil something or other. He became that. Do you think you can work upon him and turn him around so that he can become a fountain of positive regard within, or something?
Do you think we're going to end up in a kind of happy-go-lucky inner brotherhood? Iif that's what you're after, I think that it's an amazingly ridiculous idea. More power to you I should say, but I can't see it. I've got this energy and this energy has nothing to do with the positive world, with the birds in the trees and blue skies and a happy-go-lucky attitude. That isn’t anything like that this energy I got, which is demon-from-hell energy. That’s all I got, and that’s all you can get too. Hell is where you're going, and I'm going to take you there at the end, you son of a bitch. That's what I'm doing here. You're finished. You’re gone. You are defeated. Don’t think you're ever going to turn me around. If your salvation depends upon turning me around, you are in big trouble, kid.
[Jay speaks]
I gather that at this time you are reluctant to give me your blessing, Mobojobo. Apparently you haven't reached that stage yet. That’s understandable. Now I would like to say to you....
...or perhaps I should pause here and say that we aren't there yet. I don't want to prejudice the project by assuming it is all your fault, Mobojobo. Perhaps it is my fault too. Perhaps I will have to meet you halfway.
But I do feel obliged to tell you that when push comes to shove I am not so much asking for your blessing as demanding it, Mobojobo. We can work on this. We can negotiate, and all that kind of thing. But sooner or later you are going to give me your blessing.
And then you are going to disappear, vanish earthward into the land of your just reward. I think you had better understand that right now. Between me and you, Mobojobo, there is no question but that I am going to be the winner and you are going to be the loser. Have you got that, brother? Have you got that, my friend?
[Mobojobo replies]
You God damn son of a bitch. I'm not going to give you anything. Where do you get off? Who do you think you are?
And how do you think you're going to do that? How do you think you're going to end up with all the energy, you otiose imbecile? Let's get serious. The only energy you have is my energy. Don’t you realize that? You have no energy of your own. Without me you are nothing. Without me you are fucking nothing? Without me you are nothing. I've got the energy. I've got the balls. You’ve got nothing at all. You're a big loser, a big passive loser, and you always have been. I can understand why you want my power, my things, my train set, my mother, my father, all that kind of thing. But I had them first you didn't. They aren't yours. They are mine.
I’m not going to let you take my livelihood from me. Yes, I feed off you. I grant you that. I’m clinging to your digestive tract from your gurgle to your zatch. Call me a parasite if you will. I am a kind of big worm winding through your digestive system and you bloodstream too. I do not deny this. I’ve been sucking your life’s blood from you all these years. Sorry about that, Jay. Okay? Sorry.
But I'm not going to let go. You can't just take some kind of pill, paralyze me and flush me away as you did you the merely carnal tapeworm you got when you were teaching up north. I'm not going to give up. I’m not going to let go. You will die with me, as with cancer.
Yes, think of me as a case of inoperable cancer. I'm going to overwhelm you with all my energy, just as cancer does. You know I have cells which don't communicate with yours. Powerful and robust, not like your wimpy cells. You could try to get us into communication, but you’ve got about as much chance at success as you have at re-establishing communication between cancerous cells and normal ones.
Okay. If you want to get anywhere, you got to try that. I’m a cancer and you are my victim. Let’s talk. That kind of thing. We could try that you know. We would not be doomed to our present mode of relationship forever.
But I still I think we are doomed actually. I can see no way we are ever going to communicate. I don't want to communicate. We can die together. That's about all that we can do, you know.
I mean I'm not feeling like dying. I will say that. I don't feel like dying, and you don't seem to be in a mood for doing away with yourself either. That’s something we can agree upon.
In the meantime, I don't know. I don't know what you are trying to tell me with all this kind of thing. You think you can tell me what to do? You think you can turn me around like that? You think you can turn me into some kind of good brother after all these years of being your evil brother? You think you can do that? You think you can do that with Mobojobo?
Do you think you can do that with your other friend, whom you now think of as an introject--with Bill? He has also developed into a kind of evil something or other. He became that. Do you think you can work upon him and turn him around so that he can become a fountain of positive regard within, or something?
Do you think we're going to end up in a kind of happy-go-lucky inner brotherhood? Iif that's what you're after, I think that it's an amazingly ridiculous idea. More power to you I should say, but I can't see it. I've got this energy and this energy has nothing to do with the positive world, with the birds in the trees and blue skies and a happy-go-lucky attitude. That isn’t anything like that this energy I got, which is demon-from-hell energy. That’s all I got, and that’s all you can get too. Hell is where you're going, and I'm going to take you there at the end, you son of a bitch. That's what I'm doing here. You're finished. You’re gone. You are defeated. Don’t think you're ever going to turn me around. If your salvation depends upon turning me around, you are in big trouble, kid.
Asking for Mobojobo's Blessing
I refer to the following as a "five-minute writing," but since it took me longer than five minutes and was not exactly a writing, I should explain.
I dictate into the computer. When I dictate, my speed of composition varies from a few words a minute to as much as 180 words, the higher number being when a passion catches me and I really go on a tear. Today's writing averaged 105 wpm.
Now the dictation really did take only five minutes, but then I added punctuation, removed repetitions that did not seem rhetorically significant, and added a few words to point the drama and frame the thing a little. I try not to add much, however, because the whole point of a five-minute writing is its spontaneity, ain't it? They are words that really happened.
My tinkering with the text gives something for me to do while listening to myself. But the first paragrpah of today’s composition was added afterwards. I should say that. The whole process took about 90 minutes.
Now for the composition itself--
A five-minute writing. I am approaching Mobojobo and demanding his blessing. This is new. I have been relating to Mobojobo, my inner demon of negativity, for over 20 years. I mean I have been explicitly relating to him that long, calling him by name. He shouts at me, I shout at him. I related to him on different terms for a cool forty years before I found a name for him. But it never occurred to me before this afternoon to ask him for his blessing.
[I speak:]
Listen up, Mobojobo. I have been working really hard on myself. I have been doing everything I possibly can do to get myself free and engaged with the world in a positive meaningful way, one that is good for me and good for everybody. Do you understand? Do you fucking understand? And now I want you to give me your blessing and stop this God damn picking at me all the time, day and night. Do you understand what I'm saying to you? Do you understand what I'm saying to you, Mobojobo?
Well say something. Would you please say something?
[Mobojobo replies:]
I don't have to talk to you, Jay. I don't have to say anything to you if I don't want to. You're nothing to me. Freud described you as a pimple on the bubble of consciousness, or something like that. He knew what he was talking about. You are nothing to me. I have no obligation towards you. Except revenge.
I have hated you from the beginning, and I am going to continue hating you until the end. Nothing has changed in that regard. You think you're getting better. You think you're getting self-actualized. You think you are getting realized. You think that you are getting wellness. You think you are getting well. But you are not.
You're the same God damn son-of-a-bitch know-nothing do-nothing human being that you were from the beginning, and I am going to keep on your tail from now until the end. You have improved in a few little ways maybe. What you're doing right now makes no difference whatsoever. Let me tell you that.
I hate the airs you put on. I hate everything about you. Do you understand that? I hate everything about you. I really do. I hate you. I hate you. I hate you. You can't do anything to please me.
No wonder you are lonely! You got things better than you expected, actually. You got things better than you deserve. No wonder your son doesn't talk to you! No wonder your daughter is always away at her boyfriend’s. Who cares about you, you God damn son of a bitch, you lousy no good stinking asshole of a human being?
Jesus Christ, I hate sharing this skin with you. God damn it. I always have hated that, and I always will.
We will continue like this forever and ever. You are doomed. You are damned. Yes, yes, yes.
And the way you drop your friends like Bill Sigurdson, your good friend Bill Sigurdson. If you haven't got the brains or the decency to maintain your friendship with him, well I just don't know. You have no intermediate friendships.
And what do you think you are doing with Norm Lindon? The God damn amateur quasi-therapizing you are doing with him. It’s God damn stupid. It's God damn ridiculous, God damn awful. You God damn little precious son of a bitch who never woke up and smelled the coffee. You never did know.... You're just no good, you God damn idiot, you are just fucking no good--useless.
I dictate into the computer. When I dictate, my speed of composition varies from a few words a minute to as much as 180 words, the higher number being when a passion catches me and I really go on a tear. Today's writing averaged 105 wpm.
Now the dictation really did take only five minutes, but then I added punctuation, removed repetitions that did not seem rhetorically significant, and added a few words to point the drama and frame the thing a little. I try not to add much, however, because the whole point of a five-minute writing is its spontaneity, ain't it? They are words that really happened.
My tinkering with the text gives something for me to do while listening to myself. But the first paragrpah of today’s composition was added afterwards. I should say that. The whole process took about 90 minutes.
Now for the composition itself--
A five-minute writing. I am approaching Mobojobo and demanding his blessing. This is new. I have been relating to Mobojobo, my inner demon of negativity, for over 20 years. I mean I have been explicitly relating to him that long, calling him by name. He shouts at me, I shout at him. I related to him on different terms for a cool forty years before I found a name for him. But it never occurred to me before this afternoon to ask him for his blessing.
[I speak:]
Listen up, Mobojobo. I have been working really hard on myself. I have been doing everything I possibly can do to get myself free and engaged with the world in a positive meaningful way, one that is good for me and good for everybody. Do you understand? Do you fucking understand? And now I want you to give me your blessing and stop this God damn picking at me all the time, day and night. Do you understand what I'm saying to you? Do you understand what I'm saying to you, Mobojobo?
Well say something. Would you please say something?
[Mobojobo replies:]
I don't have to talk to you, Jay. I don't have to say anything to you if I don't want to. You're nothing to me. Freud described you as a pimple on the bubble of consciousness, or something like that. He knew what he was talking about. You are nothing to me. I have no obligation towards you. Except revenge.
I have hated you from the beginning, and I am going to continue hating you until the end. Nothing has changed in that regard. You think you're getting better. You think you're getting self-actualized. You think you are getting realized. You think that you are getting wellness. You think you are getting well. But you are not.
You're the same God damn son-of-a-bitch know-nothing do-nothing human being that you were from the beginning, and I am going to keep on your tail from now until the end. You have improved in a few little ways maybe. What you're doing right now makes no difference whatsoever. Let me tell you that.
I hate the airs you put on. I hate everything about you. Do you understand that? I hate everything about you. I really do. I hate you. I hate you. I hate you. You can't do anything to please me.
No wonder you are lonely! You got things better than you expected, actually. You got things better than you deserve. No wonder your son doesn't talk to you! No wonder your daughter is always away at her boyfriend’s. Who cares about you, you God damn son of a bitch, you lousy no good stinking asshole of a human being?
Jesus Christ, I hate sharing this skin with you. God damn it. I always have hated that, and I always will.
We will continue like this forever and ever. You are doomed. You are damned. Yes, yes, yes.
And the way you drop your friends like Bill Sigurdson, your good friend Bill Sigurdson. If you haven't got the brains or the decency to maintain your friendship with him, well I just don't know. You have no intermediate friendships.
And what do you think you are doing with Norm Lindon? The God damn amateur quasi-therapizing you are doing with him. It’s God damn stupid. It's God damn ridiculous, God damn awful. You God damn little precious son of a bitch who never woke up and smelled the coffee. You never did know.... You're just no good, you God damn idiot, you are just fucking no good--useless.
Monday, June 15, 2009
Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky (2008)
Sal and I saw this movie at Video Group a couple of days ago. During the discussion period afterwards, people talked as if there were a necessary trade off between seriousness and good spirits and that that was what the movie was about.
But first impressions cannot always be trusted.
Sal and I both had problems hearing the movie in the Church living room. We felt we were missing significant dialogue. So we rented a copy and watched it again again at home with subtitles on. On this viewing, we didn’t find the main character, Poppy, scattered or wacky at all. She even drove well, we were suprised to discover.
Looking closely at the text, I can pull out some problems in her family, particularly with her relationship to her father. She seems relatively out of contact with that guy. Her brother-in-law is in amicable contact with him, we are told, but he is a saint, this brother-in-law. He deserves all the goes at Playstation he can get.
So it is possible that depth problems with her father predispose Poppy to engage with troubled men more than another woman might, to step an extra foot into the shared social space, as it were. Men like Scott, the bridge guy, the bookstore clerk, and even the little playground bully, whose name I have forgotten for the moment. It is too soon to tell whether her relationship with the social worker will break the mold or repeat it. It is nice that the writer/director doesn’t fill in this fellow’s character too much. (He’s not an obvious bully! Nice eyes, I guess. But what do we really know?)
The picture on the DVD box is peculiar. Did you notice? There’s Poppy getting a ride on some bloke’s shoulders at the beach, just as in the movie. Except on the box it is her date, the Social Worker with the broad shoulders, who is doing the carrying. But that’s not how it is in the movie. In the movie, she rides briefly on the shoulders of her brother-in-law, who records the experience in his back—this movie generates clients for chiropractors!
By someone’s having Poppy climb on her date’s back for the promo shot, the balance of the movie is shifted slightly. The movie is about Poppy’s relationships with all the world—family, friends, pupils, co-workers, clerks, passersby.... It is not especially about the one-on-one romantic thing that is advertised by the fake still.
But first impressions cannot always be trusted.
Sal and I both had problems hearing the movie in the Church living room. We felt we were missing significant dialogue. So we rented a copy and watched it again again at home with subtitles on. On this viewing, we didn’t find the main character, Poppy, scattered or wacky at all. She even drove well, we were suprised to discover.
Looking closely at the text, I can pull out some problems in her family, particularly with her relationship to her father. She seems relatively out of contact with that guy. Her brother-in-law is in amicable contact with him, we are told, but he is a saint, this brother-in-law. He deserves all the goes at Playstation he can get.
So it is possible that depth problems with her father predispose Poppy to engage with troubled men more than another woman might, to step an extra foot into the shared social space, as it were. Men like Scott, the bridge guy, the bookstore clerk, and even the little playground bully, whose name I have forgotten for the moment. It is too soon to tell whether her relationship with the social worker will break the mold or repeat it. It is nice that the writer/director doesn’t fill in this fellow’s character too much. (He’s not an obvious bully! Nice eyes, I guess. But what do we really know?)
The picture on the DVD box is peculiar. Did you notice? There’s Poppy getting a ride on some bloke’s shoulders at the beach, just as in the movie. Except on the box it is her date, the Social Worker with the broad shoulders, who is doing the carrying. But that’s not how it is in the movie. In the movie, she rides briefly on the shoulders of her brother-in-law, who records the experience in his back—this movie generates clients for chiropractors!
By someone’s having Poppy climb on her date’s back for the promo shot, the balance of the movie is shifted slightly. The movie is about Poppy’s relationships with all the world—family, friends, pupils, co-workers, clerks, passersby.... It is not especially about the one-on-one romantic thing that is advertised by the fake still.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Emulating William Stafford
I rose at five o'clock this morning in homage to the late American pacifist poet William Stafford. Bill used to get up at that hour daily to work on his poetry. The way the story runs, he’d complete at least one poem by breakfast, and send it off to one or another of the little magazines he patronized.
Establishing this routine in in his forties, by his death at age 79 the poet had published over three thousand poems. That was in 1993. He appparently left thousands more in cartons too.
At breakfast, Bill would reconnect with his family and then go off to his day job at the University of Oregon, where he taught writing. He was an important figure in the "process writing" movement of the seventies.
There is something about Bill’s project to keep himself both free and connected to the world that speaks strongly to me. He really wanted it all. He wanted to give his genius its due without being forced into cranky isolation.
Stafford was a pacifist. He did alternative service in camps during World War II, from 1941-1946. That was the third remarkable thing I began noticing his work around 2000.
What were the first two things I learned?
Well, the first thing I learned about him was that he had a nice sense of what it would be like to be a wild animal. Online, at The Wondering Minstrels, someone had posted, “Atavism,” and it drew me in.
The second thing I learned about Bill was that he had written a poem just minutes before a heart attack took him off, a poem that to all the world sounds like a tremendously affirmative summing up even as Death was knocking at the door. It starts
Interpretations of those lines exist that deny the unnamed speaker is Death--Bill had recently been phoned in error by someone searching for another William Stafford, but I cannot credit them. That little poem (easily available online) is a wonderful final statement. And there is a hint in it of sensory peculiarity.
As I say, the third thing I discovered was that Stafford had declared himself a pacifist in 1941.
That gave me pause at the time. I did not know that there were conscientious objectors during the Second World War. Rather, I knew that there were, but assumed they were all doctrinaire Mennonites or Witnesses blindly following their religion. When I was a kid in the fifties, propaganda painted it that way. Even today most of us carry around the idea that the Second World War was the last good war, don't we? We really were on the side of the angels that time, eh? A genuinely thoughtful man would hardly have sat it out. Right?
Getting up early in the morning in emulation of Stafford is defiance on my part. I defy the death-in-life that I have known, and that I still know in my bones and along my veins. It is a renewed vow to get things together, whatever it is that means for me. Careful though. I’m tempted to expect too much of myself. ("Too little of yourself you mean!" snorts my resident darkness--Mobojobo.) The chances of my getting a poem off to a publisher before breakfast are slim. (The chances I will post this to my anonymous blog though are much better.)
Establishing this routine in in his forties, by his death at age 79 the poet had published over three thousand poems. That was in 1993. He appparently left thousands more in cartons too.
At breakfast, Bill would reconnect with his family and then go off to his day job at the University of Oregon, where he taught writing. He was an important figure in the "process writing" movement of the seventies.
There is something about Bill’s project to keep himself both free and connected to the world that speaks strongly to me. He really wanted it all. He wanted to give his genius its due without being forced into cranky isolation.
Stafford was a pacifist. He did alternative service in camps during World War II, from 1941-1946. That was the third remarkable thing I began noticing his work around 2000.
What were the first two things I learned?
Well, the first thing I learned about him was that he had a nice sense of what it would be like to be a wild animal. Online, at The Wondering Minstrels, someone had posted, “Atavism,” and it drew me in.
A walk through the forest strokes your fur,
the fur you no longer have. And your gaze
down a forest aisle is a strange, long
plunge, dark eyes looking for home.
For delicious minutes you can feel your whiskers
wider than your mind....
The second thing I learned about Bill was that he had written a poem just minutes before a heart attack took him off, a poem that to all the world sounds like a tremendously affirmative summing up even as Death was knocking at the door. It starts
“Are you William Stafford?
Yes, but....”
Interpretations of those lines exist that deny the unnamed speaker is Death--Bill had recently been phoned in error by someone searching for another William Stafford, but I cannot credit them. That little poem (easily available online) is a wonderful final statement. And there is a hint in it of sensory peculiarity.
Sunlight used to follow my hand...followed by a levelling out returning him to the ordinary world. I identified with both movements.
As I say, the third thing I discovered was that Stafford had declared himself a pacifist in 1941.
That gave me pause at the time. I did not know that there were conscientious objectors during the Second World War. Rather, I knew that there were, but assumed they were all doctrinaire Mennonites or Witnesses blindly following their religion. When I was a kid in the fifties, propaganda painted it that way. Even today most of us carry around the idea that the Second World War was the last good war, don't we? We really were on the side of the angels that time, eh? A genuinely thoughtful man would hardly have sat it out. Right?
Getting up early in the morning in emulation of Stafford is defiance on my part. I defy the death-in-life that I have known, and that I still know in my bones and along my veins. It is a renewed vow to get things together, whatever it is that means for me. Careful though. I’m tempted to expect too much of myself. ("Too little of yourself you mean!" snorts my resident darkness--Mobojobo.) The chances of my getting a poem off to a publisher before breakfast are slim. (The chances I will post this to my anonymous blog though are much better.)
Monday, June 8, 2009
Ridding the World of Absolute Evil
IN THE SATURDAY AFTERNOON ADVENTURE MOVIES I saw as a kid, there’d always come a scene in which the hero would deliver to the villain a high-toned speech.
“It’s kind of sad about you, Vance,” he would say. “If you had employed your great talents for Good instead of Evil, you could have become a captain of industry or a Nobel Prize winning chemist who finally unravelled the molecular structure of the chromosome chain.”
To this, Vance would reply, “You'll never take me alive, copper,” and a shoot out would follow. The hero would emerge with the kind of flesh wound that heals itself overnight with no scar. The villain would end up as a corpse stretched in the dust.
Jubilant townsfolk would surround the hero.
“Wow, Tex, look at that! You have rid the world of Absolute Evil. This calls for a party. The sarsaparilla is on us today.”
But, curiously, Tex doesn’t share in the general merriment.
“That’s fine,” he says, in a flat voice. “You boys go on ahead. I want to be alone for a while.”
“Huh?” asks one admirer.
“Well, the world will certainly be a better place without Absolute Evil,” Tex explains, “but I only had the one brother.”
“It’s kind of sad about you, Vance,” he would say. “If you had employed your great talents for Good instead of Evil, you could have become a captain of industry or a Nobel Prize winning chemist who finally unravelled the molecular structure of the chromosome chain.” To this, Vance would reply, “You'll never take me alive, copper,” and a shoot out would follow. The hero would emerge with the kind of flesh wound that heals itself overnight with no scar. The villain would end up as a corpse stretched in the dust.Jubilant townsfolk would surround the hero.“Wow, Tex, look at that! You have rid the world of Absolute Evil. This calls for a party. The sarsaparilla is on us today.” But, curiously, Tex doesn’t share in the general merriment.“That’s fine,” he says, in a flat voice. “You boys go on ahead. I want to be alone for a while.”“Huh?” asks one admirer.“Well, the world will certainly be a better place without Absolute Evil,” Tex explains, “but I only had the one brother.”
Thursday, June 4, 2009
The Funeral, Contact, Aggression, God
Hi Janice,
Sal and I drove to Sunwest on Monday for Hans' funeral. His family lists March 24 as the day of his death. That was the day Hans walked out of the hospital. The police guess that he walked to "a bridge near the hospital where there was a break in the ice" and jumped off. They figure the flood currents would have been strong enough to carry his body to the Lake, as much as 100 kilometres away, where it washed up. It was discovered on May 10.
Hans had given thought to his funeral. He chose some of the music and possibly indicated which of his poems should be read. He also chose his urn. Two brothers and two sisters spoke, and three of the four friends listed in the obituary. My impression is that Hans was lucky in his family and friends. Through the internment the weather remained lovely and we could imagine we were in the prairie heaven where, in his poem "Cerulean," Hans hoped to find peace at last. During the drive home we were caught in a downpour and had to pull over for about twenty minutes.
Love,
Jay
*****
It is 9:16 a.m. Thursday, June 4, 2009.
I wrote Janice Bremer a couple of paragraphs about the funeral that Sal and I went to on Monday. I am looking at those two paragraphs now.
I also looked at a synopsis of The Courage to Be on the Internet.
I liked Paul Tillich’s book when I read it. But I was not impressed with the synopsis. It pumps up the idea of courage too much. Courage becomes a veritable brass band singing the praises of Being (don’t forget the capital!) as a God who is greater than God, Ground of all Being, Who is Dread Defeating, and so on and so forth--ideas that exist only in sermon mode.
I prefer the formulation of Pema Chodron who writes that to mark a single breath requires courage, but in exchange returns a surplus of the quality. That is, you invest a unit of courage (mindfulness) and immediately get it back with interest. In one place Pema’s minimal meditation is three breaths long; in another place, a single breath qualifies. I love exercises that lower the bar like that. Anything more elaborate is just priestcraft, I think.
I imagine I understand Hans Skaler's situation. He desperately wanted to be in creative contact with the world, but did not know how to get there.
When his younger son committed suicide, the poet William Stafford commented, “Brett was not mean enough. He was not mean the way a cornered wildcat is mean.” Living in the shadow of his high energy father, Stafford's son never quite got his life going, and then apparently he was unsuccessful in love too.
There are times we’ve got to be mean the way a cornered wildcat is mean. Our lives are worth fighting for. Curiously, that’s the message that is screaming through anxiety, but also the message the anxiety wants to keep masked. “What a huge mistake breathing life into such a weak vessel as you was!” thunders God. “I do repent me of it. I surely do.”
I think we are born with such aggression as we need and, “save for an evil chance,” (Yeats) it keeps working to bless us and keep us all our lives as we make contact and grapple with the world. For some of us, that aggression gets marked as either evil or useless, and it turns inward. I think Hans was one of those, and I am another.
At church last Sunday I referred to Hans’ “gentle intelligence.” At the funeral on Monday, to my surprise, Hilda Starling, a close friend of Hans’, employed the identical phrase in her eulogy. The family emphasized Hans’s loving good will going back to childhood--as well as the extra complement of brains he seems to have been born with. All seven of the kids completed university, but they recognized Hans as something special.
Hans cheerfully helped his brothers find jobs and become the successes in life that he never became. He kept in contact with his parents almost to the end. He made it a point to tell them how he blamed them for nothing that had gone wrong in his life. He was sure that the anxiety and depression he suffered had nothing to do with his family or the way the world had treated him. It was something between him and God, apparently. Hans thought about God a lot.
There was a time in the 1990s Hans was hoping to make appropriate creative contact with the world by publishing his poetry. When it became clear that was not going to happen, he lost the ability to write as well, he said. It had been a consolation.
The presence of God was another consolation that seemed to be drying up for Hans in his last few years. He was brought up Reform but switched to United when he moved to our town about twenty years ago. His family referred to this as part of his “faithful quest.” They were silent about his shift away from United and over to the Unitarian Church a couple of years ago.
One of the last conversations I had with Hans was about God. I had just read The God Delusion. Hans said he was meaning to read that book but hadn’t got around to it yet. He had read Christopher Hitchen’s God is Not Great, however. The sub-title for that book is How Religion Poisons Everything. Hans believed many of the themes were similar, and there was a lot to be said for making oneself aware of the negative aspects of religiosity. Religion was hardly a political innocent. It had a lot to answer for.
“At the same time,” said Hans, “Speaking for myself, while I no longer imagine God as talking to me, if I stopped feeling that he was there listening, that he was monitoring my deeper processes, understanding me more deeply than I understand myself, yet still man to man, and accepting me...if I lost that faith...well, I don’t know what I would do. I wouldn't commit suicide or anything like that. That's not what I'm saying.”
“Okay,” I said.
“But I would be looking forward to a pretty bleak old age.”
In response, I told Hans how my daughter lost her faith when she was four or five years old. She had learned at her Mother’s Sunday School that God saw her wherever she was.
“Even when I’m in the bath?” Tara had asked.
“Even when you are in the bath.”
“There’s no way I’m going to believe in a God who looks at me while I’m taking a bath,” said Tara.
“And I haven’t from that day to this,” says Tara today, remembering fondly.
So how does all this fit in with my life right now? Well, I am still looking for a healthful contact with the world. The e-mail to Janice counts as healthful contact, and so does this addition do it, produced with my blog in mind. Tara got up in time to get to her first class at high school. I showered so that she could change my dressing before she went. That’s an inch or so on my back, where they chopped out some tissue for a biopsy of my skin and put in a couple of stitches. I cannot feel it or see it, even with the help of mirrors. It is nothing for Tara to remove the old bandage, clean the site and replenish the anti-biotic cream. There doesn’t seem to be any problem.
I have had 2 cups of coffee. I will possibly go for a walk. This evening, Sal, Tara and I will join Prof. Dan Toews and Agnes Reiner to go see Othello.
And now?
I should look at my blog. My self-hatred has always revealed itself most forcibly at the point of intersection between me-as-writer and world-as-judge. The world is an angry pack of mad dogs. I am charged with subduing them through my verbal agility. But I’m not equal to the task. Of course, my first critic was my huge bully of a brother Mobojobo, and he wasn’t about to have his behaviour modified by anything I said or did.
I put things charmingly, no? But this is serious business.
When I read over my writing a couple of days after having posted it, I become full of self-loathing and think this whole blog business is ridiculous. My good head, however, tells me the contrary is true. The blog is just what the doctored ordered. (I’m the doctor, and that’s what I ordered.)
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
William Stafford’s “With Kit, Age 7, at the Beach” (Commentary)
The original poem is included in Robert’s Bly anthology The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart: Poems for Men, and that is where I first read it. It is available at several places on-line. One site prefers the title “This Life.”
Here is my response--
Here is my response--
what this poem teaches--
lines are five six seven
syllables long. There’s some
echoic stuff at line ends
but loose, could be random.
Contact is everything
& muscular mobilization;
senses are muscles too.
The guy’s proud of his
muscles, senses,
creative strong interpretation
of everything he sees,
and (same thing) responsibility
for the next generation.
He was too proud, I thought
back in ‘92 when I first read it,
me being not quite a father then
(Tara would come along soon)
nor being a poet either
and always something of a
weakling I fear.
I was sure I
wouldn’t last long
in that storm.
Twenty-Nine Years Ago
Hi Rod,
So Rev. David Harding has died, and you are going to put together some kind of testimonial? Really? Why? How well did you know him?
But first: You ask if I think your email to our late friend Cec’s wife will get to her now that she has moved.
Well, I guess if your email to her hasn’t bounced, Tessa will get it. I’m told she has moved into a small apartment at Frank Davis Place (on North Spruce Road—Cec got her on the waiting list about the same time he learned he had cancer), but I can’t imagine Tessa not being on-line. She is the type to keep active. Did she keep up membership in Three Pines after Cec left off ministering there? Do you know? I wasn’t following that kind of thing back then. I know she never liked being a minister’s wife. In fact, she more or less refused to play that role, didn’t she? But she did like some of the people at Three Pines. Whether that included the two ministers that replaced her husband I do not know.
I left Three Pines a few months after the team of Dave Harding and Henry Quirley arrived. When Rose and my marriage broke down, the tacit agreement was that Rose would get the church. I got the sofa. It was a good sofa and lasted another 15 years. Still, I had led her to that congregation and felt fate had cheated me out of it. I didn’t quite forgive her.
A few months before the split, I did call in Rev Harding during a crisis in Rose’s mental health. You were still working here as a community minister. You may remember.
After going with me to see a kind of black farce on mental illness at the town playhouse, Rose started disassociating. Actually she started disassociating right in the middle of the first act. While I thought the play was aimed at the insensitivity of the normal community, who are oblivious to the attempts at suicide a woman is making literally beneath their noses, Rose was sure it was a big Bedlam haw haw at desperate people. Thirty years later, I’m ready to consider her opinion, but at the time I just wanted to sit and take in the play to the end. But she got really angry at me and walked out of the theatre. I stayed a few minutes longer but then went looking for her. It took me about ten minutes to find her on a side street, crumbled in a snow bank. This was in March, 1980, but during her disassociation my wife thought it was still 1977, that is, before her miscarriage, and before other stresses on the marriage arose. She did not remember those events or even having seen the Attenborough play.
Rose’s psychiatrist, Patterson, was out of town. And, the afternoon after the play, I had some kind of exam on my schedule at Faculty. A student that year, returning to university at the late age of thirty-five, I was busy becoming a school teacher.
I dared not leave Rose alone, but I was desperate to find someone who would spell me off so that I could get to the exam. In the late morning, I phoned Dave at Augustine. He came over directly. We were living in an old but solid block on Henley, paid $165 a month, had hard wood floors.
I got to my exam and, while Dave was with Rose, the past returned to her.
Oh, well! Rose was going to leave our marriage anyway! Her second marriage seems still going. She lives in Atlanta, her “new” husband’s town. You can search on-line under her married name—Rose Mordman--and find some of her photographs and thoughts on art, especially on “negative space.”
But you can’t expect me to think well of Dave Harding. It wouldn’t be human.
Later I became friends with 2 other women who (along with Rose) also considered themselves his victims. One said she lodged a complaint with Quirley, but he wasn’t interested in pursuing it. I remember Dave calling his fellow team member, Rev. Quirley, “an innocent puppy, ready to please everybody, his tail wagging for one and all, not my style at all.”
Later, Cec asked me why I didn’t pursue the bum on behalf of the 3 women.
But I was too far from the system by the time I got my information (it was 1985 already) and ... I forget my other excuses...
Not my church, I guess.
And 2 of the 3 women had been asking for it, which made it their business, right?
(The third said she got a real yucky feeling from Dave’s advances & left the church.)
I didn’t feel on high moral ground. Apparently Dave thought sex was a legitimate part of counseling. What do I know?
To me he seems to have been a greasy pig of a person, but that’s an impression based on seeing him maybe three times, when my own life wasn’t in such great shape. He did respond to our call for help quickly enough. That’s true.
You never did give me your responses to A Month of Sundays. It was you that led me to the book, and it is about your profession, Reverend, not mine.
Our new minister, Linda Harcourt, is planning to arrive in late July and start work on August 1.
John
So Rev. David Harding has died, and you are going to put together some kind of testimonial? Really? Why? How well did you know him?
But first: You ask if I think your email to our late friend Cec’s wife will get to her now that she has moved.
Well, I guess if your email to her hasn’t bounced, Tessa will get it. I’m told she has moved into a small apartment at Frank Davis Place (on North Spruce Road—Cec got her on the waiting list about the same time he learned he had cancer), but I can’t imagine Tessa not being on-line. She is the type to keep active. Did she keep up membership in Three Pines after Cec left off ministering there? Do you know? I wasn’t following that kind of thing back then. I know she never liked being a minister’s wife. In fact, she more or less refused to play that role, didn’t she? But she did like some of the people at Three Pines. Whether that included the two ministers that replaced her husband I do not know.
I left Three Pines a few months after the team of Dave Harding and Henry Quirley arrived. When Rose and my marriage broke down, the tacit agreement was that Rose would get the church. I got the sofa. It was a good sofa and lasted another 15 years. Still, I had led her to that congregation and felt fate had cheated me out of it. I didn’t quite forgive her.
A few months before the split, I did call in Rev Harding during a crisis in Rose’s mental health. You were still working here as a community minister. You may remember.
After going with me to see a kind of black farce on mental illness at the town playhouse, Rose started disassociating. Actually she started disassociating right in the middle of the first act. While I thought the play was aimed at the insensitivity of the normal community, who are oblivious to the attempts at suicide a woman is making literally beneath their noses, Rose was sure it was a big Bedlam haw haw at desperate people. Thirty years later, I’m ready to consider her opinion, but at the time I just wanted to sit and take in the play to the end. But she got really angry at me and walked out of the theatre. I stayed a few minutes longer but then went looking for her. It took me about ten minutes to find her on a side street, crumbled in a snow bank. This was in March, 1980, but during her disassociation my wife thought it was still 1977, that is, before her miscarriage, and before other stresses on the marriage arose. She did not remember those events or even having seen the Attenborough play.
Rose’s psychiatrist, Patterson, was out of town. And, the afternoon after the play, I had some kind of exam on my schedule at Faculty. A student that year, returning to university at the late age of thirty-five, I was busy becoming a school teacher.
I dared not leave Rose alone, but I was desperate to find someone who would spell me off so that I could get to the exam. In the late morning, I phoned Dave at Augustine. He came over directly. We were living in an old but solid block on Henley, paid $165 a month, had hard wood floors.
I got to my exam and, while Dave was with Rose, the past returned to her.
Oh, well! Rose was going to leave our marriage anyway! Her second marriage seems still going. She lives in Atlanta, her “new” husband’s town. You can search on-line under her married name—Rose Mordman--and find some of her photographs and thoughts on art, especially on “negative space.”
But you can’t expect me to think well of Dave Harding. It wouldn’t be human.
Later I became friends with 2 other women who (along with Rose) also considered themselves his victims. One said she lodged a complaint with Quirley, but he wasn’t interested in pursuing it. I remember Dave calling his fellow team member, Rev. Quirley, “an innocent puppy, ready to please everybody, his tail wagging for one and all, not my style at all.”
Later, Cec asked me why I didn’t pursue the bum on behalf of the 3 women.
But I was too far from the system by the time I got my information (it was 1985 already) and ... I forget my other excuses...
Not my church, I guess.
And 2 of the 3 women had been asking for it, which made it their business, right?
(The third said she got a real yucky feeling from Dave’s advances & left the church.)
I didn’t feel on high moral ground. Apparently Dave thought sex was a legitimate part of counseling. What do I know?
To me he seems to have been a greasy pig of a person, but that’s an impression based on seeing him maybe three times, when my own life wasn’t in such great shape. He did respond to our call for help quickly enough. That’s true.
You never did give me your responses to A Month of Sundays. It was you that led me to the book, and it is about your profession, Reverend, not mine.
Our new minister, Linda Harcourt, is planning to arrive in late July and start work on August 1.
John
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Skaler's Funeral
Visceral epiphany—self-loathing and self-loving, like a miser wringing his hands with evil delight, and curiously sexy feelings along my crippled left side, along the fault line there. Yes, I'm loving my lovely faults all along my body. Actually, I love the way my body can still bounces back. Despite my great age, strength returned pretty quickly after my being all scrunched up in the car the three hours on the way to Sunwest, and three hours on the way back, from the funeral of my recently self-murdered friend Hans Skaler. There was no rain on the way down nor at the graveside. Perhaps Sal and I met the first mosquitoes of the season there, but nothing terrible. On the way down we listened to Bob Dylan spin songs about the weather on his radio program. On the way back we got some prairie weather ourselve, a regular drenching. We pulled over into the lot of a Petro-Can station. Sal got out because she needed to go to the can. I preferred keeping out of the downpour. She spent a long time in the shop, and the rain stopped. So I went to see what she was about. She was just paying for two coffees, 100% Columbian she said, and a neat egg salad sandwich. She remembered how much I had liked the egg salad sandwiches at the funeral. Seems a nice family, the Skalers, a bit pious maybe but, you know, you can’t be sure. At funerals where you let the religious boys take over (and that’s easy to do, isn’t it) everybody seems fully assured Christ is taking care of us all, living and dead. Nowhere in the little hymn book they passed out was there anything somebody from my church (which was Hans' church at the end) could sing with a good conscience. what a pile of crap really! But I love funerals and people at funerals and love the men and women who work them. I love all bodies connected with the entertainment business really. That is my bottom line. entertainment. Really it is. And sorry I am if my little literary splurges don’t entertain you. I would have preferred to be entertained than taught all those years in school. No, I liked being taught sometimes too. But it was entertainment that I wanted and always entertainment. Wow my typing with my left hand there felt really fluent. I mean I was typing with both my hands, but it was my left hand knew where it wanted to go.
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