"For a hundred years the 'Ice Maiden' was trapped .....but now she is free and a new Ice Age is dawning!" This image was featured in the Expose section of the Dec 2006 Imagine FX magazine
"It is easy to overlook this thought that life just is. As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point. We have plans and aspirations and desires. We want to take constant advantage of the intoxicating existence we've been endowed with.
But what's life to a lichen? Yet its impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours - arguably even stronger. If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a rock in the woods, I believe I would lose the will to go on. Lichens don't. Like virtually all living things, they will suffer any hardship, endure any insult, for a moment's additional existence. Life, in short just wants to be." - Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything
William McGuire "Bill" Bryson, OBE, (born December 8, 1951) is a best-selling American author of humorous books on travel, as well as books on the English language and on science. Born an American, he was a resident of North Yorkshire, UK, for most of his professional life before moving back to the US in 1995. In 2003 Bryson moved back to the UK, living in Norfolk, and was appointed Chancellor of Durham University.
This poem brings to light the way women dissappear and appear in the north, or the winter, in the snow in my life. The View From The Northern Wall, Noordwal. In the Chinese version of the directions, the North is the place of solitude. South is plenitude, East beginnings, and West endings.
Or is it God? I'll wager :) Hmmm. Goddess.
Of course to bring it down home, my last lover left Oregon, emigrating to British Columbia. How much more literal can I get?
Tracking Signs
You've gone north and you Expect me to follow you But I see no trail. That means I'll have to Track the signs you've left again. That will slow me down.
(shaking the rain off)
Not that I suck at signs, no, I follow them well, Hardly ever get Lost so bad I must give up In disgust, go home.
You know all of this, Of course you do. I admit This pisses me off.
Still, my heart hangs here Now that you've gone walking As if I don't count, As if it's me that Disappeared, or I didn't Care enough for you.
Blaise Pascal; June 19, 1623 – August 19, 1662, was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Catholic philosopher. He invented a mechanical calculator. Pascal was a mathematician of the first order. He helped create two major new areas of research. He wrote a significant treatise on the subject of projective geometry at the age of sixteen, and later corresponded with Pierre de Fermat on probability theory, strongly influencing the development of modern economics and social science. Following Galileo and Torricelli, in 1646 he refuted Aristotle's followers who insisted that nature abhors a vacuum. There is so much more. Wiki him. This was a remarkable man.
One of my favorite blog moments, the post that contained this discussion of Pascal's Wager also contained another poem that I like very much. I am reprising Pascal tonight and we will see what tomorrow brings.
This poem is written in gratitude to Blaise Pascal, who pointed out that belief in God cannot in the end be buttressed by reason. This was not a new claim in Pascal's time, but what came next was. If not by reason, then perhaps we shall approach God in the form of a wager thus, if you choose to believe in God you may gain much and lose little. If you choose that you do not believe, you risk much and what you can gain is doubtful. The wager seems clear. Small risk in believing and much possible gain, that position sitting in an elevated position over the larger risk of disbelieving with no clear gain. Such a wager may not be palatable as an underpinning of belief. Many people have tried to refute it. Some have possibly succeeded.
For example, and a big one if you are a stoic or some other philo-soph - lover of truth, keeping integrity with truth may count for a great deal. Thus the risk of believing is increased greatly in the loss of truth if God really doesn't exist. However the wager cannot be reasonably denied in anything like the ease with which it can be stated. The wager was a groundbreaking philosophical point that no one had done before him. Pascal's Wager opened up probability theory (and Pascal developed a probability theory after making his wager), anticipated pragmatism and voluntarism as philosophical movements, and the wager was part of a group of observations that attacks certainty and thus his wager may be considerred the first work of existentialism.
Do not understand this wager as a reason to believe by itself. That is not how Pascal meant it at all. However, not everyone was pleased with Pascal. The wager was published posthumously and thus Pascal escaped all brouhaha. If you are interested in the replies that philosophers made and all that, just Wiki Pascal's Wager. It turns out there were forerunners of the wager in Islam and Hinduism. No one operates in a vacuum, nor does he have a truly original idea (in the sense that no one else ever thought of it.)
Discussion
You said, "Better to Believe in God, risking there Is no God than the other way." I said, "Better to Believe in the work, risking there Is no satisfaction than not believing Which guarantees no satisfaction." God woke up at that, sang "Boys will be boys. And girls will be girls. It's a crazy mixed up world."
January 9, 2009 3:37 PM
This poem first appeared in the May 31, 2009 post. This was a few weeks after my first heart event.
(I know, I know, this is a red fox, not a dog. I am partial to this picture.)
"We all have our own life to pursue, our own kind of dream to be weaving. And we all have some power to make wishes come true, as long as we keep believing." - Louisa May Alcott
Louisa May Alcott (November 29, 1832 – March 6, 1888) was an American novelist. She is best known for the novel Little Women, set in the Alcott family home, Orchard House in Concord, Massachusetts, and published in 1868. This novel is loosely based on her childhood experiences with her three sisters. Alcott was the daughter of noted transcendentalist and educator Amos Bronson Alcott. Alcott's early education included lessons from the naturalist Henry David Thoreau. She received the majority of her schooling from her father. She received some instruction also from writers and educators such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Margaret Fuller, who were all family friends.
******************
I have known many dogs who delight in chew toys and I have played tug of war with many of them. That game is completely satisfying on its own or as part of a toss the stick game. The only drawback is slobber. Sometimes you get an acrobatic dog and everything reaches a higher level. Then playing with a dog is almost as much fun as a cat with a red laser light or a feather toy. You can get cats to walk on walls and ceilings. :D
Chewing Sticks
If I had pastimes Like your dog does chewing sticks Maybe I would not Collect useless junk, Would not have drank half to death, Would not write so much Poetry.
"Relationships are all there is. Everything in the universe only exists because it is in relationship to everything else. Nothing exists in isolation. We have to stop pretending we are individuals that can go it alone."[from Never Eat Alone] - Margaret J. Wheatley
Margaret J. Wheatley (commonly Meg Wheatley) is a writer and management consultant who studies organizational behavior. Her approach includes systems thinking, theories of change, chaos theory, leadership and the learning organization: particularly its capacity to self-organize. Her work is often compared to that of Donella Meadows and Dee Hock. She describes her work as opposing "highly controlled mechanistic systems that only create robotic behaviors."
Christopher says: Meg has stated the Buddhist law of interdependence here in her own way. That we tend to think of ourselves is distinct and separate is one main source of the illusions that hamper our spiritual development.
"The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned." - Antonio Gramsci
Antonio Gramsci (1891 - 1937) was a leading Italian Marxist. He was an intellectual, a journalist and a major theorist who spent his last eleven years in Mussolini’s prisons.
I am really, really stubborn. This is not good. :)
Maybe I Should Stop This
I said, give me signs.
You said you did, gave me sores on my dreams of hope, a pox on my heart, the grinding walk, stone on stone and me between them, lost and losing more.
You said all my pains show me that I don't know shit, that I don't think straight, that I still persist, insist; I want my own way.
February 9, 2009 11:07 AM revised February 19, 2011.
So I stayed home on Wednesday and got a bunch of stuff done.
One unique experience for me was getting fired by my primary care person, who is a Nurse Practitioner. She decided I was too complex a case, with two kinds of heart trouble and diabetees (though the diabetes is not much).
I drove through to completion, I hope, on my end a refinance of my house.
I have been getting tests done on the rise in anticoagulant levels, and in the last test, the diuretic consequences were checked. Everything is working out fine.
But...
I came down with the grandmother of all viral attacks on my respiratory system yesterday and lost today's work and blog post too.
I now have a diagnosis. I am in a mild state of "diastolic heart failure." Google and Wiki it. I have the kind that will put too much fluid around my lungs (not in them unless it gets really bad) and makes it difficult to breathe and difficult for the oxygenated blood to get back into the ventricle. For now should be controllable with beta blockers, diuretics and anti-coagulants. Getting old is not for sissies.
They say that the musculature governing the relaxation fill stroke (diastole) has gotten stiff from one or more causes that may never be clear. In my case I did not treat a modest high blood pressure for years (130s-140s). This is a possible contender for cause. Nothing is certain. The stiffness does not permit full loads in one or the other ventricle so that blood from the lungs does not reach good capacity prior to the stroke that drives the blood onward to the body. Thus if I work the body hard enough I will tire out much faster than people with healthy hearts will.
Put together like this: "May God be your guardian."
"I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness the astonishing light of your own being." - Hafiz of Shiraz
Khwāja Šamsu d-Dīn Muḥammad Hāfez-e Šīrāzī (Persian: خواجه شمسالدین محمد حافظ شیرازی), known by his pen name Hāfez (1325/26–1389/90) was a Persian lyric poet. His collected works (Divan) are to be found in the homes of most Iranians, who learn his poems by heart and use them as proverbs and sayings to this day.
For over 17 years Philip Straub has been creating art for the games, film, and publishing industries. He is the author and creator of the award winning illustrated Novel and interactive website, Utherworlds and co-author of D'artiste Digital Painting.
I love this poem. I want to be the poet who wrote this poem. I am not. However I can feature the poem here on my blog. I can let you all know he is in the world and a little about who he is. You too can Google him as I did. You can find him at Phillips Exeter Academy as I did. I love the internet for this capacity for connection.
Club Icarus
We're no more than a few silver seconds in the air when that winged and cocky boy gets sucked into a turbine sparking off a fire that rips the starboard wing away from the fuselage, shucking passengers out and raining us over northern California, dozens of us dropping towards the bay and you can imagine the screams, I'm sure, the prayers cast up then down the twirling sky, and yet here's my daughter laughing the whole way down, her yellow hair whipping around her first teeth smile, as she titters at the tilted wonder of what was happening, rolling airborne over and over, as we all drop like sacks of wet clay and for a second I want to snag her, to show her how frightened she should be, so I can hug her safe one last time, but the way she looks laughing I just can't and so as the brick of the bay comes up to kiss my back I watch my little girl giggling, grinning floppy-cheeked into the wind and then, damn, if I don't see, right before the world splits my sides, wings all her own butterfly from her back and lift her laughing back into the blue.
MATT W. MILLER Harvard Review Number 39
Miller is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. He earned a B.A. in Psychology at Yale University, and his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Emerson College. He is a former Visiting Professor of Writing at New England College and has taught writing workshops at several leading institutions, including Stanford University and the University of Massachusetts. He has published work in Notre Dame Review, Connecticut Review and PN Review, among others. Miller’s first book, Cameo Diner: Poems, was published in 2005 by Loom Press and nominated for five Pushcart Prizes. Currently, Matt teaches English and coaches football at Phillips Exeter Academy where he is also chair of the Lamont Poet Committee, serves on the Bennet Fellow Writer in Residence Committee, and is faculty advisor for the surf club.
Interestingly, there are other contenders in the myth of Robert Johnson's devil-purchased soul -- and the crossroads of US 61 and US 49 in Clarksdale is where most blues tourists pay their respects (the Romantics album released in 2003 is called "61/49" for this reason)*.
Of course -- as with ancient Roman tourists setting off to find "sites" from Greek myths -- the location of Johnson's crossroads is not exactly something that can be proven. He was born in Hazelhurst, and his supposed grave is in Quito (near Itta Bena) -- but Rosedale did figure in the lyrics for one of Johnson's most famous songs, "Traveling Riverside Blues".
*To my good friend, Mike Skill, rock on!!
Story by Matt Morgan with some modifications and additions by me, Artwork by Ricardo Pustanio
Robert Johnson, born Robert Leroy Johnson (May 8, 1911 – August 16, 1938) is among the most famous of Delta blues musicians. His landmark recordings from 1936–1937 display a remarkable combination of singing, guitar skills, and songwriting talent that have influenced generations of musicians. Johnson's shadowy, poorly documented life and death at age 27 have given rise to much legend. Considered by some to be the "Grandfather of Rock-and-Roll", his vocal phrasing, original songs, and guitar style have influenced a broad range of musicians, including John Fogerty, Bob Dylan, Johnny Winter, Jimi Hendrix, The Yardbirds, Led Zeppelin, The Allman Brothers Band, The Rolling Stones, Paul Butterfield, The White Stripes, The Black Keys, The Band, Neil Young, Warren Zevon, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, and Eric Clapton, who called Johnson "the most important blues musician who ever lived". He was also ranked fifth in Rolling Stone's list of 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time. He is an inductee of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Meeting with the Devil at the Crossroads A "vision", as told by Henry Goodman
Robert Johnson been playing down in Yazoo City and over at Beulah trying to get back up to Helena, ride left him out on a road next to the levee, walking up the highway, guitar in his hand propped up on his shoulder. October cool night, full moon filling up the dark sky, Robert Johnson thinking about Son House preaching to him, "Put that guitar down, boy, you drivin' people nuts." Robert Johnson needing as always a woman and some whiskey. Big trees all around, dark and lonesome road, a crazed, poisoned dog howling and moaning in a ditch alongside the road sending electrified chills up and down Robert Johnson's spine, coming up on a crossroads just south of Rosedale. Robert Johnson, feeling bad and lonesome, knows people up the highway in Gunnison. Can get a drink of whiskey and more up there. Man sitting off to the side of the road on a log at the crossroads says, "You're late, Robert Johnson." Robert Johnson drops to his knees and says, "Maybe not."
The man stands up, tall, barrel-chested, and black as the forever-closed eyes of Robert Johnson's stillborn baby, and walks out to the middle of the crossroads where Robert Johnson kneels. He says, "Stand up, Robert Johnson. You want to throw that guitar over there in that ditch with that hairless dog and go on back up to Robinsonville and play the harp with Willie Brown and Son, because you just another guitar player like all the rest, or you want to play that guitar like nobody ever played it before? Make a sound nobody ever heard before? You want to be the King of the Delta Blues and have all the whiskey and women you want?"
"That's a lot of whiskey and women, Devil-Man."
"I know you, Robert Johnson," says the man.
Robert Johnson, feels the moonlight bearing down on his head and the back of his neck as the moon seems to be growing bigger and bigger and brighter and brighter. He feels it like the heat of the noonday sun bearing down, and the howling and moaning of the dog in the ditch penetrates his soul, coming up through his feet and the tips of his fingers through his legs and arms, settling in that big empty place beneath his breastbone causing him to shake and shudder like a man with the palsy. Robert Johnson says, "That dog gone mad."
The man laughs. "That hound belong to me. He ain't mad, he's got the Blues. I got his soul in my hand."
The dog lets out a low, long soulful moan, a howling like never heard before, rhythmic, syncopated grunts, yelps, and barks, seizing Robert Johnson like a Grand Mal, and causing the strings on his guitar to vibrate, hum, and sing with a sound dark and blue, beautiful, soulful chords and notes possessing Robert Johnson, taking him over, spinning him around, losing him inside of his own self, wasting him, lifting him up into the sky. Robert Johnson looks over in the ditch and sees the eyes of the dog reflecting the bright moonlight or, more likely so it seems to Robert Johnson, glowing on their own, a deep violet penetrating glow, and Robert Johnson knows and feels that he is staring into the eyes of a Hellhound as his body shudders from head to toe.
The man says, "The dog ain't for sale, Robert Johnson, but the sound can be yours. That's the sound of the Delta Blues."
"I got to have that sound, Devil-Man. That sound is mine. Where do I sign?"
The man says, "You ain't got a pencil, Robert Johnson. Your word is good enough. All you got to do is keep walking north. But you better be prepared. There are consequences."
"Prepared for what, Devil-man?"
"You know where you are, Robert Johnson? You are standing in the middle of the crossroads. At midnight, that full moon is right over your head. You take one more step, you'll be in Rosedale. You take this road to the east, you'll get back over to Highway 61 in Cleveland, or you can turn around and go back down to Beulah or just go to the west and sit up on the levee and look at the River. But if you take one more step in the direction you're headed, you going to be in Rosedale at midnight under this full October moon, and you are going to have the Blues like never known to this world. My left hand will be forever wrapped around your soul, and your music will possess all who hear it. That's what's going to happen. That's what you better be prepared for. Your soul will belong to me. This is not just any crossroads. I put this "X" here for a reason, and I been waiting on you."
Robert Johnson rolls his head around, his eyes upwards in their sockets to stare at the blinding light of the moon which has now completely filled tie pitch-black Delta night, piercing his right eye like a bolt of lightning as the midnight hour hits. He looks the big man squarely in the eyes and says, "Step back, Devil-Man, I'm going to Rosedale. I am the Blues."
The man moves to one side and says, "Go on, Robert Johnson. You the King of the Delta Blues. Go on home to Rosedale. And when you get on up in town, you get you a plate of hot tamales because you going to be needing something on your stomach where you're headed."
I am sharing this, nearly the entire Robert Johnson poat taken from the site Haunted America Tours. Thank you so much. May you have all due success and happiness. It was too good not to share. That I should find an oblique reference to a friend of mine in the whole thing was just too much.
Here is another crossroads. This poem was first posted April 24, 2009
I'll Play Such A Lick
Here at the crossroads I shall bring out my guitar And play such a lick The world will begin.
You will come down the bright lines Of the eternal highway To stand before me. I will mute my sound and bow, Then will gather all.
About this Image: A painting for the Philip Straub original IP, Utherworlds.
Purchase the Utherworlds novel: Utherworlds The Illustrated Novel
Experience the Utherworlds website: www.utherworlds.com
I strongly suggest clicking on this painting and magnifying it to get a better view.
"In commitment, we dash the hopes of a thousand potential selves." - Lord Byron
George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, later George Gordon Noel, 6th Baron Byron, FRS (22 January 1788 – 19 April 1824), commonly known simply as Lord Byron, was a British poet and a leading figure in Romanticism. Amongst Byron's best-known works are the brief poems She Walks in Beauty, When We Two Parted, and So, we'll go no more a roving, in addition to the narrative poems Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan. He is regarded as one of the greatest British poets and remains widely read and influential.
Originally posted TUESDAY, MARCH 2, 2010
Here’s a poem about commitment. I wonder how many other things it is about.
I'm Already Taken
The wind and earth fought over me but I belong to the pale moonlight, to starry rivers, to the morning shine of sun, to your warm rose heart.
April 15, 2009 12:58 PM
Update: I am getting used to injecting myself as I must with blood thinner. I feel better than I have for some time even though nothing has been done, and this may be so because I have continued to use Lasix, a diuretic. They used it and shed me of ten pounds of fluid in hospital. I decided to continue, resuming its use on returning home. I stopped after it seemed to no longer treat the edema in my legs months ago, before any of this new stuff had come into view. I felt okay because I had talked the doctor into the diuretic based on nothing more than my legs.
Oil on canvas, 133.4 × 196.2 cm (52 ½ × 77 ¼ inches).
This painting and this photo are in the public domain.
There is a detail in this painting that is difficult to see at this size. If you follow the link or click on the painting and you will get a larger size and can see the other angel plainly. There are two angels in this picture.
"How long should you try? Until." - Jim Rohn
Emanuel James "Jim" Rohn was born in Yakima, Washington to Emanuel and Clara Rohn. The Rohns owned and worked a farm in Idaho where Jim grew up, as an only child. Jim Rohn (September 17, 1930 - December 5, 2009) was an American entrepreneur, author and motivational speaker. His rags to riches story played a large part in his work, which influenced others in the personal development industry.
****** I first posted this January 17, 2010. I feel it even more relevant this moment, more than a year later. Even while I struggle, even while I watch bruises form from too thin blood and feel the pin pricks of self administered injections and through which I gather small drops of blood to check my sugar level, even now I remember what it is like to hold someone close, to feel the positive changes, the magnetism, to breathe another into me and approach ecstasy.
But I am old now...
I was a lover but now no longer equal to that task, no longer on the quest for dragons, no longer willing to stand my ground and hold the dark at bay. What I do, I do in story and fable and poem, do utilizing my cleverness. I delegate. I give way to the young bucks who know everything and then I watch how it turns out. It is ever thus, always this way. I fell short of senior independence. I do not have enough. I am in the position of the elderly who go out on the ice to save the tribe the burden. This is nothing to grieve, not in the best of worlds, just what is. Most days I am okay with it.
While this is still a story at this moment, it is really there in my near future. I have about fifteen years max if I judge by my mother and father. But I added the self abuse of alcoholism. That is the point. This is not far away for me. It is easily right next door, tomorrow. If I pretend otherwise I begin to be pathetic in my denial. I watched a dear friend who tried desperately to deny his mortality while it trimmed his edges piece by piece. I vowed long ago I would not let myself be in that position. I have carried death on my shoulder for decades, ever since Don Juan Matus (Casteneda) made that spiritual gesture so obviously right for me to do. Now I am reaping the benefit.
Erotic Certainty
You have given me words, ruby flames rising higher than I can for I am old now and you hold the true arrow of the time to come. Still we both know words with erotic certainty given as we love.
Thank you, my friends. I have hit a real change point. The other shoe dropped from nearly two years ago. I have been complaining of some tiredness, exhaustion, and really low metabolism for quite some time. It has confused me. Now I know it is heart related.
I had to return to hospital and get more observation and help.
The condition is atrial fibrillation, where the atria of the heart no longer pump in synch with the ventrical all the time. It means the flow of blood around my body is too weak to maintain high end and even sometimes normal activity. Apparently it is not in itself at a serious level to be of life threatening concern, but the stroke that can come of it is. There are some other anomalies that may signal some other stuff to come.
I am being ramped up at this moment into the coumadin regime that is prescribed to people who are at risk for this kind of stroke. This not only entails being introduced to coumadin but also, I must inject myself now with another blood thinner called Lovenox to bridge me into the new lifestyle. My mother was on this regime but had a stroke anyway. Her heart trouble was controlled. This is no joke. I live alone so I must wear my big boy pants and do the right thing without encouragement and some other watchful eye.
I am getting boxed in. I really need to stop working but if I do then I lose the supplemental insurance and watch my life fall apart because I have no retirement. So with all this extra stuff and less energy I have to continue working if I possibly can. At least my skill is high and so is my boss' loyalty at this moment. Who knows how he will be in the future, or how I will be either.
This is a common end of life dilemma in this day and age. My spirit is not that bad, considering, but my comfort level is at a lower ebb. I would prefer now to not have any life struggles to go with the medical struggles. They are going to be quite large enough.
I will probably post as usual tomorrow. Another thing that has happened, my main computer has failed with a start up corruption of some kind (says corrupt file(s)). I tried a system restore. I don't want to reload from the beginning and lose files. Too many poems to lose, though should be less than six that aren't in hard copy. My last remote drive back up was mid January. Oh well.
I love you guys...as one friend of mine says, "I love your guts." Keep courage, stay peaceful, find wisdom, do the right thing. Love your people.
"No matter how deep a study you make. What you really have to rely on is your own intuition and when it comes down to it, you really don't know what's going to happen until you do it." - Konosuke Matsushita
Wiki says: Konosuke Matsushita (松下 幸之助 Matsushita Kōnosuke, November 27, 1894 – April 27, 1989) was a Japanese industrialist, the founder of Panasonic, a company based in the suburb of Kadoma (on the Keihan line), Osaka in Japan. For many Japanese, he is known as "the god of management".
Originally posted on May 5, 2009, this was the last post just before my first what I call "heart event". I think it is interesting that the title should be what it is. This is, I think, an excellent example of what is for me a useless tie that I have with my own future. I cannot predict it even to save my life. And yet I sort of do in this vague and unconscious way. After the fact I can look at such things and see how they tie together. Hind sight is not very useful.
I am posting it now to tie together my two heart events. This atrial fibrillation that came up yesterday (see my last post) has been going on for quite a while now I can see in hind sight. The worst thing about it in my daily affairs, I am exhausted all the time. I am not at huge risk for some larger heart event. What I am told is my high risk now is stroke. They are putting me on Coumadin shortly to keep my blood thin. This is controlled hemophilia. I was on Plavix for a year to guard against a clot forming at the stent they put in.
I am returning to work tomorrow.
My Human Condition
Total soul eclipse As I stuff myself with toys And the sugary Dollops, diversions Of my own greedy senses,
Yet the dry desert Of avoiding things Builds toward an explosion I just cannot stop.
Why then is it so The middle way is slicker, More slippery than My poor toes can grip And I slide to either side Again and again?
Demerju may be located in Croatia. Nothing is certain.
"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle." - Albert Einstein
I have spent the day in the emergency room instead of going to work. Shortness of breath took me there. We have discovered atrial fibrillation. I will shortly go on a Coumadin regime to dissolve any possible clot that has formed. I will need to be close to doctors for a while. This explains how difficult it has been in the last little while. Growing old is not for the faint of heart.
Wiki says: Atrial fibrillation (AF or A-fib) is the most common cardiac arrhythmia (abnormal heart rhythm) and involves the two upper chambers (atria) of the heart. Its name comes from the fibrillating (i.e., quivering) of the heart muscles of the atria, instead of a coordinated contraction.
As I have mentioned before, I feel a great urgency in this work I do here.
Searching For Sources
When I look into Your waters, Oh God, I see no sign of my face.
When I look into the waters of my own soul some odd signs appear.
I search Your sources and spells. I find smoke in my hot white eyes.
October 22, 2009 12:45 AM rewritten, February 7, 2011 8:12 PM
If I was a real boy I might not need to hide from you under my sheet.
I might not then tell stories of domination and triumph over all the land and sea.
I might reveal this wrinkled fallen broken soul if I was a real boy and my heart was healed.
July 18, 2009 12:40 PM
changed “perfect” to “a real boy”, and "heart" to "soul" February 6, 2011 12:04 PM
changed the title from "Pulling My Covers" to "Wooden Head" 7:04 PM
This poem should have posted a long time ago, but there was something wrong with it. I took a look this morning and things fell in place. "Wooden Head" and "real boy" are phrases associated with Pinocchio as long as I have known the story. I did not feel I wanted a cartoon character. I got ballet artistes instead. The meat of the poem is not meant to be a portrait of Pinocchio. That is too direct. I was not thinking of Pinocchio when I first composed the poem.
I was however thinking of being stuck in a role, perhaps a self constructed and miserable role, and yearning for a simple and less painful life - perhaps being stuck something like being an unintentional wooden headed gargoyle in the wrong job just waiting for the other shoe to drop because you are failing and you know it. That happened to me in the mid nineties, rather late in my career. I had been placed in over my head and I was trying to be a design crew supervisor with almost no training relevant to the design discipline. While supervisory duties were an expected part of my job description, hi-tech utility piping (exotic atmospheres and materials and clean room protocols) was not. I was out of place and hopeless. I did get fired, the worst moment of my career before or since. I was twenty years senior at the time.
I was locked out and walked off the job and they packed me up themselves, demonstrating the degree of distrust they felt they needed to show. Of course I never worked for either that client or my engineering company again. It is really small consolation that I did nothing but try my best and fail. Anyone in politics or business who has been through this sort of thing can tell you there is no consolation in explanations or extenuating circumstances. I did not even know enough about things to say I was unqualified and refuse the assignment at the start of it. I was used to success. The atmosphere was horrid and the guy I was replacing looked at me with pity as he left. He was from another local company and they were being shown the door for corporate political reasons. We were replacing that company. It was a bad job.
It was a commuting job too. We were carpooling about forty miles. I had to sit with my design crew all the way home with everyone knowing my situation. What I experienced on that car ride was extreme shame. There was nothing I could say nor that they could say that could make it any better. We were all surprised.
If I was a real boy none of this would happen. Do you see the fantasy? Don't think I don't.
I have been paranoid before, but not for a long time. I know no one much cares to know about me now. I know this even if it is not true. I choose to know this. It makes life easier and more effective. I haven't had clues that I was being watched or listened to or followed for a long time now.
When I was a dope dealer though, there were some dicey times and one in particular. This was in December, 1971. I had gone out of my comfort zone and shortly after some strange things happened. I wound up headed to arrange a pot buy and realized that the road was not right, and it felt exactly as if I was being followed. I pulled a check ploy, going off the freeway in an unlighted area, knowing I could go back on. Someone did that with me. This road was a residential turn off I knew about and while busy in the day because of a golf course, this was night with only local residents using it. It was too weird when that car did what I did, going right back on the freeway. I dumped the buy completely at that point, and my goal was now to get home in one piece, with the money intact so I could give it back to the people who fronted me and get the car back to its owner too. I was successful at getting away but was completely convinced I was being set up. I was also quite high.
A week later a friend of mine who worked at the local paper turned gray when he saw me and said, "What are you doing here?" It turned out he had seen my name on a prepublication grand jury indictment list given to the paper in preparation for the expected arrests in the very near future. I decided to trust his access because it made sense of what had happened to me.
In those first days after my road trip out of town but before I got that information it stayed weird. There were odd people about and strange goings on. I felt really exposed and at risk. I made a decision to get out of town. I also decided who my friends were based on whether they could take my distress seriously or not. I was really aware that I was right next to insane if not over the line. I had two roommates in this apartment we lived in, in an older house. We were not paying rent and on the way out the door. We all decided that the heat was on. It certainly felt like it. The task was to stay cool and not spin out totally. I went to Arizona for a few weeks and when I came back it was to a totally different life.
The line between distress at a real situation and paranoia is vague at best. I know there was trouble but I will never know how much was in our shared worry and how much was bearing in from the outside. The report about the list was real. The car and other stuff on the road that night was real too. The stuff that happened at the house was real but it was not clear what it was.
But if the list was real, how come I was never popped? I have had to take on faith that I somehow did the right thing and it voided their intentions. It really scared me but not how you might think. What scared me was I knew that I was not strong enough to tough out the way it would go. I was afraid I would be put in a situation where I had no way out but suicide. See, I knew it wasn't me but my supplier they were after. That guy was known to be a smuggler with Mexico connections but basically untouchable, except they knew, I surmised, that I knew him. I was afraid that they would give me an offer I couldn't say no to, and it would mean ratting out my friend. He trusted me and had fronted me dope more than once. I felt I would have to commit suicide as the only way out of all that, jail or being a rat. That's what scared me.
Paranoia...even paranoids are sometimes right. Sometimes they really are persecuted.
The gate and the glass shards on top of the high walls are however from an earlier time when I lived in Dacca (now Dhaka) in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh).
There Are Threats
They come at me with words and sneers, innuendos and even placards hung on my steel gate.
The glass shards atop my wall keep nothing much out.
You tell me suffer and grow stronger. Don't you know I would if I could?
Elena Dudina did both of these. She is elusive. I can find lots of her work all over the internet. There is very little about her. I know she is Spanish and it appears she lives in France. I am highly responsive to her work. Doesn't it feel haunted to you? Elena's work feels haunted to me.
As far as I am concerned, loving a woman is not always clearly distinguishable from loving God. I discovered that years ago when listening to popular music on acid, that it was often possible to hear the music as spiritual and aimed at God. Ever since that time I have been able to have this kind of double vision. The best times of my life have been when I am in love with someone and equally able to know that I am loving God. That is why I know that for me God is equally Goddess.
Haunted
I wake in empty
Space, in your scent left behind.
It's been years, but still
This happens to me.
December 29, 2008 9:22 AM
Sometimes it just takes faith. I am pretty good at faith when the chips are down, but I have been deeply trained to respect doubt too. It is inherent in the posture of those who enter science that they set faith aside as a disciplined practice. They intend that the world speak without interference by bias and hope. To that end they devise a series of tests and procedures. Then they submit to a process called peer review in which they demand and perhaps at best welcome critical remarks concerning the conditions and events that have led to certain findings. This can become vicious if people become too fixed and certain. Thus they reveal again and again that there is great usefulness in doubt and less usefulness in assumptions of certainty which may or may not also be true statements.
And yet sometimes, it just takes faith.
To Start This Trek
Terrible journey
From this place just to arrive
At your cottage door.
I need newer shoes
To start this trek through the wild
And a full pack strapped
Snug on my body
And I'll carry shelter too,
Which I will need twice.
I'll sing to spirits
I encounter on the way
That they let me pass.
All this in my heart,
Fear and hope and grit,
I don't know if you'll be home.
December 29, 2008 9:04 AM
This post has been reordered and revised. In its original form it appeared on Thursday, April 23, 2009
"The most successful people are those who are good at plan B." - James York
James W. York, Jr. (born July 3, 1939 in Raleigh, North Carolina) is an American mathematical physicist who is well known for his many important contributions to the theory of general relativity. In any physical theory, it is important to understand when solutions to the fundamental field equation exist, and answering this question has been the central theme of York's scientific work, culminating in the achievement, with Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat, of formulating the Einstein field equation as a well-posed system in the sense of the theory of partial differential equations.
York earned his B.Sc. in 1962 from North Carolina State University.
York is widely credited with being the first to recognize the importance of conformal geometry in the initial value problem, and with introducing concepts now called the York curvature and York time.
York is a recipient of the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics from the American Physical Society, where he is a Fellow.
I have to remark at this point...how cool is that? Your peers allow you to place your name on a couple pieces of high math nobody else thought of before... Holy shit! I am proud to introduce him to you.
Another remark: somebody really knowledgeable wrote that thing for Wiki explaining what Professor Doctor York has done, and I wonder if it is York's own words.
Big Tent has offered a wordle and they are gentle about it. They say you only have to use a few words, or even leave something else. However, I love using all the words. Here is the wordle: and here is the poem:
It Is My Call
I shall then rotate and float in the darkening night sky, a remote caretaker's handle.
Like a sharpening function and alert for heat, I'll grind the blade down to razor's edge, that special twenty degree hone, that angle, that keen repose -
I am resistant to all blandishments from the head of state, from his aging cabinet, and, my love, from you.
February 3, 2011 4:49 AM
Don't blame me. I write strangely when I first get up. I think my baby's soft spot opens in the night, or maybe my knickers twist in a unique way while I stir and dream. Anyway I feel remote from my own words and a little bewildered. Should I say, bewitched? I am wondering if I am really like this down deep in my soul, like this is something I did, sort of, in a past life. I have written over a thousand poems in the last couple years. They just spill out, though I have slowed down to a few a week now instead of several a day. I gotta figure one of them is actually pretty good. I wonder if it is this one. But if it is I think my other brother in my head wrote it. I'm an innocent man, innocent, I tell you!
Now may I suggest that you pop over to Big Tent's Come One, Come All page and read some other good stuff. There is probably a great piece lurking over there somewhere. These guys are pretty good, many of them.
Three Word Wednesday says, use these words and get somewhere. I wound up in football somehow. I don't get it but there it is...
Abrasive; noun: Any material or substance used for grinding, polishing, etc., as emery, pumice, or sandpaper; adjective: Tending to abrade; causing abrasion; abrading or tending to annoy or cause ill will; overly aggressive.
Handful; noun, plural: the quantity or amount that the hand can hold; a small amount, number, or quantity; or informal, a person or thing that is as much as one can manage or control.
Loss; noun, many uses including detriment, disadvantage, or deprivation from failure to keep, have, or get; the state of being deprived of or of being without something that one has had; or the accidental or inadvertent losing of something dropped, misplaced, stolen, etc.
Sideline Chatter
I am all tore up from the floor up. I'm chewed up and screwed up. I've hit the abrasive patch, scraped the hide off the handful of hope that held me on the scrimmage line. It's a sack, a ten yard loss. What will I do now? When it's fourth down, punt.
"To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control, that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances for which you were not to blame. That says something very important about the condition of the ethical life: that it is based on a trust in the uncertain and on a willingness to be exposed; it's based on being more like a plant than like a jewel, something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from that fragility." - Martha Nussbaum
Martha Nussbaum (born Martha Craven on May 6, 1947) is an American philosopher with a particular interest in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, political philosophy and ethics. Nussbaum, though not a lawyer, is currently Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, a chair that includes appointments in the Philosophy Department, the Law School, and the Divinity School. She also holds Associate appointments in Classics and Political Science, is a member of the Committee on Southern Asian Studies, and a Board Member of the Human Rights Program. She previously taught at Harvard and Brown where she held the rank of university professor.
"Before you can inspire with emotion, you must be swamped with it yourself. Before you can move their tears, your own must flow. To convince them, you must yourself believe." - Winston Churchill
"If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go into business, because we'd be too cynical. Well, that's nonsense. You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down." - Annie Dillard
Annie Dillard (born April 30, 1945) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American author, best known for her narrative prose in both fiction and non-fiction. She has published two novels, poetry, essays, prose, literary criticism, and a memoir.
Ayers Rock is also known by its Aboriginal name 'Uluru'. It is a sacred part of Aboriginal creation mythology, or dreamtime - reality being a dream. Uluru is considered one of the great wonders of the world and one of Australia's most recognizable natural icons. Uluru is a large magnetic mound large not unlike Silbury Hill in England. It is located on a major planetary grid point much like the Great Pyramid in Egypt.
Uluru is a large sandstone rock formation in central Australia, in the Northern Territory. It is located in Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, 350 km southwest of Alice Springs at 25 degrees 20' 41" S 131 degrees 01' 57" E. It is the second-largest monolith in the world (after Mount Augustus, also in Australia), more than 318 m (986 ft) high and 8 km (5 miles) around. It also extends 2.5 km (1.5 miles) into the ground. It was described by explorer Ernest Giles in 1872 as "the remarkable pebble".'
Uluru is an inselberg, literally "island mountain", an isolated remnant left after the slow erosion of an original mountain range. Uluru is also often referred to as a monolith, although this is a somewhat ambiguous term because of its multiple meanings, and thus a word generally avoided by geologists. The remarkable feature of Uluru is its homogeneity and lack of jointing and parting at bedding surfaces, leading to the lack of development of scree slopes and soil. These characteristics led to its survival, while the surrounding rocks were eroded. For the purpose of mapping and describing the geological history of the area, geologists refer to the rock strata making up Uluru as the Mutitjulu Arkose, and it is one of many sedimentary formations filling the Amadeus Basin.
I love this poem. Stray dreams, stray thoughts that rattle. More than one coyote. It is daylight and yet the moon rises.
Heart Moon
Like rooms in a house, I walk through gray tender thoughts Of my long chased dreams.
Under the porch lie the strays That rattle like angry snakes.
In my daylight hills God moves, and coyotes move too. My heart moon rises.
written October 10, 2008 8:20 AM last posted, March 21, 2009
The artist called himself Werewombat and was apparently English but is now absent from the web as linked to this photo.
Yaquina Bay Bridge looking south near sunset.
Birds figure high with me. Small warm blooded dinosaur descendants (lately we feel many dinosaurs developed warm blood metabolisms), already around when the dinos fell, along with crocs and gators and a few smallish and one or two larger type lizards, and with the turtles and tortoises, they survived whatever that was.
The eyes of birds are direct windows into ancient life for me. I love that I feed the wild ones, mainly a few varieties of finches. I especially loved being very close to a yearling bald eagle one time. That yearling gave us the eye as we floated along in a canoe beneath the tree that held him/her. Here are two bird poems that both came during the morning of Dec. 19, 2008.
This first one is about ocean shore birds. Have you ever been on the beach of a morning when the fog isn't really fog but is still there, thin enough the sun shines through and gives a bronze cast to things? I used to live on the Oregon coast in the town of Newport, got married there back in 1975. We lived in a house in Nye Beach and were a block from the cliff that gave access to the beach, beside the Hotel Gilmore, a flop house and dope house in those days. Years later, that became an upscale bed and breakfast called the Sylvia Beach Hotel, with rooms that took literary names and decor, like the Charles Dickens room, for example. You could walk down the cliff face on a path and stroll the beach for a long distance, and some days were magic.
My Strange Presence
In the haze, gold eye Shines with its own fuzzy light Giving gulls the high Signal, permission To enter the game, gamble On my strange presence As I stand beneath The flock of them approaching The shore where they live.
*************************
I love it when I can write one long sentence and have it make sense all the way like that. I tell you three times.
Here is another, a doubled haiku, two of everything. Death on my shoulder. In the Chinese mythology a crane is a singular blessing. One of my favorite lines in I Ching speaks to this crane, and how she sings to her young, how she possesses a goblet and is willing to share. I have from the beginning, when I first read that line, felt the love that comes with that goblet. My grave but me not in it. A crane's caress. Contact and communication. How can I not be blessed?
Whooping Crane
The Crane's Eye
A crane high steps on My grave - I can tell Because my flesh feels her feet. I look straight at her. She gives Me the eye and nods. Then she steps away.
"The cause of all our personal problems and nearly all the problems of the world can be summed up in a single sentence: Human life is very deep, and our modern dominant lifestyle is not." - Bo Lozoff
Bo Lozoff started the Prison Ashram Project with Ram Dass in 1973, which has grown into the largest interfaith prison ministry in the world. Bo’s book, We’re All Doing Time, now in its 17th printing, is widely referred to as “the convicts’ bible” and was named by Village Voice as “one of the ten books everyone in the world should read.”
For over 30 years Bo has traveled around the world giving talks in thousands of prisons, churches, and community centers. His many roles include author, spiritual teacher, friend, counselor, musician, and modern day mystic.
For more information on the work of Bo, his wife Sita, and the Human Kindness Foundation, please visit www.humankindness.org.
Here's a real lesson, I believe. Manifest reality works in ragged lines, often curved, never perfect. Human brains like straight lines, instinctively know that they are the shortest distances, and without sophistication will expect the flatness they see to the horizon is the truth of things.
Humans want things in the world to work just like brains do. And they do, sort of, once you get past the illusions. But humans like to hang out and fool around and not take so much responsibility too if they can. In these matters they don't have time between getting food, fighting and fucking. Raising kids just like them. And all the other things they get involved in. They don't have time to see clear, would rather see straight because it is so much easier. Besides, it's close enough for government. You get a C on the test, you pass, even though the price may be high, but you can't have an omelet without breaking eggs, now can you? Often humans hate other humans who see better and will persecute them. We all know the usual examples of that.
Especially in America, we like technology but not the nerds and geeks who produce it, like science but deeply distrust scientists who might be able to tell us how to live safely on the planet, and now we are paying the price as China and India grow better scientists than we have.
I like poetry. I think poetry is very often reminiscent of the true short lines of nature, the ones that curve all over the place and take us home more certainly than those God damned straight jacket lines of the people who think they need to run things.
The Curvature Of Nature
The best lines nature offers are curved and crooked like the veins in leaves, and in our bodies, like the paths that rivers take. Why then should we think that good lives are straight, that good men should be upright, I be an arrow?
February 20, 2009 8:09 AM
The Curvature of Nature first posted on Friday, October 23, 2009 I have added the photos and Bo Lozoff as new elements.
I want to be angelic. Here is a really good reason. I am nearly 100% certain that angel relationships are so much simpler. Sometimes the negotiations of relationship make me really tired. I know why at least some of us fail at relationships. We just get too tired. It shouldn’t be this hard, what my bones and sinews say. Music gives me the same trouble. It just shouldn’t be that hard to master the whole thing. Calculus, I couldn’t even start, even though I am supposed to be really smart, but calculus scared the shit out of me. I want to be angelic because I sense they don’t even have to try. I really, really want to not have to try.
I think I have heard this, that I am not making it up. Angels are complete and perfect creatures, limited in only one direction. They only possess a smidgen of free will, not the main meal that is ours but just a dash, a splash of it, like a good spice. Enough to make rebellion possible, but so rare that only a few have tried it and only one mustered enough to fall into rebellion completely and take some of the others with him.
Man on the other hand is required by his nature to rebel.
God loves Man best. Sometimes angels find that difficult, knowing that. It is said that is why Lucifer fell. God's love for man may be merciful but is not just from the angelic point of view. Lucifer fell for justice.
But Man’s work is the thing. It is so fucking hard.
Taking Winged Shape
That I should want this
thing with more than I ever
could gather from hills,
the grassy long sweep
of wind washed blades and flowers,
white starred stalks among
the green green old hills
of the far planet behind
my flight. That I should
want so much from this
sky into which I now go,
why I learned to fly.
March 9, 2009 1:41 PM
A Guardian Angel
First posted (without the angelic images) Tuesday, December 15, 2009
When I sit beside you and can settle into the reverie you offer all of us I marvel at how the world just changes color.
So I offered to snap your picture, capture truths, maybe your soul's shape peeking out your eyes, and you said you would not shave so I could not steal your soul, guarded so by stubble, and you would not look direct at me.
written January 27, 2011 8:48 PM written for Big Tent Poetry go there, read many poems.
To explain...the Taoists assert the most enlightened among us will resist being held back as they take their journey into the mountains. Though they command the very winds at times, they will never look like the masters they are, unless, awake, you see with a deep spiritual sight. This man looks holy to me. I hope he does to you.
Some years ago my poetry took on a mythic flavor and I became a character in my own poems, a mage, "the man of the Northern Wall". This apellation is not completely fictional. My middle name is Noordwal, a Dutch term for north wall, though in current Dutch it mainly means north bank as in riverbank. I was told that an ancestor, a Portugese Jew escaping the Inquisition, settled in a small Dutch town and took this name from where he settled, near the north wall of the town. I have thought for a long time that -wal meant wall, think my mother told me that. A linguist might say that my usage is no longer common, is an older usage, but then the Inquisition happened in Portugal a few centuries ago, right around the time the Moors lost control of the Iberian Peninsula and the Jews lost the modest protection given them by Islam. Now I write as this mage, my poetry persona.
Mechanical designer for industry, now retired, once a Bay Area Hippie, went undercover in 1972, I've been writing poetry for years.
Contact: 3topper45@gmail.com
"For a hundred years the 'Ice Maiden' was trapped .....but now she is free and a new Ice Age is dawning!" This image was featured in the Expose section of the Dec 2006 Imagine FX magazine
