Looking for Eros Pellini

"Remember, what we are trying to do in this life is to shatter time and bring back the dead. ...Rise and see the whole world." --Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin

In a transient exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art, there is a small, bronze woman in a plexiglass case. The work, "A Girl from Lombardia" by Eros Pellini, was featured in the Kennedy's hotel room when John F. and Jackie visited the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex. President Kennedy, of course, never left the city alive, and I'm told that his death sent Dallas into a steady economic decline for several years afterward. I imagine that this handful of paintings and sculptures--including Thomas Eakins' famous and (I find) humorous work Swimming--were some of the last objects the president ever really studied in this world. Surely he must have looked closely at them? Does an aura settle around the objects last seen by a dead man's eye the way Pellini's fingerprints can be traced in the thighs and belly of this relaxed and lounging girl, settled on one hip and looking past us? Does the ghost, not only of the artist but also of the viewer linger on with the work, perhaps building up in metaphysical concretions like memories do over the too-familiar objects of populating our common lives?

When I go to museums or the theater, as I did last night (Shakespeare in the Park's production of Pericles--excellent), at some point, if my mind is really on the matter at hand, I am inevitably struck that someone made these things. A man as mythical and therefore as inaccessible as Shakespeare or Eakins or (in a lesser way) Pellini put pen to paper, brush to canvas, fingers to clay, and conceived this.

There is a shield in the Dallas Museum of Art from Polynesia, owned by a Shaman, with the outlines of hands carved into it. The hands trace an ancestors'. The shield was passed on because of the bravery and prestige of this warrior, whose name the little plaque beneath does not record. I assume he is forgotten now, because once that name has slipped from memory, the shield is no longer of value. The virtue of the object is, apparently, imbued by the power of living memory rather than intrinsically present. To us, the shield is a work of art; to the Shaman, of magic. I'd argue, however, (and I have Mark Helprin, particularly in his magnificent Winter's Tale, to back me up here), that the function has remains essentially the same: "Magic...was all about time, and could stop it and hold it for the inquisitive eye to look through as if through cold and splendid ice." Surely this is why we collect photographs of our families and artifacts of distant times--to freeze them.

I wonder about art and memory. Does Pellini's little woman mean less to me than Eakins' painting nearby? Probably. I have only a brief and fading memory of who Pellini was, gained exclusively from the exhibition catalogue. Does the greatness of the object d'art dwindle with memory or does it become itself a testament to memory? Can a man be made immortal in molding what bears his memory even after his name is lost? Does a work wear its maker's handprints and endure according to the strength of the man? Or are the works we praise only survivors saved by accidents from the shipwreck of time? "O you gods," Pericles grieves in Shakespeare's eponymous play, "Why do you make us love your goodly gifts, and snatch them straight away."

Perhaps the muses play our Prometheus against the Fates, and instead of fire, give us memories incarnated and bulwarked in songs and images. Art, certainly, has always and through all ages taken time (figured, often, as death) and love as its themes. Art, perhaps, defies defacing time and bodies memory after the mothering mind passes, giving order to overwhelming experience. Or perhaps art is only the lovely, spinning beads of water which hang in the air after over a fountain.

Blur

Blur

By Andrew Hudgins

Storms of perfume lift from honeysuckle,
lilac, clover—and drift across the threshold,
outside reclaiming inside as its home.
Warm days whirl in a bright unnumberable blur,
a cup—a grail brimmed with delirium
and humbling boredom both.  I was a boy,
I thought I'd always be a boy, pell—mell,
mean, and gaily murderous one moment
as I decapitated daises with a stick,
then overcome with summer's opium,
numb—slumberous.  I thought I'd always be a boy,
each day its own millennium, each
one thousand years of daylight ending in
the night watch, summer's pervigilium,
which I could never keep because by sunset
I was an old man.  I was Methuselah,
the oldest man in the holy book.  I drowsed.
I nodded, slept—and without my watching, the world,
whose permanence I doubted, returned again,
bluebell and blue jay, speedwell and cardinal
still there when the light swept back,
and so was I, which I had also doubted.
I understood with horror then with joy,
dubious and luminous joy: it simply spins.
It doesn't need my feet to make it turn.
It doesn't even need my eyes to watch it,
and I, though a latecomer to its surface, I'd
be leaving early.  It was my duty to stay awake
and sing if I could keep my mind on singing,
not extinction, as blurred green summer, lifted
to its apex, succumbed to gravity and fell
to autumn, Ilium, and ashes.  In joy
we are our own uncomprehending mourners,
and more than joy I longed for understanding
and more than understanding I longed for joy.

Two Things on Four Books

It's been a pretty big month; Serena got the Internet and I got air conditioning, so I'd say together, we're basically living all the way in the 21st century for the first time in a while. High-fives all around.

I don't have anything super in-depth to say about any one thing I've read lately, but here's a drive-by of the last four books I've read (one of which I'm only halfway through) and two things that I've liked about them:

A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan, and The Liars' Club, by Mary Karr

First, Mary Karr is fantastic. I'll probably write more on that later, but for now, just trust me. She really is. You should go read "Disgraceland" if you need to be sure. Anyway, she had a pretty unfortunate childhood (her mom tried to shoot her dad, stuff like that) and wrote a memoir about it. Karr's book essentially posits that really horrible things can happen to you and you can overcome them and eventually have a normal, healthy life. Egan's book (which is a novel) touches on the same issue. Pretty simple. I find it heartening. Is this lame? Is it lame that sometimes I just want to read about how you can move on from really awful things that happen to you? Anyway, if you want the case to be made for the possibility of normalcy, you should read these two books back-to-back.

Last, Dakota by Kathleen Norris and My Bright Abyss by Christian Wiman (which I'm only halfway through) both lean heavily on others' writings. Norris has an epigraph at the beginning of each of her chapters and constantly cites the Desert Fathers. And Wiman's book almost feels more like a scrapbook or an anthology than an essay collection. The great thing about that is that you get quick little exposures to people like Randall Jarrell, Patrick Kavanagh, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Robert Bringhurst, and lots of others. His book almost feels more like a synthesis of others' thought than anything else; it's really honest and see-through. It feels very rich, and I like it.

On Marilynne Robinson

Humility and charity rarely find themselves heading the list of American virtues. Marilynne Robinson, however, in her recent essay collection When I was a Child I Read Books, finds in them the soul of democracy. As she writes in the introduction, “to identify sacred mystery with every individual experience…is to arrive at democracy as an ideal, and to accept the difficult obligation to honor others and oneself with something approaching reverence.”

As the quote suggests, and Robinson subsequently explains, she grounds this collection of musings on civic virtue and the state of American public life with reflection on human nature. Rather than offering a positive formulation, however, she attempts this apophatically—to “make inroads on the vast terrain or what cannot be said,” as she defines later in the book.  Rather than metaphysical concerns, she takes the mystery of consciousness as the most primal fact of human life. Because of this, Robinson celebrates the very feature of democracy which its detractors criticize as destabilizing: the heterogeneity of democratic society. Consciousness, Robinson insists, is fundamentally heterogeneous, varying not only between individuals but also between regions and nations, and therefore democracy is descriptive of the human condition rather than prescriptive. Democratic virtue, not conformity, makes coherence possible in a truly free society.

By democratic virtue, Robinson means those habits of soul which cultivate “imaginative identification . . . with [the] shared humanity” of others. Without this imagination, “[it] is simply not possible to act in good faith toward people one does not respect, or to entertain hopes for them that are appropriate to their gifts.” Civil conversation would because impossible because it requires imputing good intention to those who hold differing views from ones’ own.

Though the book is a collection of independent essays, as a whole it certainly makes a central argument, which deserves some summary here. For Robinson, rigorous education cultivates this imagination which democratic virtue requires. Fiction and poetry opens children to their own unique inner lives, and it allows them to identify and sympathize with the inner lives of others.  Literature teaches humility before the complexity of human experience which escapes circumscription and yet submits itself to those who would approach it slant-ways in poetry and fiction. Only such literary habits of mind protect a person against ideological attempts to define and limit the purpose and meaning of human life.  

Education, however, has been in a decline for decades, Robinson claims, and she sees a direct causality between the loss of literary education and the impoverishment and polarization of civil discourse. She spends a majority of the book calling upon an impressive breadth of historical sources to root out this mole in the garden of American civil life. To her credit the rant rarely becomes self-indulgent, either for her or for the reader. She treats the disintegration of public discourse as a public responsibility—and this includes both her and her reader. She requires her audience to examine itself for every form of a bad faith, denouncing the “bright line between an ‘us’ and a ‘them’”: the American public is lazy and undisciplined, whereas I and my friends work hard; the other party’s ideals just conceal a ruthless will to power.

Despite the breadth and force of Robinson’s argument, however, the book falters. Her attempt to establish the mystery of consciousness as the rallying cry of democracy fails to produce any clear positive vision of American civil life. By banishing from the conversation any ultimate commitments, the book ends with a brittle aestheticism.  The apophatic proves a bit too radiant a fog for the robust needs of human life, and the reader wonders if a some of the Protestant and American voices Robinson draws up in her defense didn’t offer a rather better field book of the “vast terrain” of the unsayable which Robinson equates with human nature. For instance, I doubt whether John Calvin—Robinson’s personal favorite on whose behalf she launched an admirable defense in her book The Death of Adam—would have approved of her praise for American intellectuals like Walt Whitman for whom “creeds fall away and consciousness has the character of revelation.” Perhaps we can call this a certain aestheticism of the soul: “A man must not mean but be.”

The problem with aestheticism of all stripes, however, is that it is essentially reductionist. After all, one of the progenitors of literary aestheticism, Oscar Wilde, also wrote “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” and The Portrait of Dorian Gray, two deeply moral works. Robinson, perhaps, forgets that though literature certainly teaches inwardness and sympathy, it often does so by impressing the reader with the moral weight of choice. The variety of human choices, four millennia of world literature teaches us, often end tragically. The best laid plans of mice and men, and all that.

Likewise, while Robinson laments the loss of “soul” from American vocabulary, her aesthetic appreciation of religion belies its obnoxious and perennial tendency to insist on firm and clear ends to human life, and therefore public life. Given the broad knowledge of Protestant intellectual history demonstrated here and elsewhere, her failure to note its tendencies to meddle socially and politically seems puzzling. If religion is the heart of Robinson’s America, it seems missing from its backbone and biceps, a troubling absence in light of its historical force.

Of course, it is pretty hard to give an exact outline of what “Robinson’s America” would be in its ideal, or at least improved, form, and there’s the unfortunate failure of a really delightful and insightful book. Sometimes it’s almost too easy to just accuse her of nostalgia, particularly when she laments the starvation of “our great public education system” which is largely the offspring of John Dewey and an experiment of the kind of capitalistic labor mill Robinson abhors.  

Nostalgia aside, she doesn’t seem to have a telos for American virtue, and though she lambastes the political Right for its cramped individualism, it’s hard to see how her lovely articulation of the mystery of conscious gives much direction for communal life.  A negative formulation of freedom as respect for the mysterious unknown just isn’t a strong enough peg to hang a nation’s public life upon. She talks a lot of about cooperation and sympathy, but with little indication of the end toward which we strive.

This aimlessness also wrinkles up the book’s generally starched style. While her admirers will appreciate here her characteristic economy and vigor, When I was a Child I Read Books lacks the precision and polish of Robinson’s earlier work. The diction tends a bit toward abstraction, while the essays have an unsettling habit of spiraling around one another. Unlike the best of her previous essays, many lack clear internal structure and are prone to unsubstantiated claims. Several times, I was even sure I had read nearly an identical sentence a few dozen pages before.

Those who already appreciate the probity of Marilynne Robinson’s thought and the weightiness of her prose style will find When I was a Child I Read Books rewarding. It isn’t, however, the best introduction to her work. The essays rarely obtain the necessary internal momentum to arrive at that elusive place of almost reading themselves—a quality she achieves so well in the best of her fictional and discursive work. It is certainly the kind of book read best with a pen in hand, and a second skim after a preliminary read will reveal patterns in what before appeared scattered threads.  Even at its low points, however, the book deserves and requires the reader’s robust attention, and Marilynne Robinson never fails to reward the humility and charity of her readers.

"The origin of art is in the shock of the food chain"

That's Robert Hass, former US poet laureate. He said this at an NYU event where he and evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson had a conversation about how nature and wonder influenced their career pursuits. I'd love to hear what you think about that comment, Serena, (and anyone else, please), and about his riff on the evolution of altruism leading to both communal living and warfare. Do the two go hand-in-hand? Can you have community without necessarily enforced otherness? Etc. Link is here.

Getting More Awesome All the Time

Okay, so this may be cheating, but I was going through some papers while unpacking my stuff (a never ending process which seems to never reach its goal of making my room look less like a disaster area), I found some papers I wrote for Mr. John Miller of the National Review in the writing class I took from him my last semester. I wrote this little bit for my final. I think the prompt was "What are your post-grad plans" or something. I, conceitedly,think my past self was witty and amusing. So here are the words of my (slightly) younger self, written hubristically to conceal the terror of the last week of my life--I mean school:

There’s an internet meme that says, “All of my friends are getting married. I’m just getting more awesome.” Since, last time I checked, approximately 42.86% of my friends are skipping blithely down the nuptial pathway--skyping or canoodling with significant others on Tuesday nights while I study or drink (alone)--I’ve adopted this motto for my post-grad plans. Those of my classmates who aren’t getting married will probably be attending grad school in the fall for some degree in, like, levinasian hermeneutics or domestic life in Orvieto in the 16th century. Me? I’m going to trot off to the woods with my English degree in one hand and Thoreau in the other to live intentionally.

I’ll be spending the next five months not on the banks of Walden pond but in the Shenandoah Valley, just south of Roanoke, Virginia at Seven Springs Farm, close to where Annie Dillard wrote Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I’m looking forward to living in a little shack without potable running water, cooking outdoors, watching the sun rise over the fields, and never writing another term paper or taking another final exam again. My mother, raised on a farm herself, doubts whether my high-heel-and-skirt-wearing self will last very long, but I’m sure that my complete failure to create a backup plan will ensure I live the gentleman-farmer dream for the full stint, hunkered down over wood coals and smothered with bug spray and sunscreen. Did I mention there won’t be air conditioning?

Thanks to Hillsdale, my extensive knowledge of Medieval poetry and Plato has made me an invaluable asset to cocktail parties to come. I also know most of the lyrics to any one of two dozen Irish drinking songs and how to order a beer without looking like a fool, so basically I'm set. This Saturday, I will emerge like a butterfly out of a chrysalis a stronger, more elevated and refined version of the slobbering and fearful child of eighteen who stepped foot on campus four years ago. My parents will hardly recognize this exemplary specimen of womanhood. 

But I’m tired. I need sunshine. While my brain has become a thing of beauty, my adrenal gland is shot, I have permanent bags under my eyes, and my skin has taken on that greenish-glow which signifies early-onset LCD-induced cancer. So while everyone else hunkers down to enjoy nuptial bliss, you’ll find me at Seven Springs Farm, sweating away and covered with axle grease and dirt. I’ll be getting more awesome.

Filling Station

Filling Station 

by Elizabeth Bishop

Oh, but it is dirty!
--this little filling station,
oil-soaked, oil-permeated
to a disturbing, over-all
black translucency.
Be careful with that match!

Father wears a dirty,
oil-soaked monkey suit
that cuts him under the arms,
and several quick and saucy
and greasy sons assist him
(it's a family filling station)
all quite thoroughly dirty.

Do they live in the station?
It has a cement porch
behind the pups, and on it
a set of crushed and grease-
impregnated wickerwork;
on the wicker sofa
a dirty dog, quite comfy.

Some comic books provide
the only note of color--
of certain color. They lie
upon a big dim doily
draping a taboret
(part of a set), beside
a big hirsute begonia.

Why the extraneous plant?
Why the taboret?
Why, oh why, the doily?
(Embroidered in daisy stitch
with marguerites, I think,
and heavy with gray crochet.)

Somebody embroidered the doily.
Somebody waters the plant,
or oils it, maybe. Somebody
arranges the rows of cans
so that they softly say:
ESSO--SO--SO--SO
to high strung automobiles.
Somebody loves us all.

Mystery and Mastery

 “What is mastery?” The doctor asked me. I hadn’t exactly prepared for the philosophical turn the interview had taken.

I had been running late all day: for one thing, this was Monday—‘nuff said. For another, we had just moved that weekend (a fiasco of tragicomic proportions which included, but as not limited to, the power company accidentally shutting off the juice for 24 hours). What with a new and unfamiliar city-location, I was getting lost and therefore late every time I left the house. Leaving extremely early for everything didn’t seem to mitigate the problem, to my frustration. And then, what between moving, job-training, and crisis-management (bananas for the baby and eggnog for us), I had somehow forgot to print out a copy of my resume. Little-known fact: I’m prone to panic attacks. Needless to say, I was pretty ragged and haggard—in short, not office manager material by the time I made it to Dr. Bekker’s office for the interview. At that point, I wouldn’t have hired me to be a short-order fry cook, much less an office manager at a homeopathic practice.

“Education,” Dr. Baker leaned back in his chair as I tried to settle down, “is about mastery,” and instead of the bullet-point job-description low-down I expected, he gave me a quick lesson in pedagogy. The problem with modern schooling, he remarked, is that it aims at accumulation, not mastery. Of course, he smiled, mastery depends on the scope of the subject: “I’ve studied homeopathy 25 years, and I haven’t begun to master it.”

                                                                                                    

But what is mastery?

I’d like to think that college humbled me on this subject of education. I graduated from high school much more confident about what I knew than when I walked across the stage six months ago and shook Dr. Whalen’s hand. As an 18-year-old, I had wanted to be a liberal arts major, to study everything. Of course, you can’t do that at Hillsdale, weirdly enough, so I settled on English: it’s cohesive, unifying, blah, blah, blah.

I’m glad I did.

I found that nothing reveals your ignorance like burrowing deeply into a subject. It’s like an intellectual Heisenberg uncertainty principle, and it’s depressing. The world shies away from discursion.

I’ve studied all four poems of the Medieval Pearl-Poet (you may know “Gawain and the Green Knight”). They’re some of the most stunning works in English, perhaps in any language, and I know them probably better than any other comparable body of work. I know them well enough to know I don’t know them. I, of course, only spent 3 months with them, which is an absurd space of time in which to expect mastery, but stil.

If the danger of specialization is myopia, as the liberal-artsy types argue, the generalist’s boogie might very well be hubris: thinking that political theory can be summed up by the Magna Carta and U.S. Constitution or that knowing one’s case endings constitutes knowledge of Latin. The specialist, if he’s honest, knows how unknowable the world is, how it recedes at every point. Knowledge kisses reality through a bridal veil.

So you’re going to college? About to start an apprenticeship or technical school? Welcome, to use another metaphor, to the greatest hide-and-go-seek game of all times. Tag. You’re it.

Like riding an exponential function, you ain’t never gonna touch x, baby.

Don’t mistake me for a mystic or a pessimist—though I do err in both directions. An exponential function gets close enough to the axis to nearly skin its nose. Being a specialist is not like Moses ascending to see the Promised Land, with a noble mournfulness, as from afar. Sometimes I feel that way, but that’s mostly laziness. Nonetheless, mastery does, I think, reveal mystery.

Consider, by way of analogy, friendship. Perhaps it’s just me, but I find it much easier to describe people I don’t know well. I would shudder to describe quipily my best friends.  Sometimes my dad (the “anonymous” who often comments here) ask me why I’m friends with so-and-so; I don’t know what to say. Who could contain the scope of a soul in 140 characters? Those I thought I knew best surprise me most. The friendships I discovered particularly during college taught me that trust and predictability are not mutually contingent. They may even be mutually incompatible. I don’t know. I could write you a zinger of a personality analysis for the diner waitress this morning--mustard-stains and blowsy hair included--but for, say, my dear blog co-writer Betsy? No, I really couldn’t even start. But I do know, all the same.

Perhaps that mystery is what dear old St. John was getting at in his Revelation, about God giving a secret name to each.

                                                                                           

I was listening to “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” (yeah, I confess; I make up excuses to drive around just to listen to NPR) the other day, and they had astrophysicist Adam Reiss who won a Nobel Prize this year. He said that he got into astrophysics because of how much we didn’t know—and then, by gum, he discovered we knew even less than we thought—dark energy, etc. I don’t think the old pagans would have been surprised, personally. But we do have names for everything, he said. So we’re still Adam, slapping names onto things we’ve only just seen--but, perhaps, half the knowing is in that name?

We domesticate the world through words. That’s our job, from the beginning. A master names. And yet we know that our names only approximate, circle around, that true name, true knowledge, of a thing. It’s all stuttering—but stuttering is speech, too, and our words are true. Just as we approach, asymptotically,* that divinely given name, the more find ourselves speechless, I think—like Thomas Aquinas or Gregory the Great who Dante has laughing at himself re his speculation about the angels.

What’s mastery? It’s sweating to find the right word; it’s near-god-like gaze of seeing the whole and all its parts; it’s eating the crop you raise from and raze back to soil, in reverence. If your hackles are still prickling that I dared put down that intellectually-obese character, the well-rounded generalist—padded with Plato, rolling in Shakespeare, with a spot of Cezanne on his chin—forgive me. Mastery means the happy marriage of generalist and specialist.

*Note for math nerds: I know that in contemporary mathematics, an asymptote can actually intersect the line. Don’t get mad at me. I learned, like, Euclidean geometry ‘n’ stuff, so I’m still living in a mathematic world a couple millennia out of date. Forgive me.

                        

Hell and Love

Hell and Love 

by Garret Keizer

Hell is always grander to pain
Than the bliss of a resurrected saint;
More fun to show the lecher's doom,
Tits and ass in the flickering gloom.

Yet love inspires more than hate,
A head caressed than on a plate,
And even should his colors wash,
I'd put Chagall in front of Bosch.

The Passion is a painter's dream,
With hell and love a single theme--
The human body stripped to show
A death both merciful and slow.

Still life with fake avocados and clean laundry

Well, gang, I’m here. I’ve been here for a month, here in the Big D--Dallas, home of big cars, big hats, big hair. Through an odd turn of events (i.e. the friends I’m living with were evicted from their apartment a week before I arrived because--and I tell you the honest to gorsh truth--someone decided to tear the building down), I’m camping out in two top-story bedrooms in a huge house (complete with chandelier) in Plano. If you’re wondering why I’m sprawled out in two rooms, you’ve never seen the way I spread out. My things are everywhere. Someday I will become an adult and be able to, you know, keep house. Until then....

But that’s neither here nor there--the real here and now consists in me squatting hobo-style with friends in a show house. It’s basically been like Arrested Development. Picture this: the four of us (three adults plus 1.5 year-old) eating goulash and arugula at this Ikea table which is slightly too tall for comfort in a beige dining room. We’re eating off beige placemats and using the napkins which came off the table, show napkins which are neither soft nor absorbent, which sort of spread the gravy around your sneering mug rather than wipe it off.  There’s a plate of fake avocados in the middle of the table and we pass the casserole dish around them, trying to confiscate the avocados from Sophia who makes a periodic grab at them and chucks them at our heads. Meanwhile, a nice-looking Asian family have let themselves in the front door and are tip-toeing around checking the place out.We wave blandly, like people on an elevator. They ask where the water heater is and seem confused when we tell them that we have no idea. Is there a problem with the backyard flooding? We’ve never seen it happen, we answer with perfect candor.

Oh, well.

But we’re leaving Plano. We’ve found a nice little apartment a mile from our church which is about two miles North of downtown Dallas. It has lovely wood floors and a fireplace which appears to have been designed by someone who had never actually seen a wood fire. It’s a nice touch. Our neighbors below have obscured their front door with massive spider plants, so obviously they are cool people. It’s a five minute walk to one of the coolest little bistro groceries in Dallas, Eatzi’s, and the famous Turtle Creek Park is another little hop.

Employment’s been slow coming, but in the last week it appears that between being my Wonder Woman (i.e. mommy’s helper) jobs for a few mothers I know, a cleaning job, and part-time stints at two separate tutoring centers, I’ll actually be able to pay my bills. No cardboard box or bankruptcy for this English major.

So basically all’s right and weird in the world, as it ought to be, thank God. I have an amazing church, good friends, work I enjoy, and a sweet pad. What more could one possibly want from life? I don’t know about the rest of you, my fellow graduates, but the post-college months have been incredibly odd. Who knew that not measuring your life in semesters could be so disorienting? For the first time in my life, I could almost literally do anything I want to--and I find that what I really want to do is, well, go to evening prayer and teach kids how to conjugate Latin verbs. The pleasures of my life are that dry-mouh daze you get from pounding through a good novel (East of Eden for me currently), wrestling with Sophia on the floor, and chatting to Nicole about childhood over breakfast. I’ve discovered how satisfying folding three baskets of clean laundry for a friend can be and that I really will read copious amounts of literature without the threat of a reading quiz. To summarize: despite the fact that I somewhat sadistically miss 2am cigarettes outside the old student union at the Dale during the nose-hair freezing Michigan winter, God’s in his heaven and I’ve found a home.

Ten crooked fingers to count with

Not that it matters, but this is definitely one of my to 10 favorite poems ever.

This World, Not the Next 

by Lance Larsen

True, God dreamed our first parents out
of chaos of firmament and longing.
And true, he pled with them to return
to a delicious Forever of his making.
But it was this world, with its tides and machinery
of sweet decay, they learned to love.

He touched their hair, then covered their sleeping
mouths with His and declared breath
holy, but forced them to draw another
and another.  He commanded that they eat
not of that dazzling tree of awe and penumbra,
but knew its fruit would eat at them.

And when it did, and when they fell
into knowing, God folded the garden and hid it
deep inside the woman, but commanded
the man to tend it.  And in due season the man
Eved, and the woman Adamed back
and the song of radiance they keened was pure

darkness by morning.  And God blessed
their bounty to be infinite, but left them
ten crooked fingers to count with.
And buried His echo inside their bodies,
a delicious lapping that answered yes and yes
though neither could remember the question

Ecclesiastes was wrong about that

A Man in His Life

by Yehuda Amichai

A man doesn’t have time in his life
to have time for everything.
He doesn’t have seasons enough to have
a season for every purpose.  Ecclesiastes
was wrong about that.  

A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,
to laugh and cry with the same eyes,
with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,
to make love in war and war in love.

And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,
to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest
what history
takes years and years to do.

A man doesn’t have time.
When he loses he seeks, when he finds
he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves
he begins to forget.

And his soul is seasoned, his soul
is very professional.
Only his body remains forever
an amateur.  It tries and it misses
gets muddled, doesn’t learn a thing,
drunk and blind in its pleasures
and in its pains.

He will die as figs die in autumn,
shriveled and full of himself and sweet,
the leaves growing dry on the ground,
the bare branches already pointing to the place
where there’s time for everything.

The Hippy Commune

You all know what you've been waiting for: pictures of the commune. Yes, these are SFW.

In back of the main house. Yes, that's an outdoor shower.

The outhouse is a happening place, man.

The outside of the outhouse, or "privy," as we like to call it.

Milling sorghum.

Pressed sorghum stalks next to the vineyard.

If I were a princess, I would send princes on quests for a butcher block like this for my castle. This is the holy grail of kitchenware.  

Road Trip Down to Dallas or Indiana Never Ends

Well, it's been a month in Dallas, and I'm finally posting some pictures from my road trip down from MI.

The Indian Sand Dunes by Gary, IN

I met a white-haired, snaggletooth man in a down jacket and a baseball cap here. His name is John. He quit his job, sold everything he owns except his Windstar, and is visiting every National Park in the country. I wished him the best of luck.

I don't remember what town this is in, but it was right after Utica, or right before Utica, where this crazed museum curator snatched me off the streets and held me captive for an hour explaining the glories of their little museum. All I remember is a wooden duck and a carriage Lincoln road in. This hefty homeschool mama came in and the two of them started monotone monologuing about Noah's flood and the fossil record under our feet. I edged out. 

The sunbursts accurately represent my mental state after 7 hours of Indiana. It's officially my least favorite state (sorry).

Don Quixote didn't show up, much to my chagrin.  

Pentatina for Five Vowels

I have about 5,000 words written which I'm sure will someday find themselves edited and published in blog-form, but right now I'm weary and I just want to post a poem which struck me from last month's Poetry.

Pentatina for Five Vowels

BY CAMPBELL MCGRATH

Today is a trumpet to set the hounds baying.
The past is a fox the hunters are flaying.
Nothing unspoken goes without saying.
Love’s a casino where lovers risk playing.
The future’s a marker our hearts are prepaying.

The future’s a promise there’s no guaranteeing.
Today is a fire the field mice are fleeing.
Love is a marriage of feeling and being.
The past is a mirror for wishful sightseeing.
Nothing goes missing without absenteeing.

Nothing gets cloven except by dividing.
The future is chosen by atoms colliding.
The past’s an elision forever eliding.
Today is a fog bank in which I am hiding.
Love is a burn forever debriding.

Love’s an ascent forever plateauing.
Nothing is granted except by bestowing.
Today is an anthem the cuckoos are crowing.
The future’s a convolute river onflowing.
The past is a lawn the neighbor is mowing.

The past is an answer not worth pursuing,
Nothing gets done except by the doing.
The future’s a climax forever ensuing.
Love is only won by wooing.
Today is a truce between reaping and rueing.

In case you're wondering...

...this is why a liberal arts education matters. From October's Poetry, reprinted from its first publishing in that same magazine in 1958.

Private and Profane 

by Marie Ponsot

From loss of the old and lack of new
From failure to make the right thing do
Save us, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.
     From words not the word, from a feckless voice
     From poetic distress and from careless choice
     Exclude our intellects, James Joyce.
From genteel angels and apostles unappalled
From hollywood visions as virgins shawled
Guard our seeing, Grunewald.
     From calling a kettle an existential pot,
     From bodying the ghost of whatever is not,
     John save us, o most subtle Scot.
From pace without cadence, from pleasures slip-shod
From eating the pease and rejecting the pod
Wolfgang keep us, lover of God.
     Couperin come with your duple measure
     Altar our minds against banal pleasure.
Durer direct with strictness of vision
Steady this flesh toward your made precision.
     Mistress of accurate minor pain,
     Lend wit for forbearance, prideless Jane.
From pretending to own what we secretly seek,
From (untimely, discourteous) the turned other cheek,
Protect our honor, Demetrius the Greek.
     From ignorance of structural line and bone
     From passion not pointed on truth alone
     Attract us, painters on Egyptian stone.
     From despair keep us, Aquin's dumb son;
     From despair keep us, Saint Welcome One;
     From lack of despair keep us, Djuna and John Donne.
The zeal for free will get us in deep,
That the chance to choose be the one we keep
That free will steel self in us against self-defense
That free will repeal in us our last pretense
That free will heal us
     Jeanne d'Arc, Job, Johnnie Skelton,
     Jehan de Beauce, composer Johann,
     Dark John Milton, Charter Oak John
Strike deep, divide us from cheap-got doubt,
Leap, leap between us and the easy out;
teach us to seize, to use, to sleep well, to let go;
Let our loves, freed in us, gaudy and graceful, grow.

Does anyone know anything about Marie Ponsot?? Her other poem in this month's Poetry, "A Visit," is also swell. It reminds me of my grandmother a lot (sans the gin). I just really dig the vim with which she wrote.

Downer of the Day

Ok, I'm really sorry, and I know this is might sound negative and uncharitable, but this month's Poetry has some real stinkers -- like, hoo boy, some of this stuff is bad. One example:

My Weather

BY JANE HIRSHFIELD

Wakeful, sleepy, hungry, anxious,

restless, stunned, relieved.

Does a tree also?

A mountain?

A cup holds

sugar, flour, three large rabbit-breaths of air.

I hold these.

Oh for goodness sake. What is this?? I don't even want to talk about it.

That's not to say it's all bad -- Deborah Paredez and Mary Karr's stuff is really interesting (and Karr's poems are about David Foster Wallace, which Serena intuited w.o even knowing they used to date, because Serena, as I've said before, is really really smart). But for goodness sake.

A Whole Passel O' Gloves

Various gloves, most of which were in Harlem:

This is a block or two from the Upper West Side whole foods. A true glove bonanza.

But sometimes NY is really beautiful (skyline via Queens).

Ugh, Solange Knowles, Ugh

Why are you perfect? Ugh, ugh.

A few Floyd Co. highlights



Many of the ol' homesteads are now used as hay barns

A thrift store 4 turns and 20 minutes from anywhere.



I'm not sure whether to be frightened or reassured.

Greens Garage: an organic/local food store on a gravel road which runs completely on the honor system.



Vitro Yoyo out on Shawsville Pike, also home of Boogles' Pro Wrestling Camp.