It Happened I Had No Coffee
It happened I had no coffee
And I had already fallen back asleep once
But I put on my shoes and went to catch my bus.
I was the last passenger before we went express
And I in a window seat felt the sun
At eye level across the lake
Its prod and soothing palpation,
I fell asleep and had a dream.
I was on the street, surrounded by smells
And increasing numbers of Joni Mitchell
Suspiciously tan, inexplicably scatting.
“Why say you’ll join me in the fields?
Tonight I am with my oar, alone, and can do everything
Yet waver, not willing to return.
I am involved in rose clouds of the sunset. I always say:
The way you spend your time is the way you spend your time”
Edit out all the parts where I’m on my phone or talking about my job
And it sounds so nice, to laze on the river, even with wet socks
And I guess I’ve lost my way.
Even shepherd boys know the Tao, but
I fear I will lose this refuge forever
So at daybreak remind me to fix it in my mind.
So many fish long for bait and I wanted to be hot this summer,
The way gruel in the orphanage is.
The way smells in the brainpan are as placeless as possible.
I have been pooling myself into the flood —
Do you live in that way, with jaunty organ?
Lifestyle smell molecules crawling up noses and throats.
On one side was the present and scars
On the other, names and commands.
I had a knife, a goat, a mountain, a son.
I have many relations. I have killed a boar.
I’m the man on the street whom Jay Leno humiliates.
Out of the bus a ramp unfolds naturalized bullshit views and
I am unable to abandon habits of that life
And I am sometimes recognized by people of this world.
My name and pen speak my former being
But about all this my heart is ignorant.
I’ve found no good way to live
And I brood about getting lost in my old forests.
I’m sorry you travelled the stone path for nothing
Bearing objects incomprehensible to people ten years ago
Bearing objects incomprehensible to people ten years hence.
Just when you think things can’t get any stupider
The sewer smells quarrelled and rose
Though I’ve spared you both sides of the argument.
The Loop is a coffin, empty as hell.
Congregate cops accost both nostrils and demand of you:
Whom would you like to impress?
When you are on the beach
You can’t negotiate as well
Nor access all the things you saved
And stored to never look at again.
Colors leap into clarity, staining sadness,
Nowhere for mist to dwell.
Sun stuck in moss, as talk on the mountain
Floats into the human world.
No one knows when I will see my friend again.
A party insists in the night that
It costs money to pass the time,
A steady crunch of assessment appeals
Mostly held by insiders and index funds
And the train overhead
And overhead moisture of dubious origin.
No complaint in my face:
I will bevel my nose.
I hate my job and also
No longer have a job.
The wind does not ache with departure;
Who else will live here after me?
But now I am aimlessly grieving like how rain dawdles in mist.
My heart is beyond the clouds.
We are living lazily as the medians blossom.
You know, I turned down a great post.
I was too unpracticed in silence, rigor, and doing.
I only have the one life to despair with.
We are unfortunately beyond the symbolic
You can see that you can’t help the people you see.
It is everyone’s horror: It’s safest to waft,
that’s always an option.
I had no idea you were so knowledgeable and superstitious
Command and control acting almost organic
Nobody wants the way things must be
With banks building streets
And Ceres enthroned.
The mayor should smell what Icarus smelled, and indeed
There’s piss in the pedway, as always shall be.
It takes so long to be pregnant, we both are on islands.
I ask that you open your chest, fold your clothes,
Shape sentences in unfolded books,
Sometimes chant,
Ask hermits to visit.
I plod. How hard to find what dereliction discovers hour by hour.
When geese come back, I will too.
Sadly 100 new worries assail me.
No need to lodge in the bright world
Always fearing punishment for going against the time.
You once talked of living beyond mere dust.
How the year barrels like a solemn Mercedes,
A daybreak in the void.
Don’t blame the official who won’t fade away:
All creatures are resting.
Likewise be lazy and in the dark about human affairs
You can gather things smaller than you.
Tao is hard to reach. Act alone.
I’m ashamed about my work and in the way
I abhor what they did. I denounce harm.
I am so sick with incompetence
My melancholy reaches far beyond the inlet.
My melancholy is clothed in blue shirts and khakis and gray vests,
It moves from the trains from Union Station and
Moves towards the lake dropping
A different secret in every ear and dumpster
And hatred of the weak and inadequate.
I just want to ask: I can’t tell if you’re OK.
You know that’s not real theology and
This morning my own life is nothing.
The dead city intensifies our grief
But only I can know this.
No one texts me all day.
Our time together is not a few lost days,
Unbearably finite,
As Steph Curry gets to the rim
With an overhead finish.
Will we meet again? In these people I see strange customs.
Before me is vagueness. What am I doing?
With each empty day I am older.
It’s definitely stupid but it explains the cosmos.
It makes me angry that you object.
Did your reverence do much good?
Often our talent blinds us.
We can look at each other with the good part of the eye
Because we share a cranberry bog in our hearts.
I drag my body to work in the bar, I hand in the documents
I wrote out for the Son of Heaven.
I’m not going anywhere, I’m just sweaty.
I don’t care. Could you just answer me?
I knew at that moment I said the right thing.
I awoke in my bed, again, late for work.
***
My Friend Had to Bail on a Performance We’d Planned to See Together, So I Sat In the Audience Alone and Found Myself Surrounded by Overlapping Conversations Which I Wrote Down to Share with Her Later
Remember those women we ran into in the hotel in Grand Rapids? This huge hotel,
and there were thousands of women and they would just break into song,
and when they finished another one would jump in.
It was a jamboree, yeah.
I don’t remember my parents ever dancing, not even once.
They ate porridge and dried meat and sucked the juice of green corn.
That’s why you don’t hear that name that often anymore, Martha.
The men ate their bowstrings, lacking strength to draw the bow.
I wanted to contact you years ago, my advisor said I should, but I wound up not
doing that,
now I’m a medical secretary. It means I send out faxes and e-mail doctors.
Anyway I don’t have much to talk about, I just want you to know that I’m excited to
see you.
Your name is Chris because that’s what happened. I just read your book,
I really liked the ending, I felt a distinct lack in my vocabulary.
That’s the aunt you were telling me about,
did you go into the district and hang out?
It’s a little bit odd in my opinion.
I have a picture of the Lincoln memorial when it was built.
It’s just a seat in the swamp, in the middle of nowhere. And his version is just so
tame.
They should have left it that way.
There was a cast-iron colonnade,
you had to drive down a dirt path to get to the cleared area
and there are the pillars.
And it’s older than Washington, it’s really early and it’s all there.
And the food is phenomenal, and there’s a cast-iron library, my god,
google it and see what the images are there.
I’m too embarrassed about...
I don’t actually remember.
I took the doors out and it makes a cool niche,
and the wall of books will disappear, and we’ll have the room we never had.
Author's note: a substantial amount of "It Happened I Had No Coffee" is either direct quotation or paraphrase of Wang Wei translations by Tony Barnstone, Willis Barnstone, and Xu Haixin.
Author: musickmorley0814
The Puppet Man
In the heart of a grand, metropolitan river sit two small islands, one of which you will know of for the Our Lady cathedral and the blaze she suffered not so long ago, a blaze which brought down the ancient wooden roof beams from which Quasimodo once swung. The other island is not as storied. One thousand years ago its banks offered natural enclosure for the city’s cattle, but those cows are long gone—now it houses the city’s artisanal ice cream vendors.
Between the two islands is a stone bridge. A swooping design, like the scales of a great koi fish, cresting the surface of the river, was painted onto the pavement with a roller dipped in chalk by a famous TikTok artist.
A puppeteer stands where the stone bridge meets the cow-and-ice-cream island. He is alone. In the summer, on the weekends, when the weather is nice, there are others performing at his side—roller skaters winding around orange traffic cones on one foot, a man made of pure silver, a pianist on a wheeled baby grand playing Elton John—but today he is alone. The white, curving lines emanate from him like a concrete carpet rolled out for an audience only he awaits.
He wears black leather shoes, scuffed, pigeon-toed, and tilting outwards as though he hardly rests any weight in them; tan corduroy pants and jacket; a dark gray and tattered sweater; and a felt cap. Any traveler who, during working and evening hours Wednesday-Sunday and holidays for the past ten years, has wandered across these two small islands at the center of this city has surely encountered this man and his marionette show.
On the ground before him are two metal Turkish ashtrays for coins, both empty, a small, painted vase with a thin neck, and a wooden box that holds new copies of his DVD for 15 euros. Next to him is a sun-bleached blue fabric box with a divider in the middle forming two compartments, to store his marionettes.
He tells the fables of Jean de La Fontaine, beginning with the two goats. Having grazed in the meadows, the goats were seized spontaneously by the spirit of liberty. Emancipating themselves, they took to the mountains, without road or path. As they climbed, each alone, they reached a thin plank suspended over a deep river. While the Amazons would tremble at its quick current, the proud goats placed a white hoof on the plank, advancing towards one another until meeting in the middle. For lack of retreat, their fall was communal.
The wooden marionette goats meet one another on the miniature bridge laid atop the blue fabric box laid atop the stone bridge, their curved horns clinking softly and their rectangular pupils flashing yellow. They fall to their shared fate in the discard compartment, disassembling into piles of wood as they land.
The puppeteer’s body hangs like one of his marionettes, his head lolling slightly off to the side as if on a string neglected by its master. His raised avian elbows point out, but his forearms and hands are slack. His legs buckle as if he is suspended close enough to the ground that the ground pushes back up against dangling limbs, folding them back in on themselves.
He lifts two twig crosses into the air. His hands quiver, a gentle agitation that is his method for extracting marionettes from their tangled piles. In this careful way, a vibration runs through the invisible threads and awakens the sleeping wood, which then lifts itself from the nest of fishing line as the Wolf and the Stork. Wolf’s pink tongue flaps about while he speaks. Stork is made of chopsticks, two for the legs and two for the beak.
Wolf eats gluttonously. So quickly that a bone catches in his throat. It is in this state that Stork comes upon him. She runs to him, pulling the bone from his throat. The chopsticks of the stork’s mouth reach into the mouth of the marionette wolf and extract a small, whittled bone. When Stork demands compensation, Wolf laughs. “Isn’t it enough to have your neck pulled also from my mouth?” Stork’s chopstick beak clicks as she flees her patient.
The fable ends and the two performers walk to center stage and bow. An old Parisian woman passing by with a bag of groceries, a smart coat, and low-heeled velvet shoes tosses a twenty-cent piece into one of the empty ashtrays.
Stork is put in the box and out comes Dog, a beautiful and fat mastiff who strays close to the edge of the woods. Wolf, all skin and bones, pays Dog’s heartiness a compliment. “But you could be like me,” Dog retorts, “if you would quit these woods where your condition is to die of hunger. You need only give chase to beggars, to flatter your Master, and you will be paid in chicken and pigeon bones and in many caresses.” But Wolf spots something on Dog’s neck: a bit of skin peeling. Dog confesses it comes from the place his collar is often attached. Wolf scoffs. “At that price, all your meals, I do not want them in any way.” The wolf, his own Master, runs away, and runs again.
As he plays, his eyes often drift up above the horizon towards the sky. It seems that he isn’t seeing anything at all, focusing his attention instead into the sporadic twitching of his fingers, which nonetheless produce the audacious swing of a paw, indignant shake of a head, or snobbish, upturned nose.
His hands are not delicate or clean. They are weathered and the nails are strong. He collects the ashtrays and the twenty-cent piece, the vase, and the new copies of his DVD, and tucks them into a black backpack. Then he tenderly lays the dog and the wolf in the blue fabric box, which he covers with a soft lid of the same material. He lifts the box from the street and with that the show is over.
——
The puppeteer is named François Monestier and he comes from a family of puppeteers. I don’t know his age, but he has a gray beard and wrinkles on his forehead. His parents, Claude and Colette, founded the avant-garde marionette troupe Théâtre sur le Fil (Theater on a String) which infused modernism’s abstractions and formal experimentation into the popular, narrative craft of puppetry. That tradition, which evolves from the stock Italian character Pulcinella into the French Guignol and the British Punch and Judy, usually stages a violent and irreverent slapstick of poor against rich, worker against boss, and citizen against police, the gendarme or constable also being a central character in all of these traditions.
In public access television interviews from the ’70s with Claude and Colette, dutifully uploaded to DailyMotion by their son, Claude looks just like François, especially in his smile, which widens eagerly under questioning. He sports a close-fitting black turtleneck in the theater, revealing stringy arms. Claude explains to the interviewer, “Rather than having finished images that move afterwards, we like to start from the original material, the primary material, and then to make them become living creatures. We like that the man becomes the material and the material a little bit man.”
François called these materials, like cardboard, paper, fabric, and wood, “materiaux bruts,” meaning natural, untreated, raw, pure, animal, physical materials. He took a paper napkin lightly in his hands, pinching both ends and holding it at eye level, then twisting and untwisting it, collapsing and crumpling it suddenly, bringing his fingers apart and gently pulsing them to create trembling ripples, then swiftly pulling the soft paper napkin taut, almost to the point of tearing. All this expertly gave a series of metamorphic impressions that the napkin was afraid, tortured, oceanic, calm, fleeing, and liberated.
Anni Albers, the great string craft modernizer, wrote, “We are apt today to overcharge our gray matter with words and pictures—that is, with material already transposed into a certain key, preformulated material, and to fall short in providing for a stimulus that may touch off our creative impulse, such as unformed material, material ‘in the rough.’”
In one of their archived performances, Légende pour un Trou (Legend for a Hole), performed in 1975 for a class of eight-year-olds, two white strings are stretched horizontally across the stage. A curtain hangs from the lower string, which would normally hide the puppet masters, but in this show it is pulled to the side so that Claude and Colette are visible, dressed in black like stagehands.
Claude commands his audience: “We forget all the stories we know. We forget everything we’ve already seen and we simply open our eyes and ears until we hear nothing.” Then he follows a sound coming from backstage and finds a roll of white paper that seems to be breathing. Determining that something must be trapped in the roll, he cuts into the paper to free the creature. “Listen to his footsteps,” Claude says, interpreting the rhythmic sound of the scissors. Colette responds, “I hear him walking.”
Guided by Claude’s questioning hand against the black background, the white cut-out becomes a bird, and then a passing cloud, and finally a man, whom he attaches to the upper string.
Colette takes the remaining paper, from which the man has been cut, exclaiming, “Look, in the paper! There’s another.” She hangs the leftover paper next to the cut-out of the man, so that one white figure and one black figure surrounded by a white square hang in the center of the stage. The two become friends, and as they embrace, they disappear.
Claude says in the interview, “It’s the transformation from one appearance to another which renders them living, for us.”
The first lines of Carlo Collodi’s picaresque Pinocchio, published serially in an Italian children’s newspaper, read as follows:
“Once upon a time there was…
“‘A King!’ my little readers will say at once.
“No, children, you’re wrong. Once upon a time there was a piece of wood.”
Pinocchio “wasn’t a fancy piece of wood, just a regular woodpile log, the kind you might put in your stove or fireplace to stoke a fire and heat your room.” But when the log is held, it assails its captor, shooting out of his hands to whack him on the shins. No sooner does Geppetto finish the hands than they snatch off his wig. Where Albers’ devotion to the tactile qualities of her material gives her organized mastery of its fibers, in the canon of puppetry the autonomous qualities of the material, when formally liberated by the hand of the craftsperson, are those of impishness, volatility, and antagonism. How to prove the aliveness of something inert? This is the trick of the puppeteer: the puppet who disobeys and abandons his own master would seem to be the most alive of all.
Pinocchio is earnest, foolish, and childish. He is swindled by the cat and the fox, he neglects his studies and work out of laziness and under the influence of deadbeat friends, despite promises to his father and the Fairy with the Sky-Blue Hair. He is cajoled by these guardians with fabulist maxims like those of La Fontaine.
To François, Pinocchio is the greatest of literary masterpieces, the Don Quixote of Italy. It is the ultimate coming-of-age story, of realizing “that out in the world there are really mean people.” He said this, méchant, with conviction, with relish, fascination, spite and anger.
When he was young, like Pinocchio, François hated school and studying and quit his management accounting career before it had begun. He worked “like all young people. In the South of France picking apples, pears, apricots, peaches. I loved that life, but it didn’t last. I did some temporary work at the Post Office, little jobs like that.”
He joined up with Claude and Colette and the puppet family toured Europe—Provence, Italy, Portugal, Poland, the Netherlands—and then eventually the US, Latin America, down to Quito, and up to Vancouver. In Vancouver, he saw transformation masks, a style of red cedar mask made by the Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw, “articulated masks, masks that one could modify.” The yellow eyes of his puppets, inspired by the masks, are held in place like beads on a string.
In his twenties, François left his parents’ act to build a show of his own, first by constructing a small house, a castelet, made for puppets. Then he bought a car and found a girlfriend and together they drove to Spain, touring Aragon, just north of La Mancha. They took the small house to the Spanish streets and opened its doors to passersby, filling it with American stories of Indians defeating cowboys and wandering totem poles. The hand puppets would come alive, the street and the Spanish villagers would come alive, even the wooden house would come alive and play in the show.
“It was all in the street. I was not looking to play in theaters at all. I was only looking to play in the street. I knew what it was, what I wanted to do. And what I do, what I said to myself from the beginning, which made me want to do the street show, was that it has to be a door for everyone. The work of the common man.”
He laid out a guest book for his audience. They wrote touching and admiring letters to him. The children tugged at their parents’ hems to stop and watch, the Moroccans would offer him almond and honey sweets, the vegetable sellers gave him vegetables and the cheesemongers gave him cheese. But it was always he who called out to them and gathered them round for a story. The people loved him, but they never got close to him, he found no success, and he grew bitter towards them. Where was his common man?
So the show was finished. The cowboys and totem poles lay like piles of dead twigs, and where the car and the girlfriend went, he didn’t say. “I stopped doing that completely and didn’t do anything. I took care of the garden and I tinkered. I didn’t do anything anymore.”
——-
Far past the gates of the metropolis and its river lies the vast Forest of Sénart. One thousand years ago the woods were filled with charcoal makers and wolves and peasants gathering mushrooms and nuts. Then the King seized the land and cut it through with straight paths in the form of a star. The wood was milled at the timber mill on the river. Hounds were set loose on the paths to hunt down the wolves.
At the edge of this forest is the workshop of François. It is hidden behind a tall, plaster wall with a white wooden door opened by an ancient key. Above the door hangs a wooden mask of Sancho Panza. Inside is a steep, metal stairway that sways underfoot and leads down to an overgrown garden. In the summer, it grows turnips and cabbage and carrots, but it lays dormant and wild in the cold winter months.
When I visited his house, he offered slippers from his mismatched collection and a thick yellow, purple, and orange mash made of potatoes, beets, chestnuts, pumpkin, squash, pasta, chickpeas, and something else that was hard and crunchy. He heated the mash on the stovetop and seasoned it with black pepper which he ground with a stone mortar and pestle.
The dining table was pressed up against a dusty bookshelf set into the wall and filled with guides to regional flora and fauna, cookbooks, children’s rhymes, old graphic novels, and comic books. Pulling a book off the shelf at random yielded The Island of Brigadiers by the Franco-Belgian cartoonist known only as Fred. It told the story of an island inhabited by human-sized puppets played by giant, tyrannical hands that roamed the hillsides like horses. In one scene, the puppet hero takes the string like a lasso and tames his master.
François lived here during his depression, when he no longer performed or made puppets. He wandered the forest and picked up pieces of wood to bring back to his house and feed the fire. Until one day, “I went to the forest in the morning, at 8 o’clock or even before. I don’t remember. And I talked to a lumberjack, who cuts the wood, who sells the wood, and I told him, I asked him if there was work. Well, I’m strong enough, so it didn’t scare me. The work of a lumberjack.” His job was to cut the logs with an ax, load them onto the truck, and then drive the truck out to make deliveries. He was a poor navigator on foot. “But in the car, I’m efficient and I want to deliver the wood.”
“And this initiated me. Because afterwards I understood the mechanics of wood. And that it had value. That’s what I wanted to do, and that’s how I came to make wooden puppets. Because deep down I hadn’t given up on the business of making puppets. I hadn’t given up on doing it. I still believed. By touching the wood, it came back again.”
François found the fables as “a carrier text,” from a collection of La Fontaine illustrated by the Czech puppeteer Jiri Trnka. La Fontaine’s fables are written for one child, the six-year-old heir to the French throne. In his letter to the young Dauphin, he says, “The unsuspecting reader, implanted with the seeds of virtue, acquires self-knowledge without realizing that he does,” like a bitter pill slipped into a sweet pastry. His tales are often negatively instructive, the animals acting poorly or stupidly to prove a point. They are ironic, turning the bitter unfeelingness of the world into caustic humor.
In his act, the wolf is the only animal to return more than three times. It is one of the most frequently appearing creatures in La Fontaine, alongside the lion and the fox. As curated and animated by François, the world described in the fables is that of the vicious wolf: expect no reward for kindness; nothing is better than liberty; and unless you can outwit the hucksters, you will suffer endless abuse and trickery. “I am like the wolf,” he told me eagerly, pulling at the neck of his wool sweater from under his gray beard. “I wear no collar!” On a separate occasion, he confessed, “The wolf is always the character who is not only bad, but also the loser. He is a loser, he is a villain, and he is often stupid.”
During these years, François biked two hours to his bridge, and then two hours back, five days a week. Sometimes the police would come and give him trouble and tell him to move along but he always came back. He kept his box very light to travel easily on his bike and so that he could pack everything up at a moment’s notice.
When the mash was finished, we went out to the tall glass greenhouse which is his workshop. Brambles and vines scaled its outer walls and inside was a sparse collection of tools and a few hanging puppets. He sat hunched over a vice clamping a stub of wood and spoke while he whittled and sawed and drilled.
He remembered the fallen redwoods in the forests of Vancouver. “They were walls, and I was like this,” he said, pinching his fingers together and regarding the small space between his fingers as though he were holding a tiny creature, himself, against the felled giant.
As he was crouched there, watching himself in the Americas, there was a sudden crash of something landing on the greenhouse above his head. The item clattered down the side and fell into the brambles lining the greenhouse. François ran out into the garden, where he searched before procuring a small, dark object from the overgrown weeds.
“A bird carried it,” he said, placing it on the stump in front of him. It was a short piece of wet wood the size of a child’s fist, covered in bright green lichen. It seemed to have a head with a nose, and two little arms, and came to a dull point at the base for a handle. “Pinocchio,” he said sweetly, “you’ll become a real boy!”
He returned to the small piece of wood he had been carving, which had begun to take the shape of a monkey head. By gently revving a small power drill he started carving out the eyes. “Paper is good, it’s good indoors, but it can’t stand rain or wind. Wood. Wood is very good outdoors, there’s no problem. But the problem with wood is the weight compared to paper.” So he hollows out his puppets, “because it’s the lightest thing for the street.” The wood for the heads, hands, and feet of his marionettes he sources from the Sénart. For the bodies, he scavenges furniture upholstery, used clothing, and any old textiles he finds on the street. There are only three things that he buys new: sewing needles, fishing line, and embroidery thread.
“By touching the wood again it came back. Since I’m here, I’m working the wood. I can spend hours doing that. Woodworking is, how can I put it, an expression that’s not used much, but it’s interesting. Work is the only salvation. Redemption is in work, it’s the only one. It’s not good, we’ll say. There’s plenty of things you can try in life that are the wrong paths. The good path is work, it’s the only salvation.”
In the final installment of Pinocchio, after saving his father from the stomach of a massive shark, the puppet encounters the fox and cat who swindled him out of his gold coins. The cat has gone blind and the fox has sold his tail. When they ask him for assistance, he refuses them, reciting proverbs like, “The devil’s flour turns out to be the chaff!” Pinocchio finds employment turning the donkey wheel to draw up well water and earns one glass of milk every day to heal his father. On top of this, he studies, and cares for his father, and saves money. But it is only when he takes on an extra gig as a basket-weaver, working so much that he falls asleep on the job, that he awakens as a real boy.
——-
With his act in the street and unemployment payments in France, François gets by. Occasionally he is solicited while performing—small gigs for middle school classrooms, once the Christmas party at a law firm. “With that, I can pay my subscription, my monthly internet subscription.”
One day, François was approached by a man in a suit, who asked him if he’d like to be in a television show named Emily in Paris. The man offered more money than François had ever made. His day began at 6 a.m. in the Place Saint-Michel, where the production company had spared no expense: renting out an entire café in the morning, where François could order food and drinks without needing to pay; a coffee cart with pastries on set, next to the rented café, also for free; people whose sole job was to remind the actors to put their masks back on after each take; people whose sole job was to tell pedestrians not to walk on a certain part of the sidewalk; and an entire brasserie in the evening, all for free.
In the episode, a character is learning to busk in the picturesque Place. There are too many performers vying for space in the crowded square, each trying to outdo the others. Cutting through, for just a flash, are the horse and the wolf, followed by old leather shoes and the yellow straw hat worn by François in the sunshine.
When Pinocchio is asked the trade of his father, Geppetto, he replies, “Being poor.”
The last time we met, François had just returned to Paris from a month in Toulon, where the tide rises and falls with the weather, exposing wild oysters and mollusks, tiny red coral and algae, and where he swam four hours a day. He had sent photos taken with a webcam in the local library of the finished monkey marionette, and of himself wearing a snorkeling mask with a fish inside of it, pressed against his eyes. He had also detailed the soup he would make using leftover vegetables from the market and bass that he harpooned in the sea.
After playing on the stone bridge for ten years, he was now stationed on the paved square directly in front of Notre Dame, which was surrounded by metal scaffolding, cranes, and shipping container offices. He thought the construction lamps cast a brighter and more dramatic glow. The square was packed with tourists. A young, clean-shaven man with a guitar came over to ask François if he didn’t mind sharing the square with another performer and the two negotiated distance and relative sound. When we had spoken at his house, François had said, “I think that everyone should be able to cobble together a little something on the street and then recount a story like that with a pocket spectacle. I show what I show and what I can do. But I hope that others want to do it also.”
Children ran around at his feet, and an audience had formed in a semi-circle in front of him. A boy came over to where I was seated in the dirt and leaned against me, whispering, “It’s a wolf,” as François played the story of the horse and the wolf.
It was the end of winter’s rigor, in the season when gentle zephyrs rejuvenate the grass, when the animals leave their homes to seek their lives. Wolf saw Horse in the countryside. Since Horse was much larger than he, Wolf would need his cunning to catch this prey. He said he was a surgeon and knew the virtues of the meadow’s plants. So Horse revealed the wound under his hoof. My son, said Wolf, there is no other part susceptible to so many evils. Suspecting quickly, Horse dropped a kick, turning Wolf’s mandibles and teeth to marmalade. “It is well done,” said Wolf to himself, “each one to his trade must be attached. You wanted to be the herborist and were never but a butcher.”
Before he was finished, the boy grew bored, or distracted, and ran away.
Oscar Wilde Visits Vicksburg, Mississippi
The Port Gibson Reveille was founded in 1851 and is now owned by a woman in her eighties named Emma, who composes the articles on a typewriter in a storefront downtown, where most of the other businesses have closed and kudzu is eating the empty buildings. Emma maintains regular office hours and copies of that week’s paper available for sale. Local politicians keep her busy. “They should all be shot with Gatling guns,” she says happily. Last July, the most recent paper featured her photograph of mimosa trees and a caption noting that the trees were then in bloom all over Claiborne County, Mississippi, “but they don’t seem to be as pink as I remember from before.” The “This Week In History” section said that in June, 1882, Oscar Wilde visited Vicksburg, thirty miles up the Mississippi River from Port Gibson, during a lecture tour of the United States. An unknown writer at The Vicksburg Herald covered his visit. It was apparently the only American newspaper to report that he planned to lecture on “the primitive cabbage.” – Isabelle Taft
The Vicksburg Herald, May 30, 1882
OSCAR WILDE is to be in Memphis during the middle of June and will be in Vicksburg about the 1st of July, all things being even. He will lecture on the sunflower and the primitive cabbage.
June 9
AMUSEMENTS
OPERA HOUSE
OSCAR WILDE
COMING
ONE NIGHT ONLY
LECTURE ON
“DECORATIVE ART”
WEDNESDAY EVENING, June 14.
***
BREVITIES
We heard a gentleman remark yesterday that we might expect a heavy frost before this present weather was over. The gentleman referred to voted for a defeated candidate in the recent city election.
Yesterday was a dull, gloomy, cloudy, wet and generally disagreeable day. We are sorry that our weather reports cannot impart a better quality of encouragement to the planters of this section.
The Herald received the following telegram from Memphis yesterday: “Memphis, Tenn., June 8.—Sale of seats for Oscar Wilde’s lecture indicate an immense audience. The first seats were sold at big premiums. Peter Tracy.”
June 13
Oscar Wilde.
GREAT SUCCESS AT MEMPHIS–VICKSBURG NEXT.
Special to Vicksburg Herald.
MEMPHIS, TENN., June 12.—Oscar Wilde delivered a fashionable oration to-night to the largest audience of ladies ever seen in the Memphis theatre. He will lecture at Vicksburg Wednesday evening.
June 14
According to programme Oscar Wilde, the apostle of æsthetics, will deliver here to-night his lecture on Decorative Art. The subject is one which admits of various treatment, and how the æsthetic Oscar will treat it remains to be seen. Whether there be anything in what this man Wilde proposes to show or not he has at all events, created a vast sensation in this country. Describing his appearance at a recent lecture an exchange says: “Wilde was well worth seeing, his short breeches and silk stockings showing to even better advantage upon the stage that in the gilded drawing-rooms where the young apostle has heretofore been seen. No sunflower, nor yet a lily, dangled from the buttonhole of his coat; indeed there is room for reasonable doubt as to whether his coat had even one buttonhole to be put to such artistic use. But judging his coat by the laws of the Philistines, it was a well-fitting coat, and looked as though it had been made for the wearer as a real coat and not as a mere piece of decorative drapery.”
June 15
BREVITIES
Oscar Wilde was around among our booksellers yesterday making purchases of such books of art, etc., as suited his taste and genius. Oscar is a tip-top fellow.
And still the “festive pop” infests the State, and its sharp swift concussion sounds the death knell of some unsuspecting fellow-mortal. When will this thing stop?
***
Oscar Wilde’s Lecture
The long-looked for, much traveled and largely talked about Oscar Wilde, the Apostle of Æstheticism, came to town yesterday on the morning train, and during the day was the recipient of some attention and several gazes from our citizens. On the street he was dressed in an ordinary white Marseilles vest with pearl buttons, a maroon-colored, short-cut frock coat made of velvet, and tight-fitting bell-bottomed gray stuff pants. Byronic was the collar he wore, and his cravat carelessly tied was blue and worn in a bow-knot.
Last night was a scorcher, but a very large and recherche audience greeted the young gentleman at the Opera-house. He was ensconced in black dress-coat and knee-breeches, with the addition of the dark-colored silk hose and patent leather low-quartered shoes, we have seen in pictures, and of which we have read about in the newspapers. His hair was worn long and parted in the middle. Ruffled was his shirt bosom, his collar ditto and his wristbands likewise. His audience was seldom applausive, always attentive. His subject was “decorative art.” This he deems to be the handi-craft of men and women, employed upon whatever can beautify, adorn and gratify the human senses.
These expressions of art, are derived from Nature, her tints, her tones of color, her radiant harmonies and exquisite resemblances. The objects of art are of every description, and are essentially founded upon the true and the beautiful. We detect instinctively what is beautiful, we by the same unerring law feel what is fraudulent in art by its failure to resemble nature.
June 16
BREVITIES
Dust knee deep.
Mosquitoes are doing their best.
Only a few cases at the City Court yesterday.
White parasols are the prevailing fashion now.
Marriage licenses are but few and far between just now.
On account of the excessive heat business is somewhat quiet.
A big amount of work is going on in different parts of the city.
Cotton is growing rapidly in all the sections around this city.
The mortuary report is growing beautifully less in this section.
Grumbling has never yet influenced the weather to any great extent.
Travel on the railroads is exceedingly slim about this season of the year.
We hear of a number of private dances that are to be given here at an early date.
Oscar Wilde thinks the National Cemetery at this place one of the, if not the most beautiful in the world.
June 18
Man wants but little here below, but when he wants it he longs for it with a hungry longing that will not be long in being satisfied to its fullest extent if he partakes of one of those tempting dinners, breakfasts, or suppers, which the Delmonico of Vicksburg, Charlie Knight, serves every day in the week, but particularly on Sunday. Oscar Wilde wanted to take Charlie and his restaurant along with him, but Charlie thinks too much of his customers right here in Mississippi—and so said—“Oscar, dear Oscar, I can only go with thee when the too-tooness of the utterly utter is cooked into an indistinguishable jambolaya of lily sauce with sunflower dressing.”
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable are all the uses of the newsgatherer, when he seeketh about the streets all day, searching vainly for items and only gathereth dust.
June 20
In an interview with a reporter of the New Orleans City Item, the other day, Oscar Wilde, the high priest of æsthetes, on being asked the question, expressed himself as being delighted beyond measure with Vicksburg. “It is a charming place, really, so picturesque,” said the poet: and then he launched out on a most eloquent harangue touching “the beauty, taste and intelligence of Southern women.” If Oscar’s head is as level as the plains of Sahara it is nevertheless a thousand per cent fuller of good things.
June 21
We are to have a new Compress in addition to the excellent roomy one already here. Why not a new theater also? Let the solid men answer.
The New Orleans States says Oscar Wilde’s lecture in the Crescent City was coldly received and the applause at its conclusion was mingled with hisses.
Oscar Wilde left New Orleans for Texas Saturday. After lecturing in the principal cities and towns in Texas he will go to Mobile. He is doing a beautiful job all over the South.
June 25
Ho! FOR our railroads, our compresses, and factories—soap and others, our graveled thoroughfares, our big crops, and our business boom in general. It is the very best thing that could have possibly happened to the Hill City, and the people are anxious that it should happen “HARD,” and be so severe that every man, woman and child in this section should feel it to the extent of dollars in their pockets, and work all around them. It is all foolishness about capitalists quarreling among themselves. Let them quarrel and fight, too, for that matter, and poor men will get their due. Capitalists never spill blood. They spill money and the poor man that stands by and watches the fight will get his share of it, if he is smart.
OUR friend Col. John Walsh received a letter from Oscar Wilde yesterday, in which the æsthete states that he is better pleased with the appearance of Vicksburg than any other Southern city that he has visited thus far. He thinks the magnolias “have a more gorgeous beauty here, the lily a more exquisite meekness, the sunflower is richer and more magnificent in its coloring, the mocking bird has a voice more musical and a more touching melody, the saloons better whisky and John Walsh’s shoe store is the most æsthetic and most utterly too too of any that has yet come under his observation. Go up to the Colonel’s and have you measure taken, and at the same read “Dear Oscar’s letter.”
June 27
MEMPHIS lights her streets with the electric light, and the papers there say it is a big success.
COL. L. A. CAMPBELL and wife left by rail, Sunday evening, to visit relatives at Springfield, Mo.
COTTON SEED dealers are resting on their oars, patiently awaiting the time for the next crop to ripen.
IN addition to the heat we have the dust, and in addition to the dust we have oceans of perspiration, etc.
F. M. DAWSON has about 1,400,00 feet of timber, which he desires to sell. See his advertisement in another column.
OSCAR WILDE has returned to New Orleans, and will be the attraction at Spanish Fort for several days. Oscar has a level cranium.
THE James Maguire who was shot at on Levee street, Sunday night, is not our young and popular merchant of that name, but a raftsman.
Issue 5 Editor Diary: Skeuomorphic Boat Shoes
Lamp
Standing table
Desk
Hamper
Chair
Lotus root
Wood ear
Cauliflower
Bok choy
Potato
Brecht
Rexroth
Akhmatova
Enzensberger
Baraka
Gold chain in a false thumb.
Skeuomorphic boat shoes.
Disproved miracles in a foundation pit.
“the pack-ice of logic”
“the smell of tar”
the third man
aristotle’s objection to the forms
illustration exercises for the uninspired
the space between the orchestra in its entirety
composed of single violins of trombones of drums violoncellos and flutes, of trumpets more or less insignificant violins, and an entire choir with alti bassi and everything in between
And an unquenchable, trading card collector desire for completism, an irregular hierarchy of attentions, which fails to follow the typical moral ladder from atmosphere to body to face, animals consistently outshining humans and gods in their vivacity, and the way his brush obsesses over floral patterns on cloth, on Buddhist temple flourishes, and Gargoyles, all, always, at the expense of his flat, inhuman faces
His sublime autism.
The preteen boy
behind his mother
on the Metro
at day’s end.
She supports her head with her hand, elbow against the wall. The back of her neck exposed. She wears a black hoodie with angel wings bejeweled on the back.
Sir Ernest Shackleton, in his 1919 book South, described his belief that an incorporeal companion joined him and his men during the final leg of their Antarctic journey. Shackleton wrote, “During that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia, it seemed to me often that we were four, not three.”
We made progress last year but that’s no “constellation” to someone who has lost a loved one
I dreamed that I threw a bottle of gasoline at officers of the Myanmar military who were confined to the room next to mine.
The room burned, and I could smell the flames.
When it was all over, Tyler learned what I had done. I felt deeply ashamed. And that felt good.
Consciousness is episodic
I can’t pretend to the clairvoyance of children….
This put me in a terrible mood, for three reasons I can identify: 1. You were right and I was wrong.
Kandahar Giant Elegy
The Kandahar Giant. Many U.S. soldiers and people like them report or share a story about the spotting and killing of an enormous giant in Afghanistan.
The Kandahar Giant. It was red-haired and extremely tall, it emerged from a cave and engaged the combat capabilities of some large number of US soldiers and maybe their Afghan allies.
The Kandahar Giant. It is typically cited in connection to the lore of the nephilim, the sons of god came down and spent time with the daughters of men. These were the mighty men of old.
The Kandahar Giant. So the government is hiding things. The ancient stories are true. We live in a created world. Americans found something older and greater than them and all they knew and killed it.
The Kandahar Giant. But they do tell the story. Images are drawn. Between the space of an enquirer and a witness. Between the space of bones and bread.
The Kandahar Giant. To get to the bottom it would take some group of investigators. Credible to the people and competent among themselves, but their identities secure enough and their lives hedged against risk.
The Kandahar Giant. In a time when sheriffs departments or the wholes of smaller U.S. states can be dominated by a conscious apocalyptic conspiracy.
The Kandahar Giant. Or a less conscious tendency toward graft and intimidation justified by feelings of chosenness and justification.
The Kandahar Giant. But as people become victimized investigators will be needed to get to the bottom of incidents like shakedowns, frame-ups, and seizures at borders. But who could be such an investigator?
The Kandahar Giant. Between the decline of the classical neurotic bourgeois capable of self-discipline and guilt and the rise of urban rents little space is left. What would it mean to support “democratic culture?”
The Kandahar Giant. Someone now who, say, fixes a car and drives to west coast might develop a new and unique understanding of electromagnetic flows, the positive and negative poles, the lifecycle of stars.
The Kandahar Giant. With knowledge like this in hand one can commence turning control of territory into control of capital flows.
The Kandahar Giant. Another who can’t be found for a week turns out to be okay. In an era of porous borders and low-intensity conflict there are more occasions to disappear.
The Kandahar Giant. One who works in a factory may write a new Stoic Epistle and participate in democratic cultural forums. And due to long-running processes the coral reefs are bleached.
The Kandahar Giant. Even among those who are inveterate critics or opponents of a burgeoning movement they see holding possibilities of violence and self-destruction. But those who are young, who are just coming of age and lose an eye to riot cops “less-than-lethal” weapons or receive good school lessons on the world situation or what it means to take a moral stand will by and large age healthily and carry these experiences as lessons.
The Kandahar Giant. It was a real possibility that the peripheral areas were pacified decades ago by the brute structural forces of famine and emigration restructuring the ground beneath our parents’ feet. But even more, the very people ready to be a “step ahead” of anti-systemic action and make sacrifices are bound to be a little odd.
The Kandahar Giant. And the closest thing we know to les colones are fantasy of the clarity expert knowledge can bring to complexity. Because even if they can, they always fail to communicate it.
The Kandahar Giant. For example the killing of George Floyd might have been motivated by Derek Chauvin’s own involvement in the very counterfeiting ring that led to the call from Cub Foods–see the cop and victim both employed at a nightclub and hence Chauvin’s determination to kill. The same can be cited to show the depth of complicity or particularize the incident between the two men.
The Kandahar Giant. Only with the firm substrate of prayer and forgiveness and only in a context of historical-epistemic-naïveté. Because otherwise you talk yourself out of it or end up as Cassandra.
The Kandahar Giant. It can be a sad thing to recognize oneself in the things surrounding you. You can go underground for years with your true love and communicate on an up-front humanistic level with realism about everything, and seek it your whole life, and it is still tragic.
The Kandahar Giant. Usually specified to be red-haired. Drawn at least a dozen times by Forteans, evangelicals, UFO writers and video hosts.
The Kandahar Giant. I can tell towards the end of life what it meant to give a toast, as much for you as for the company. Always for the story and introduction. I can see why they would hate you and fight.
The Kandahar Giant. Of course they want to be good people. But apparently have no truly-felt criteria, no image of the good life of this good person. Hence constant feelings of catastrophe in misplaced tests. And this is the wunderkinder? Lead us not unto temptation (the trial) and deliver us from evil (the evil one.)
The Kandahar Giant. Oh the deep gut rage against empire’s crimes. I am an anti-imperialist. Don’t give any grief about identity and action. It is not even a feeling of betrayal anymore. It’s opposite actually, an appreciation of germinating seeds in an overgrowing understory.
The Kandahar Giant. Yes, a beast. With eyes like this, this many legs, a head, no tongue or tongue wounded, more sacred of you than you are of it and not housebroken.
Tomatoes in East Palestine
On the evening of February 3, 2023, a train running through the 4,800-person town of East Palestine, Ohio, derailed, caught fire, and released a black plume of toxic chemicals in a controlled burnoff.
Trains derail every day in the United States – as the Transportation Secretary was all too eager to remind news anchors when asked why he didn’t say anything about the train derailment in the first two weeks after it happened. But a series of contingencies eventually thrust East Palestine and the railroad industry into the national spotlight.
East Palestine had experienced the consequences of one of America’s oldest and biggest industries (the Pennsylvania Railroad had a bigger budget than the U.S. government in the 19th century) in a spiral of self-destruction. The industry had spent a decade in the “buyback era,” slashing its workforces under the guise of “precision,” shortening safety inspections, and returning ever more cash to investors while allowing derailments to tick up.
But what made the catastrophe the defining event of the news cycle were the failures of the most hated member of the Biden Administration: Harvard graduate and former McKinsey consultant Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
In the wake of the disaster, my publication ran an investigative news story on the history of railroads fighting safety regulations. A lifelong East Palestine Resident, 71-year-old Rob Two-Hawks, emailed me in response to the story, offering media criticism, reporting tips, notes on the town, and tomato-related concerns. He grew up in East Palestine catching crawfish in the rivers now polluted by chemicals, left for a little while, and then returned to help a family member with health issues. The following is quoted directly from our email exchange and has been edited for length. I began by asking him for a picture of his town. – Julia Rock
Just a walk or short drive through this Appalachian town & region would quickly offer a sense:
IT IS VERY ECONOMICALLY-DISTRESSED AND PREDOMINANTLY RURAL. Much of that relates to the fact that we exist between both PITTSBURGH, Pa. and Youngstown, Oh….both once great STEEL INDUSTRY centers(…“GO-PITTSBURGH-STEELERS.”) // P.S.If you’ve never seen the ’78 movie “THE DEER HUNTER” with Robert DeNiro, Christopher Walken, John Savage and Meryl Streep….you might want to catch that. This region has the same energy…but less mountains. So, many of the cities and towns in this region once supported Big Steel and related satellite industries in various ways (…Coal, Iron Ore from the Great Lakes, Metal-related industries, on & on.) My area also had significant coal deposits and this entire region supplied clay for potteries, refractories, etc. On & on.
Simply…THIS REGION BECAME THE “DUMP-OF-IT-ALL.” In my area alone we have received: NUCLEAR WASTE…MEDICAL WASTE…CONSTRUCTION WASTE…and, of course…you guessed it…TOXIC WASTE. And why not, after all… “OUT-OF-SIGHT… OUT-OF-MIND.” So, yes…we have become the Unseen, Unnoticed, and Unattended dump-of-it-all for the other big industries and the more sparkling and prosperous cities/areas elsewhere.
And, I’ll bet you can just imagine the POLITICAL MINDSET AND ORIENTATION that all that can generate…and, how the great SWING STATE of OHIO has begun to SHIFT FURTHER & FURTHER…R-E-D. So corrupt politicians like Trump, etc. have made their false promises to support Coal, other Industries or Manufacturing…while the Democrats have moved toward an evermore Environmentally-friendly and Regulation-oriented mindset and position. Of course, I also support the latter…but the Dems have failed to place enough interest in the mindset and the needs of people of distressed regions.
I live within the mile-radius for the evacuation, likely 3/4 mile from the derail. I evacuated for the high school late Sunday afternoon after the Humane Society picked-up my dog. I am disabled and without transportation. Interestingly, I’ve been following the RR story much closer ever since the potential RR union strike in December. I can definitely attest to the length & speed of most trains here because, on foot, I often experience long waits crossing town at the tracks. My next door neighbor is a RR worker…and his work hours are obviously insane. He’s a young man with 4 children and I believe I only spoke with him once last summer/fall.
I didn’t see the fire Fri. night as the view was blocked from here. The next day, beyond the still smoking wreckage…the air definitely had a strange odor (…which I’d describe as “burning plastic.”) Most of the aroma was gone on Sunday. The black plume from the controlled burn was an ugly monstrosity which had the appearance of a smaller black Hiroshima…and after traveling vertically for 100’s of feet….spread-out to cover a huge amount of the eastern sky. The stuff of a horror movie.
My situation here at ground zero is incredibly REAL and very INTENSE…day after day and likely into the future (…if I stay.) Just imagine swimming in a sea where everyone is freaking-out day-after-day….not just part of an army, etc…
People here were getting excited about a “HEALTH CARE CLINIC” this week. I have no idea who or what agency is presenting it…but it’s more than a bit flat & superficial. So, the clinic runs at a local church Tues through Sat.
Here are the things it WON’T PROVIDE: …Prescriptions…Diagnoses…Blood-Urine or Stool Testing…geez Julia, not even Vital Sign Monitoring. Amazing right…with all these people so worried about their or their childrens’ health? So, what WILL BE PROVIDED? Wowee…Speak with a Nurse or a Toxicologist…get a Referral if needed…Mental Health professionals available…blah, blah. In other words, while you have to start somewhere..people are “expecting” serious and professional health checks but it’s all really just about “Assessing-Community-Health-Needs.” So, imagine being stuck here for whatever reason…confused as hell and with little clarity about anything…and feeling betrayed by both political parties, the railroad, etc. People will be even more anxious, fearful, pissed and depressed…
I was a bit disappointed you didn’t respond to my response to your email recently. However, I’m sure you’ve been busy with follow-ups to this or other stories. Meanwhile, I’m glad I didn’t interview with the Lever. Why? While there has been some great investigative work here…there also appears to be an excess of “political’” emphasis. I do understand your emphasis upon and discouragement with Buttigieg, the Dept. of Transportation, etc…but my focus, obviously, is UPON THE PRESENT & FUTURE HEALTH OF MYSELF, MY TOWN AND MY COMMUNITY.
You are a small & recently new news organization with minimal traffic. Given that…I’m sure you welcome the added attention you are now receiving from your good investigative reporting. However, I hope from this point that you may take a wider, clear-eyed, & agenda-less approach to this tragedy and the many root causes beneath it.
My neighbors are railworkers & engineers. Talk to more of them. Also, talk to more that are on-the-scene today, now…rather than retired. Take a look at how all the damage Trump cast upon many governmental agencies still has them in disarray. Hell, the EPA is still trying to climb-out from under the wreckage done by pseudo-macho-cowboy Scott Pruit. Take a deeper look at all the sleaze deregulation attorneys-in-a-row and their corresponding corporate groups & lobbyists…then, make a nice long list of the donations that went into Congressional pockets. I already have a good sense of the net worth and general bios of the major players at Norfolk Southern (…took less than an hour.) Once again, focusing your binoculars upon some worthy specifics (…while momentarily helpful & very interesting)…also ensures that some very fuzzy & unclear edges inhabit the periphery. Just my thoughts from similar past experiences…
Speak with a RR Engineer/Mathematician about the likely scenario here if the train had been equipped with electronic braking. With a bad axle, the derail would still have occurred…but with electronic brakes, where might the train have actually stopped? Ha, if it had stopped downtown next to the gas station…most of the entire town would have blown-up.
Also, our groundwater layer is very near surface..not good…so, there is already more run-off into creeks, etc. The method they are using to remediate water via air-spray is only throwing more chemicals into the air nearby.
Beyond that, there are other problems with the vinyl chloride beyond its high toxicity. It, unlike many other toxins, is NOT removed via granular activated carbon in the soil or otherwise. Bummer. As for the Dioxins, they ”BIO-ACCUMULATE”(…so say, pass from worm to plant, to us.) So much for in-ground gardening…right? Breaks our hearts..and the farmers, of course. However, I’ve already made plans to container and grow-bag plant. This Tomato grower doesn’t give-up that easily.
I’ve gardened here for 50 years. My garden serves as a big slice of my very Soul. Used to grow about everything…but now, focus primarily on those incredible Heirloom Tomatoes (…including, some that I’ve personally bred.) I’ve grown 100’s of varieties over the year..and, have NEVER used a single commercial fertilizer, pesticide, herbicide, etc. How WEIRD huh…now that this is “Toxic Godzillaville”?
I’m having some very special T-shirts made up (…with Godzilla eating-a-NS Train, of course)…had my Health Clinic check-up today..and sadly, was coughing-up some burnt plastic tasting & smelling mucous this morning. Not pleasant…but, we carry on. Ha, and while it wasn’t a thorough health check-up with testing,etc,(..will have that soon)…the doctor said my heart and lungs sound “great” via her trusty stethoscope. Go figure huh?
I spoke with Sen. Sherrod Brown on the phone this morning. We discussed everything from local needs to gardens. He’s a longtime gardener too. However,the heart of our conversation centered around the new Brown-Vance bipartisan legislation. We discussed the vested interest opposition also…Including Sen. Thune and others. He feels they’ll have the votes in the Senate…but, will have to push more for the House. Of course, all of us agree that now is the auspicious time…so, we must seize-the-moment.
P.S….The notice came today that NS is now preparing to ”Remove-the-Tracks”…oh my. Of course, they are also removing all the toxic material from the trackbeds. The new gravel and stone trucks have been lining-up for weeks. Must keep those trains moving, after all. Time=$$$$. Now, wouldn’t it be great if they had the same passion & zeal for fixing things here? By the way, that’s a lot of material…so, there will be more site traffic, more truck traffic, more noise and more odor. How kind of them to inform us…right? Ha,maybe we’ll do a community protest and …block-the-trains. Actually, there are much better and actually legal ways…
I just knew you’d be back to the RR Safety theme…and, with the article on Sen. Thune you guys are really rockin’. YOUR ARTICLE THIS MORNING REALLY…MADE-MY-DAY! GREAT WORK!
Best Regards…and yes, the fish, people and other things are very unhappy, Nevertheless, I’ll find a way to grow some of the Finest Damn Tomatoes on Earth here….as will others. We are a very crazy but also strong and tight-knit community. So yes, we will grow Tomatoes and Distill-Water-via-Steam…count on it.
THIS IS MY SMALL, PRIMARILY REDNECK, APPALACHIAN TOWN/REGION IN A NUTSHELL TODAY. AND, WHILE IT’S SOMETIMES CHALLENGING LIVING HERE…IT IS ALSO MY HOME…AND, I LOVE IT TOO….AS WOULD YOU TOO, IF IT WAS YOURS.
50 Crazy Facts About Pain (Doggerel Sonnets)
1
First thing I’ll do is give you back
some time I’d have otherwise stolen.
The firework’s residential thwack
in the eardrum has made a sullen
person of me. About it let’s be quick,
as a shepherd of gross verse
is quick with a thesaurus. For all the sick
ears among us, this refunded time is yours.
Yours to romantically pursue,
making like the gift is ongoing,
though I’m within rights to fire my milieu,
wrench a pox where wax is growing.
But remain firm, like a leftover ham.
Good work, team! Especially you, ma’am.
2
Glad that’s over! A square can be
a little longer now. Be rectangular
at least a bit. Just obey law number three
about ratios. I’m poised with particular
aptitude to be stoked on this.
Squares were sides all enforced equal
my whole child-hood in New Glarus.
No reach to ‘em and no peril
to forge ‘em useful. We the people won
what our shapes had been years staring
at: wiggling room for either one
or both of length and width, lines sharing
right to extend the little that’s needed
to shovel up dirt, or feel secreted.
3
“He wants you to look with him.” Milk,
and sugar, first. Distant wet sands, and dirty.
A poem in a book about bolts of silk,
ill-gotten. Dentists, however flirty
or uncomfortable. Stapler used by boy.
Boy’s fits, envisioned in a nightmare.
Italian men react to expensive toy
number ten: a massive carriage with no spare
tire. All of us trying our damnedest
to remember any of these glaring shards
at the funeral. Stock-still-standing contest.
Steve albini, pictured holding the cards,
praying. To see all this and painfully hear
lies about tags on our minivan’s rear.
4
‘Tis Majesty indeed to rule alone,
over no one. Intransitive.
Use it for its own sake, you old crone!
Better and half than any old laxative.
Let’s say you’d like to mold an “upper crust.”
You need to hire how many buffoons?
Your own bad thread may be discussed
by air trapped fast in balloons.
So here is my ruler. Here is my wrist
too, in case it inspires.
But your broad breast will be the mist.
The fog hangs over the empty spires.
And the yip from my box of experiments
joins the repast of royal sentiments.
5
But I do know one and one.
One’s a mite, a microscopic terrorist.
The other is the spun tone
of the piano of Bill Evans, pianist.
My idol! A Chickering grand,
he had. May he remain a myth.
Two songs for the swollen hand
and no one to go to bed with.
It has a voice, like a transposed number.
Without precedent, we adopt
the tuning. It is a liquid lumber
For a hot hut. It is untapped.
To quit a job, you must give notice
that you must play the piano’s head of sawdust.
6
I’m sad that you are leaving.
Authors doing with running from simplicity.
I’m angry (with you!) that you’re leaving.
A look of sadness and perplexity
is my point of view. You’re the topic
I’ll force into every head now.
No, mercy in writing is not big,
but it hates those who head south.
Though I can change things in the writing.
Fly envious, and meet with poise.
Migratory discs in the sea-wind biting,
miscounted, complementary noise.
I’ll go out and find someone new tomorrow,
gesture welcome, crown the narrow hero.
7
What’s the expression? The goalposts are moving?
We make a major “use case”
into a big ordeal, beyond proving.
Now and then, vague posts are grace.
That’s not where we are anymore.
Do you feel a need to note your own presence?
I feel silly without a carnivore
present. After a wrong turn, missing cousins
get missed. And it’s the whole team’s fault.
No one at the rooftop party NYC
could get past the taste of malt.
What is that? A small slight tree
of knowledge sustains the skittish thugs.
In Chicago there will be rooms under rugs.
8
When a poet is well-behaved, rather
than write, she says: “people have no
philosophy (muted or destroyed) (they sat there)
which was a signet (a scent that would show)
stirs occasionally the farmer
consulting his calendar.” A heap of sacks
and the Swedish saint getting warmer
is rewarded. Supplicants respond: “slacks
or no slacks, we have not only a ready
philosophy (sure works for me!) but delay
a hundred grams downstream (unsteady
vessel) Lord of the harmful effects (see, allay)
as bosom-buttons.” Protective of the butt
of this joke, I’ll say each node is a nut.
9
We’re all water, we’re all land;
we weather, we are weathered.
We’re all verdure, swiftly tanned;
we wither, come untethered.
We’re all mud, we’re all dirt,
we’re sad, so hot tears spurt.
We’re soil, we’re clay,
we imbibe and blow away.
This is fruitless now to say.
We’re all glasses of milk in Poland too.
The facets that superimpose to gray
go unsaid, and they’re all dull and true.
When the avalanche of tears subsides,
I gaze at cliffs: the gowns of brides.
10
He started looking for a new buddy.
Began, I might add,
looking for a smart understudy
who could play naturally a lad
of about twenty-seven years.
But she took it with no thanks
specializing the all-around frontiers
with taffy jars for the lobbies of banks.
We carved pinewood pizza planks, noted the fierce
egg and sad chickens.
Secretaries, the roll-top secret police,
made themselves scarce. The pickin’s
were slim. Diddly-squat daunted.
But fears were void for all who haunted.
11
They need staff
to make sure
people don’t slash or cuff
the canvases in the mature
museum hallways.
They’ll consider me a chap
who could always
be of service, be on tap.
A new kind of expression?
Whitmanian lines,
pelting precipitation
and public urination fines?
“Personally I don’t see it,” sir,
but I’ll make sure.
12
Fair enough! The sweet gentle pimp
lied to an egoist who was stoned.
At the quarry the excavators who skimp
on space are trapped by a bond
of friendship. Excuse the journalist who
looks from the bridge to the wedding,
sees stars, as journalists do,
and writes that those still getting
more bang for their buck
are in academic strongholds, like
women in general, while “my luck
seems infused with holy wreck.”
Those skipping the fine print disregarded
the prestigious ban that the quarrymen started.
13
Should I have the weed
or not? Since 1775 all trappers
have uttered foul curses at their need
while sitting on their unhoused crappers
on the upper peninsula of the ‘Burgh,
which is where I was plucked and pruned.
The city of 1805 was right to shrug
and hand the pennant on to the marooned
driver Arnold, or Arnie,
who was dumb for his journey
when he sent for a gurney
and strapped me to the unsturdy
roof of the fishing skiff. Since then,
I’ve harnessed a weed and scolded my wen.
14
Baby carrots he runs on baby carrots,
the sling on the overall health,
winking at the orange baby parents,
whistling “baby carrots” under his breath.
What’s that? You don’t want to talk about it?
Anything that’s hewn has special powers
in it and feathers of grace about it.
Weak children weeping all day in towers
write poems such as these.
I watch her lace a purple shoe,
she always asks me about cheese.
The foreign ones always do
good questions first.
(So skins don’t burst.)
15
Somewhere deeply seeded, far away from charm,
no sounds anymore saw, anymore reach.
The craniums their nests of eggs keep warm
and the nerves propagate in each ditch,
sailing away up the silt walls
of the cave. Nothing there to hear,
not even a high-pitched friction whine (false
overarching tone) or synthetically clear
voice of God saying “this is a site
of construction.” Whatever I said
before, I couldn’t’ve meant that, afire, I might
not stoop to pray. The roots are never dead,
only the upper shelves. And past that limit
I assume a comet has its own modes of entrenchment.
16
Screams, turns the page,
underlines, coughs up
what would be “rage”
if she were twenty-eight and rough stuff.
Now, it’s grief. Other singers are easy to please
and, to befriend, impossible as ever.
Note that once you squeeze
a note to make it flat, you can’t recover
the original inflation. No, that’s an inflection myth.
Avoided salt but required the deeds
of a servant. A replacement with
no shared blood, but shared needs.
The whole stint sings. Forward and back.
The phone line broods and plans attack.
17
Any time you have a detective show up
(what are they sawing in yonder kitchen?
Do your hush puppies offer up
a sour smell?), of course of crime fiction
you have the most basic, all-framing
element. The particular style
of notebook paper is always claiming
panels of cracked surmise. Meanwhile
(A man can’t sidestep a fight any longer)
once the volta erupts from the chest
of the table, the fermented savor
of crime, revirginized, is lost.
(You’re shot, you fall on the horn.)
We’re left with props if the page is torn.
18
Weapons fall from the ceiling
onto the very expensive carpet.
It’s well-known how I’ve been feeling.
You are powerless to stop it
but small improvements just might
dance before the very eyes
of the handsome pusher, whose plight
it is to sweep up every size
weapon, and distribute them among
deer in the middle of the road
in the middle of the beer-strung
capitol. They might, but my vote
is they won’t dance. Although we swat
at the air, we’re rooted to the spot.
19
Reciprocal discretion, on which society reposes
is swordsmanship. Being a formal fish,
attending relevant Broadway shows, is
the parachute whose folds swish
in the wind we ride down on, and
for the moment a complete intimacy
to plunder where we land.
Reciprocal illiteracy,
on which society slathers psychotic
amounts of ketchup, is sufficient basis
for an endless hunt, half-erotic
and “barnyard posing as oasis”
[translation mine] smack-dab in the middle
of the killing fields, a self-rebuttal.
20
The first gig was relatively well-attended.
It took place in a cathedral.
The renters applauded. None pretended
to love it too much. All wore neutral
facial expressions. The frowns relaxed
and gazes extended into brief periods
or intervals of vacancy. Maxed-
out patrons departed on chariots
and every looking thing was small or heavenly
as what it beheld. The clop of hooves
as a net was hung from evenly-
spaced intersections on a catch that moves,
lamenting capture. We hatched plans
for gig number 2 at our own expense.
21
When you’re all young, bulging your eyes
out, forcing them out of their sockets
is enough of a macabre surprise
to stuff all the people in your pockets
you possibly might want. Ten years later
you need them more, but the strained
passing elations don’t cater
to the need of keeping friends contained.
I did this, and it wasn’t a mistake.
If you keep cool and no one saves
you from the average path you make,
you learn a lesson. Upcoming enclaves
mark the change lightly, but your chance
is best, you’ve slackened to advance.
22
When I was so angry I rushed
to the poem notebook teeth first,
I had an idea that blushed
and receded. I know we’re cursed
to forget the spur’s pitch,
and for the spur once it’s sunk
in to serve not a stitch
of valve-releasing, sticking us with our chunk
of initial pressure… I forget, I forget,
I forget it, I forgot long ago,
I kept forgetting, and I say I forget
and I will, and the rim of the echo
spreads and the ocean stays whole.
But these peanuts are in my control.
23
You want to do for the next sap
something helpful. They will have lurched
from you, knowing nothing of the nap
your life was these years when you searched
for an ending like a hermit crab
you could live in. Concluding in fierce pain
each day the same. Sometimes you’d rob
to taste thicker soup, but then again
you’d go dumb. Now that’s the precise state
in which we write the cautionary manual.
Embed clauses when you go on a date,
or don’t lie, and maybe less annual
the pangs will be. No, you’ll hurt
anyway, since it looks like you’re no longer dirt.
24
Holy shit, there’s actually ringing
in my ears. Comes a “high pitched whine.”
With a future of timidly singing
“Jolly Good Fellow” in jeopardy, I’ll reluctantly incline
to have my inner ear removed and rinsed,
then screwed back into its old pore.
At thoughts of such procedures I’ve often winced
because hypochondriac imagination only goes so far.
Shoo whine, and don’t you bother
me. A catalogue of riotous bagel-bakin’ hymns
is left to be sung, to cut each tether
to the page yours truly deafly skims.
Where does this note of hope come from?
It snarls until the hate’s gone mum.
25
That’s what you get for hooking wires
up to your brain. What does spilling
water into a bottle of pills (never expires)
do again? You’re fried. Dude, telling
lies is so fun. If the talk is tranquil,
I can’t even make it out. A silo tube
of antihistamines, translucent little uncle,
is little help. I’ve been a boob
since 3AM. With my freshly ruined
corded instruments and assorted pills,
I’ll be the first boob that ever swooned.
I won’t. Pretty people give the wicked chills
to all and sundry. All “the slip” means
is you’re on the outskirts with the aid of machines.
26
Putting makeup on in the mirror in your car
looks so good. Reminds me of Tennessee.
Certain people there.
You’re a danger, but you’re quite free
to look up from the wheel at a piece
of your face just under your delicate eye
and dab it with salves to increase
desirable blurring. Then swab it away.
Stacking A, B, and C.
Someone certainly must love you.
Across the street, I briefly see
a makeup-doer, a maker-up, past her window
tinted half-dark. I feel the easing grip
of Wednesday call in hope from a hash pipe.
27
Only one thing: it’s Thursday. Now go
and make your poem. I’m waiting
for a chance to finally as a pupil know
whether you were able to start writing
a poem today and if so what it is
now that it’s over with, put down.
On a may be icy bridge, a big truck skids
at the slightest disturbance without a sound
of second thought or much of one. The waiflike mosquito
carries disease for no apparent reason, other than inlaced
spite, a tacit and unsearchable credo
that isn’t spite and could not be favorably replaced
by God itself. Then the cargo we dreaded
arrives, a drink, arranged to be wedded.
28
How many more meaningless sonnets
remain to be written? How many moods
can be divided into uneven fourths? Contents
(how they’re treated) make them sonnets, right? Or is it the words
rhyming in the right places? It’s not how much
you practice, it’s how you practice. Your potted
plants will notice whether you hock
upon them with love or drown them in spite-clotted
hard water. I live to count up from one
number to another. And jest intervenes
occasionally. And once a ten-number run
is in place, I call the stick-figure scenes
poetry. And I share with not a single soul.
But the drift and I make a cute couple.
29
She deserves access to the files of numbers
of infections. Don’t keep on keeping it hidden
because you like to be found out in slumbers
and asked for fast help. (The poems are ridden
with asking for help, rife with the concept
of help.) Once she (head baker) can get the lay
of the land, a whole pesky transept
can be taken off your hands, in a new way.
They’re a bunch of words for words’
sake and may be burned down without consequence.
Look at the hunched figure over herds
of yellow sonnet pages in public. The constance
of his pathetic whatever. Once the keys
are handed over we’ll cut these trees.
30
I think we’ve talked about this before
but do you listen to Scott Walker at all?
Me and my girlfriend actually spent more
on a house over there. I’m under your spell.
Of course with artist biographies you get a new
perspective on the work when you go back
to it. If no one speaks up I’ll be moving into
(moveables follow the person) a shotgun shack.
Who helped reach this milestone anniversary?
The propulsive action of a charge of powder.
Names were easy to remember in the nursery
because they were said more often and louder.
The snippets, though documentary, don’t cohere
around a center. So it must be a hollow sphere.
31
OK now we can start in on pain
it was fleeting it’s not on my spine
or in my fillings or singing my grin
like a mini-migraine, a quite dominant and fine
grain of anger. Because it’s always I’m pissed
taking a glance at death getting all sarcastic
no opportunity to insult ever missed
like it’s pure romance for pain’s small spastic
movements forward that make it all fleeting.
It was totally there winking and scaring
holding something at its hip like a phone
recording the whole final score-preparing,
the last composing of something of white painlike tone.
Snaking and pure and now so soon absent
but a fixture on the borders of the convent.
32
He set out to edit his first poem,
bolstered by the promise of a phone call later in the day.
He applied hand sanitizer, which canceled half the scum
out, then put sugar on it and sat down to pray.
From a distance the unedited poems plotted an arson.
Holding celery sticks laced with poison for rats,
the [redacted] gossiped to the historian about a certain person,
then burned their torches and threw them on the slats.
School began. Editing your work is vital
to taking a step, let alone several.
If the poem wishes to be vulgar or bridal
it’ll need censorship to be good and temporal.
The golden thing fell from the charred table
and shrank to a non-refundable staple.
33
Hummingbirds are pretty obviously microcosms
of our lives. Compressions. So I like them most.
The smallest of all the spectrum of winged organisms,
pure panic, sugar-craze, not much else to boast
but that their wings disappear, they work
so fast. A furor or war of wings surrounds
but they stay quite still, timid near bark
and self-caught within sweet-pursuit’s bounds.
Is it far-fetched to say they enjoy no leisure
but always cant forward at a well
of nectar to invade? If you live in the seizure
of drinks and sidewalks, the city, you can’t tell.
So you leave town. Fording chasms, believing
a hummingbird’s chase is not what you’re living.
34
Getting used to the water being cold
is for people, not ducks.
We can’t swim anywhere unless we’re told
hot to by an adult who talks
and can swim. Ducks are entering the lake
surface all the time. How does it feel?
Maybe they feel nothing, past the feathers can’t make
much of an impression. Within a moment, it’s real.
I float here now. My children on my back.
Not too sure what my orange feet are doing.
Not conscious of any of this. It’s the bad luck
of the poet to be conscious of coming and going,
trransitional stages. Also “I’m falling fast”
is never in their gut. Color me impressed.
35
How come? I called because everything was amiss.
One thing is everything. It’s one machine on rails
that are a unified system, one animus.
They referred me to someone high up in sales.
“Someone stole my brain!”
the official salesman said. We shared the cup of tea,
as you know, earlier when I tried to explain
how come curses and spittin flowed along in a spree,
but the only answer to that is “yes.”
Someone’s told you something you don’t know,
before. Asked you. They’ve made a noise or guess
and it’s left you in this state where your scope
is exceeded. Caught you with your pants…
down, or off, but it was just a temporary stance.
36
You go to camp next year. Every night,
later than is typical, your poor voice feels
bound, bound up. The threads are slight
but immovable in a bundle. What squeals
where once a cinch are now a to-do.
Brushing teeth is the only healthy, fit
distraction, the bare minimum according to
the camp’s nurse. All day you don’t quit
brushing your teeth until they shine so’s you can see
your reflection in the two big ones, clear
enough that you could talk it free,
make it a friend, a friend so dear,
apart from you and not. The following summer,
the annual visits aren’t louder, but glummer.
37
The history of telephones: someone’s in pain
and they want to share it. Buttons are pushed,
a tone happens, and the victim must abstain
from spilling over until the doctor’s unrushed
greeting “hello” stops the idle tone.
“Hello” is said. Various screens and tools
are added. Mine drowns of its own
accord, seemingly. The inventors are obviously fools.
The joke’s always on someone, with these calling
devices. You first. Then the ones who took
the things to market. A. Graham-Bell was only stalling
until he could afford a down payment. A book
was by him ever preferred. I’ve omitted a few
chapters from the history, to keep it true.
38
Why is a question mark shaped like that?
The shepherd’s crook is broken. That’s it, right?
We start at a point, a guy at bat,
then spin off in an arcing, returning flight
in a vessel that skews left,
a wonky airplane of inquiry. That return trip
is aborted. Sound good? The launched craft,
or duckling, is “following suit.” We skip
from circumnavigation to conclusion.
Disconnection of pod from root, the pod
implied but not canceled, not an illusion
unless we get too literal, too like God.
Are any of these close? You have the answer,
who make of me such an asker, who are my sponsor.
39
Museums. They’re mature. I’m of hearing.
Hard of hearing. An adherent. Believer,
one who practices it. It is adhering
that makes a museum. I’m somewhere
between mature museum and “content
creator.” So scared to call cool people
up! I’ve seen a Madison, Wisconsin sunset.
I’ve approached the concept of the nipple
from a few angles. Don’t need to reach
either vertex. I’ll be on the middle
of the line. One of the infinite. It’s such
a blessing to be here, so arguably little.
A point has no friends or any dimensions.
Wings of museums may suffer extensions.
40
When it was acceptable, it didn’t move,
nor could it in the empty room make sleep
happen at all, suffering the stiff shove
of its infirmities. My soul. A turtle without a peep
hid in its shell, until a gust of wind
the animators injected gave it a boost
so it could escape the wolf that grinned
and bloomed over it. The cat come to roost.
In this home there are also a few key points
that the animated things wander between.
The guests, imaginary, choreograph their haunts,
mosying, sidling, swept from curtain to scene.
Since it darts and frets from pot to pan,
flesh will see corruption, but it won’t scan.
41
Forward like a criminal, begging mercy of everything I meet
into the street today without companion,
Florida of the month this heart’s one pleat
of uniform fantasy all down the onion,
We leave Saturday and come back next night
having extended shockingly few invitations.
Idolatrous power lines, and paint’s foresight
about the road wished for more petitions.
This poem is impossible for me to penetrate,
though I wrote it. Opening up the shop
is never purely easy. On the small plate
of courtesy I see a crumb, apply a mop.
When we beg, the solitude between the lines
is sacred, but so is the eye that grinds.
42
Flies and new interests absorb you; now you never have
them. Caveat: the master volume fluctuates.
The one covering the comforting song is suave
as comfort and as fleeting; he evaporates.
We’re out in public. With a few tweaks
we’re the public eye. But queasily it shorts,
or it can; I’m referring to the nerve that squeaks
past the gate of bone and watches sports.
New interests exist: binoculars unfolded
and turned to the sugar packet
torn open on the table. They are molded
to the new part, but are no more than a racket
at rehearsal in the galley under the text.
It takes my hand, and am I now perplexed!
43
Dear sister, remember when I showed you how I draw
squares when I have a moment to spare
for art or meditation? I showed you the law
of my graph paper, how trembling along each square
my pen moves. A little world irrelevant
to your real life as a mother. A viable
escape you detected in this, a shameless element
of entry into a page. Stupid and reliable.
Well, I’m doing it again. I need a grid
because it’s a cave wall, but also I’m lying
if I say I need it. At halftime I know life did
little to merit the desperation with which I’m drying
ink into these repetitive little useful quads.
But it’s a real desperation that over me trods.
44
A dead wasp in the middle of the floor
last night I saw when I was about
to go to sleep. I didn’t sweep the poor
thing up but let it lay dead and lay out
on the wood floor, cold. Gasp! Mack the knife!
The vilest little reverences can be the pillar
of truly familiar countenances. It isn’t safe
in here, house fly, because of the indifferent killer.
But I mean there was no expected course
of action I was supposed to take for the dead
wasp. Just to see it was where the source
of contemplation pumped into my little old head
a good death dream, maybe. Now blue sky is smiling
at me; I’ve elegized my little wasp darling.
45
The new date for enjoying life is soon
arriving. Two ways to pronounce every word
my mom texts me. A richness causing a swoon
that invincible shyness can’t make seem absurd.
To enjoy life I listen to a playlist I hate.
Mix the light with the dark. Pointlessly say
“I am relaxin’” by way of issuing a late
greeting to someone I’ve been ignoring all day.
Principles of morality are like a dirty cap
that must be laundered.
“Hell yes indeed” says the bottle of detergent; I swap
drawing lots of squares for assaying the plundered
stuff. Morning is going. It’s not here to stay.
Hey I really liked your poems the other day.
46
“Everyone’s so talented! I fell in love with a lady
who made these vases. I couldn’t afford
[to buy] [one of them] but I looked and they were pretty
each one. I thanked her for them. I implored
her never to stop making her vases.
We didn’t get married or anything.
But we’re still on a first-name basis.
She’s in my thoughts. I often plan on offering
goods and services to her. No, I most
certainly will not. Oh, everyone has such talent.
I saw a woman who put faces on toast
by scraping it. She found me repellent
but I don’t care. It’s my joy just to find
these people. Maybe it’s their joy to be unkind.”
47
The routine of the countess’ delights:
say the word “fly” to myself. Ask what he’s
guarding. And it’s not the center of our nights
but the sun’s the center of our world. Freeze
a freakish movie, sweet-pea, those faded leaves
for a long time display. Sulfuric acid
might have made it. The countess grieves
her zestless office, every nonsense-facet,
and then the old pleasures really get old.
Quaint climax to the struggle, physical weariness
from a sufficient altitude seems not to have stalled
but hardened. What happens when, baroness,
someone knocks at your door asking can they use
your phone. A huge waste of time ensues.
48
To say “goodbye” at the precise instant of leave-taking
so everyone can hear “good” but no one can hear “bye”…
you disappear halfway into the stock phrase, breaking
off the blessing from the single reason why
you had to give it. Look at them standing dumb,
wondering why you said “good” before you were gone
forever. They can sense that it is some
miracle, just the right tic, with no ill to spawn.
Just a thought. Not a syllable wasted.
But that isn’t decline. Our lives don’t end when we stop
saying them! Rather, we break bad news. Nonsense will have outlasted
sentence, scraps of wood on the floor of the shop.
At the zoo with a lemur slung around my neck,
graduating at a distance like a lens speck.
49
Fuck. Another foul-mouthed playwright.
Shit should have been sweet and good.
Now it’s all ass. It all being ass ain’t right.
Fucking put me in a terrible fucking mood.
Jesus Christ. It’s open season on moods.
All fucked to hell. And right before the end.
Was supposed to be a simple day in the woods
now it’s very fucking important not to be bland.
“That is every barista’s dilemma,” I’ve heard.
Dammit, I’m a yes man, so if you say shoot
that guy I go and do it, as if it’s your weird
compulsion to shoot him I say “well that’s cute.”
Now that’s a huge flaw. But I still don’t fuck
with playwrights like that (seemingly rather stuck).
50
Talk to you later. Breathless. Out of steam.
Actually tried to climb a real wall.
Climbed a wall by a waterfall in a dream.
It made me feel strong. I looked for a waterfall
for days. Basically, there are none nearby.
And then the false memory of physical strength faded.
I was halfway up a brick wall that was dry.
Human bodies don’t do that though. We only waited
out the years to survive this long.
We’re good at enduring long periods of idiocy.
I fell off the wall and collapsed a lung.
The hospital nurse and I developed no intimacy.
Try as I might to set up a neural
pathway. I’ll call you later, to thwart any spiral.
from Focal Point
Poems from Point de mire (Focal Point), pub. 1921, by Céline Arnauld.
Translated from the French by Henry Cole Smith.
A Dream in Black Garment
Pale — cascading delicately down cheekbones
a dream in black garment
Snaking backwards in a hurricane bullseye
She lost her beautiful smile
She lost her beautiful gaze
For catching sunbeams
ensnared in a net of vapors
With an agony key — cemetery hum
Who extinguished this drunken flame
Born in a puddle of water
Raging — and unsure what to do with her hands
From a crucifix in the valley's porticoes we hanged her
With spider’s silk
She found her smile, she found her gaze
In a smoke ring
To snuff out a candle or snuff out a life
To extinguish a shower of sunbeams
It’s no different than kissing the sunset goodbye
Crawling in the tracks of the moon
And blowing out glowworms from on high…
Shut off the spotlights
Of sounds, laughter, and nightmares
Reborn yawning with serpents
Her life — her smile, her gaze
Such unprecedented things
The flame of a candle
Mid-Lent
So slacken your arms, life, usher of love
Caged acrobat
The squirrel spins like a Ferris wheel
Likewise the mockingbird
Learning through the prism of the human arena
Black-headed gulls — seagulls with little floured faces
Racket-tailed hummingbirds
Stop laugh jump
This is emancipation or war
Because it’s death that awaits you
When the party paused to catch its breath
The seagulls delivered their message
It was a banishment — his
Then an arrow pierced heart and laughter
And they remained silent
He in his thoughts and her at the water's edge…
Did they speak — confess
The chariot brought confetti
And she extended her arms
To the pitch of the boomerang
Party
Bal-musette like a stampede
Illuminated by the firing squad
Femme fatale free-for-all
Strangled etymologies strung round the neck
Like hide-and-seek lanterns
Surrounding this target riddled with holes…
Angling for stars
All this for you
Big tears of a novitiate’s bliss flow
Down every cheek along the streets
It’s a cry of petty indignation
And the marching-on of human parades
Why must we love you so…
But with the grace of a steeple, the barrier
Divorces the party from the world
The morning glory–swords awaken — tears well up
I’ve come a long way — we’ve got a climb ahead
Aspiration raps on the windows
Objects are displaced — the moon descends in tremolo
The street cleaner sweeps up superfluous words
Cries of joy lift my heart
Let’s drink to hatred and insult
Carriage 31 is mine…
Angling for stars
Persecution
We no longer know if we should buck up or stand by
This sunbeam laden with wax and foliage rears up
Blinded with sobbing childishness
It would be prudent to surrender peacefully
Isolated in a grimoire, words materialize
We don't know for whom — we don't know why
We seize them all for ourselves
Whirlwind squalls assault the slats
Sorcery — stinging nettle, and what else?
To delight in a battery of the mind…
I am not your enemy
The flight of a sigh is a flash of laughter
The laugher triumphs, the trajectory plummets
To bestow a poem is a hand unfurling
And reaching toward dazzling generosities
I didn’t ask you for anything — what do you want from me…
Brightness kindled — firebrand with boiler eyes
Flickering eyelids in silkworm wax
Watch the pout slumber
The sullen is worse than the mirthful
Who withers under the ridicule of unholy harassment
Please admit that I didn't steal anything from you
Of your runaway affection
I am not your enemy
In the Abyss
All the past was sponged up by the abyss
Locked in a quatrain like a coffin
This democratic lifeblood
sidestepping the severity of so many crimes
Bursts into a fabulous circus of caverns and legends
Abstruse like mimes
It takes thirty days o earthlings
To circumnavigate the old windmill
One more is insanity
it’s the buzzing that commences
Coil of a feral grimace
Between four planks isolated in space
Gathering then the honey — comedies buzzing…
Your four cursed verses
Siloed grains of love
Along the wall — along the wall…
Jeer the insulting parade — garner promotion
The advancement of love — at the foot of the wall
The winning horse — a thoroughbred
Extra-dry from the amazons
To death the inopportune — what a bizarre comedy
To purify the world of this swan sunbeam
For this quatrain quaffed to the dregs
These four cursed verses
Romance in B Flat
Coal miner, your teeth in B flat that mimic
The luminous range of your laughter
Think of those singers lodged in the funnel
Caught up in the flood of birdsong
and sunbeams
And carried on a smile to your ivory mine
Are these the songs that lurk undiscovered by agents
Around the dry and haggard pond…
Commodore, the memorabilia of night
at the ends of poems
Compete with evenings to win the expanse
Then come the optics of tales lost in affection
Reinvented in their naked immensity…
And if the water goes then sadness returns
Space is purified and birds are dancing
And sounding the funnels, nucleus of the forest
At the bottoms of reservoirs
Romance in B flat
The haggard keyboard has lost its silence
The fish, the dance of the musical pond
Coal miner, have you met the scholar singer
Who spans the range of my songs
Mocking — and despising your ivory teeth — your teeth
He’s enclosed himself in a wasp's nest…
Mariner, don’t let my singer die
My poet-singer who plays on a swing
Apotheosis
While the dazzling cannonade of imprisoned wind
Dies in the well…
My youth on the hill
Wheat and ryegrass quarreling
Gently
Take pity on my light
For I have not yet loved the rosebush
The ryegrass sang
Keep laughing spiritual thief
Ostensibly ensconced in the memory of the poet
Aren’t you afraid of being hanged
By the neck of reality
A deep sorrow
Wave of hallucinations
Born of my cruelty
Surrounds my brow
This loneliness is blonde
Divine mortification at the summit of a pyramid
Of silence and fake jewelry
The villages sink into green abysses
Tense with too much white
And thus the procession
The lyrical motorcade glimpsed only by me
Bow — laugh — dance
Behold the king of the muses the carny the revenant
And in his wake the sun dragged by birds
All in celluloid
The Virgin in Ripolin
Crystal butterflies
A muse in tatters
A cardboard love
Don Quixote in satin…
Headed for the parade
It’s his apotheosis
All of you beware
He’s the crowning meteor in the wheel…
I would like to never die
Let me love him too
Lift me up to see him
Pleads the wastrel
Just Don’t Look
Just don’t look with indifference
The dead will betray you
They are the loyal, the opium dreamers
The transparency of our psyche
Who can’t bear the grave
Nor suicide of the heart…
But the outstretched arms
Immense possession of this loving selfhood
Of inner vigor and incomprehension…
Your pride circumscribed in a few smoke rings…
Then the leap of calculation — of the sciences
Old — old — the ancient winks of umbral roses
Drifting passions like lavender breath
These dead with eyes glued to the clerestories…
Why don’t we leap over these graves
This tangle of ivy and casks
Forsaken in the wind…
We’ve gotten sidetracked here
While prattling about time — Wait, aha
I’ve found my cross
Long Tow
Later on, she thought, it was strange how vaporous the most important details of May 19 remained. She would have guessed that the car engine’s low oil level, their failure to properly diagnose the issue, and the eventual and ungrateful breakdown of said engine in Shoshoni, Wyoming, would be vivid memories, in the same category of personal-historical verisimilitude as the deaths of beloved dogs.
Instead, each episode in the chain of events that led up to the drive back to Casper was represented by nothing more than a few stray impressions. Shoshoni’s desiccated rodeo arena. An eighteen-wheeler, cab Tyrian purple, rolling through as they were stopped on the shoulder of the interstate. Tom and his shop assistant conferring by the open hood with an air of indifference. This was the pitiful internal scaffolding of a story that she and Jake had learned, with words only, to tell to others.
It was the arrival of the tow truck driver that returned a sense of peculiar unity to her recollections of that day.
The object of their gratitude wore a navy trucker cap and a cotton flannel — its long sleeves were, despite the wind, seasonally inappropriate. The man’s thin legs bore the airy ripples of his ill-fitting jeans with ease; he bounded back and forth as he winched the car, wheels turned all the way to one side, up on the bed of the Tripod Towing truck. He wore nondescript shoes and wrap-around sunglasses. She found it hard to believe there were eyes behind the lenses, or even limbs beneath the clothes, and imagined his movements accompanied by a skeletal rattling.
As they got in — Jake in the front, her in the back seat — the driver asked how they’d pay once they were back in Casper. In cash, they said, though they’d have to stop by an ATM.
“That’s fine,” he said, starting up the truck. “We can’t go faster than 60 an hour, or the whole truck starts shaking. So we’ll be in the city in about an hour and a half.”
It was the third day of their road trip, and already the two of them were traveling in the wrong direction. They wouldn’t get very far in the three weeks they had left, probably not past Spokane, if this was their rate of progress. Visions of total engine abdication in apple-picking country, dutiful excursions to craft cideries.
The grass near the highway was replaced further back by low saltbushes with a grayish-white color, as if the plants, previously vibrant, had been caught in the wan soil and absorbed its lifeless qualities. Or been woven up by some malign spider. They stretched back before disappearing into the landscape’s hazy emendations, a horizon of mesas and hills.
She imagined an observer on one of these clifftops, faithful and inquisitive gaze directed at the tarmac bisecting a lifeless desert. Would it look to him as if the car was making progress toward a destination? Or would it seem instead to be stuck in a loop, cycling through somnolent animals, clots of dark buildings, and the inert landscape among and between? There would be no suggestion, from the vantage point of this local outcropping, that a city, a dry lakebed, any change at all, might exist out of sight in some far east. The observer, permitted to fall back into his mesmeric boredom, must breathe a sigh of relief when the crawling, intruding cars disappeared from view again.
After fifteen minutes of silence, the driver produced a pack of American Spirits. Asking if they minded, he rolled the window down a hairsbreadth. The smoke entered her nostrils and perched on her tongue, duly proceeding lungward, while the rumble of the road became louder. The driver began to speak — it was barely audible, but the nicotine entering her bloodstream made her more alert, and she leaned forward.
“Moneta, 18 miles. Deer Creek, 36 miles. Hiland, 57 miles. Then Pytho, then Casper. The distance from Shoshoni to Moneta always seems longer than the distance from Moneta to Deer Creek, but I measure it out on the odometer and they’re the same.”
The number of cattle and sheep increased in the areas between the small towns they drove through, which the driver called out as they approached them — Natrona, Powder River. She couldn’t make out any visible hierarchies among the ruminants; they seemed to collectively agree to stay as far from the settlements of their owners as possible.
The next cigarette made the driver even more talkative. He detailed the mileage and drive times between the various cities, towns and settlements in central Wyoming, gradually expanding his report to include the rest of the state and region. Boulder took an easy four hours unless you hit traffic, while Billings was an unpredictable ride in the winter wind and snow.
Whenever he paused, he picked up his bottle of Pepsi and took a sip. She hadn’t had anything to drink since the coffee at the diner early that morning; she thought at first that he had sensed this and was handing the bottle to her. The idea of drinking the soda, which must already have been warm and flat after the 40-minute trip from Riverton to Shoshoni, repulsed her. But it was also the real thing, an obsidian sugar shock, the result of thousands of days in laboratories and boardrooms spent examining mechanisms of incorporation and desire, how to knit them into the impulse now surging up inside her.
From Jake: “Can I have a little of that Pepsi?”
“It’s the only one I have, man, and I’ve gotta drive back to Riverton after this. That’s 125 miles to get from the dealership to the office. That’s more than 2 hours in this truck. Let me have a little company.”
“Are you from around here? You know the area pretty well.”
Jake’s question came in a flat, neutral tone, the same one he’d use to ask about her day, her sleep debt, and, too frequently for her liking, the state of her soul.
“No, I’m from Colorado, grew up there. My dad was a master mechanic. I moved to Cheyenne about 15 years ago after I lost a court case.”
He paused for a few seconds without lighting another cigarette.
“I had to come serve 5 years of probation inside city limits. They said I inappropriately touched a woman.”
Jake (flatly, neutrally): “Did you do it?”
“I didn’t, no. I was framed.”
Her senses were now unpleasantly acute. She imagined the cliffside observer yearning for a return to tranquility.
“I used to be a long-haul trucker. During the summer, my kids would come with me on trips. My son met Tom Selleck one time when I moved his furniture. Signed an autograph, even if the kid cared more about the Rockies game on the radio. This was back when they were a crap expansion team. Makes it even more embarrassing.
“During the school year I’d usually have a trainee with me in the cab. They’d ride around with me for a couple of months on trips and get to spend some time behind the wheel.
“One guy was narcoleptic, at least when it came to trucks, just always falling asleep, I don’t know if it was something about the vibrations or the rhythm of the road or what but he couldn’t go more than five minutes in the cab without nodding off.
“Truckers these days can’t drive for shit, they’ve got no sense for how to handle themselves or other cars on the road. But I cared about safety and all that stuff and I told the company I was working for that this fucking guy couldn’t drive a truck and I didn’t want him with me any more.”
Jake emitted a stream of absorbed grunts as the story went on. While the driver spoke, they had made progress toward Casper, and a riverine line of cars now appeared behind the trailer of the slow-moving truck. There were no passing lanes around here, and she caught a glimpse of the red-faced driver directly in their wake. Maybe he, too, worried that this landscape would continue on forever with no respite, and this was what lent extra force to the animated gestures he was now deploying, his mute and futile attempts at conducting them forward.
But there was a break to the north — the slopes, seams, holes and folds of Hells Half Acre. Earlier that day, she and Jake had stopped there briefly before their troubles began, skimmed the interpretive signs: eroded by wind and water over millions of years; largest badlands in the Wyoming Basin; buffalo jump for the Arapaho, hence the bones still interred in the soil. After large sections of the park were closed to prevent tourists following after the bison, it had declined as an attraction, taking with it a hilltop restaurant and a roadside motel.
The park had seemed like a more provincial version of the stops on their planned itinerary, or maybe natural wonders dulled easily. Knuckle-headed human folly did not dull easily. The final placard recounted the story of a blithe pioneer, a greenhorn Pony Expresser who descended from his mustang and ventured into the caves at the center of the siltstone and clay formations. Stumbling through the batwing doors of the next town’s bar that evening, he only remembered subterranean fumes with their sweet, sharp smell, followed by a one-sided conversation with his horse for the next few hours. It came to an end when the mustang finally replied, advising him to hop on and depart immediately for other pastures, greener or not.
The sign played the whole episode off as light comedy, but could the two of them have been exposed to some toxic gas during the brief stop-off, or perhaps it had accumulated in the driver’s bloodstream after years of towing cars between Riverton and Casper. How else to explain his babbling?
“They transferred him to another truck and I thought that was the end of it. But a couple of weeks later they were driving out of Olympia one night and the trainee took over from the driver. Well, he fell asleep and drove the truck into a river.
“They were both alright but the cargo was lost and the company fired the trainee. He sued for wrongful termination and the case went to court. The company called me to testify. I said what I said — that the guy couldn’t go more than five minutes in the truck before his eyes went shut. Well, he lost the case.”
While the driver spoke, he was statuesque, immune to the sun bearing down on them through the back windshield. She could see beads of sweat forming around Jake’s neck, on the red skin just outside the shadow of the ear lobe. The driver showed no signs of exertion — it was only his tone that changed.
“I don’t know if my testimony lost it for him but he thought so. Well, a few months later the trainee’s fiancée said that I assaulted her when I was passing through Cheyenne. It didn’t matter that my log books showed I wasn’t in town when she said I was. The prosecutor said that she could always change her story to match the dates.
“The judge told me that if I entered a guilty plea I could get away with five years of probation — otherwise I’d be looking at the same time in prison. Well, I took him up on it and I moved to Cheyenne with my family. Once the five years were up, I didn’t see any reason to go back to Colorado.”
Sloping green hills, a friendlier topography, immersed them once the tow truck reached the outskirts of Casper. At the I-25 junction, she saw the bronze statue from that morning welcoming visitors to “Oil City.” It consisted of four muscly rig workers, jaws unnaturally square, installing a well. She remembered the men wandering around the Casper Walmart, where they had stopped for supplies, and imagined them now crawling like emmets over the alien shrubs, working the land over for oil and gas. The image gave her a sense of guilty relief. As they pulled into the Wells Fargo parking lot, she felt overwhelmed by her desire for a soda.
The mechanic from Subaru told them in a low voice that it would take two to three weeks to get the parts for a new small-block engine. His hands, methodically wiping themselves again and again on a terrycloth rag, underscored his authority. The price from Hertz wasn’t too bad. They’d just come back to Casper in a couple of weeks and pick the car up.
In the hotel room that night, Jake told her that he had found the tow truck driver’s account of his case dissatisfying, that he suspected some crucial details must have been omitted. “There’s no way it’s all true,” he repeated. But something about the ride, he added, made him suspend his judgment, and he even found it a little exhilarating. Still, why did the driver say anything at all?
While Jake spoke, she was reading about gas leaks a few years ago at an elementary school in Midwest, a small city north of Casper. The students and teachers had correctly identified the sweet, aromatic odor as benzene seeping in from nearby oil fields. A paper from an Italian researcher suggested that the oracle at Delphi might have been exposed to high levels of the same chemical before her voice, deepening in despair, began prophesying. There was a now-depleted oil patch in Hells Half Acre that had heated Powder River, one of the towns their driver had pointed out. She did not float any theories to Jake, who was already asleep, not even during the next day’s drive when they again passed the badlands and made it past Shoshoni in a rental.
There was a traffic jam — construction in one of the tunnels dynamited through the rock — at the end of the desert, where the plains were replaced by foothills and the Wind River, coursing at the base of a steep embankment toward an invisible valley. They sat for a long time. She took off her shoes and rolled the socks up and down her legs, feet on the dashboard. Did the buffalo, shunted off the cliffside as one lowing mass, ever suspect how much worse it would get for their descendants?
“I don’t know — I guess everyone gets loopy after being back there for so long,” said Jake. “All that flat space…it’s nothing to sneeze at.”
Watching his hands fiddle with the wheel, it occurred to her he might actually be talking about himself. She imagined a wrench after a heavy foot pressed down on the accelerator, a stomach flip in empty air as the car headed for the river. Then at least they’d be moving forward, and at speed, past the blurred riparian land. Impressions coming and going, lodgings to chew them over unavailable — bid a fond farewell to premonitions and omens ill or benevolent. Let the car rust in Oil City.
ZAM! A Review after 40 Years of Heavy Use
I like Amazon reviews that follow up years later with updates — like, “I bought this vacuum cleaner 40 years ago and as I previously wrote, I thought it was great, but now I’m here to report it broke and so it’s really a cheap piece of shit.” I was sixteen in 1984 when I first read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZAM), and I told everyone at the time it was the best book ever written. This is my follow-up review.
I read ZAM about a dozen years after it was published, but it was still basically a bestseller. I think I found it in a used bookstore and read it because I liked the cover. It’s not an exaggeration to say it completely changed my life. I can say this with a straight face since I was just sixteen years old and couldn’t really know better. I can also say it with a straight face because it was likened to Moby Dick by George Steiner in the New Yorker in 1972, perhaps in a senior moment. Oddly it received glowing reviews pretty much everywhere. Even the NYRB, whose sole job is to savage a book like ZAM, is ambivalent. They acknowledge that it was an “important” book despite some shortcomings. But I’m not getting off to a fair start here. The book made me who I am and I’m not all bad.
When I first read ZAM, I absorbed it like a baby cactus — I just sucked up every bit of moisture from it — the voice, the road trip, the values, the pretensions. The book has a serious ambition to answer fundamental ontological questions and at sixteen I was jumpstarted and ready to prick other people’s ideologies. When I finished, I told my parents I was buying a motorcycle.
They proceeded to laugh off this idea, as I didn’t seem like the kind of person who could get it together to buy something as big and expensive as that. Normally it requires a job to buy a motorcycle. What my parents didn’t realize was that I could sell all of my belongings (and some of theirs) for just about as much money as a used bike cost. I also borrowed $200 from my friend Bill. When I came home with the bike, an ’82 Honda CM450c, it was a little late to intervene. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it’s almost the same as the bike Pirsig drove when he supposedly took the trip that is cataloged in the book. That bike is in the Smithsonian now. To be fair, nothing in the book suggests you should sell whatever is at hand to get a motorcycle.
So, in 1986 I rode my motorcycle to college with ZAM in my backpack and its arguments in my head. I was put on academic leave after my first semester because I thought and acted like the roots of western philosophy and my professors were bullshit and no one, it seemed, appreciated my take. The professor who asked me to leave was a Hegelian. Out of school, I was forced to work blue-collar, minimum wage jobs for a year, which clarified a few things, namely that I should go back to philosophy with a more open mind. I said as much to the Hegelian and he gave me a second chance. This was unusual because Hegelians are not generally known to give second chances, but I guess he felt I was sufficiently aufhebunged.
By this time I’d been riding a motorcycle for a couple of years, and since I never had any money, I learned a lot of motorcycle maintenance. I bought the 480-page shop manual on the CM450c. It was probably the technical motorcycle parts of ZAM that first clued me in to the book being a little misleading. If he was wrong about something as easy as motorcycle maintenance, perhaps the metaphysics had problems?
ZAM has three main pillars: Philosophy, Motorcycles and Fatherhood. At fifty-four years old, I have now legitimately been tackled by all three of these. First, as I’ve indicated, came the motorcycle which was my only form of transport for 15 years. I still own one today and was riding my youngest son to kindergarten on it not too long ago. Philosophy became a bigger love of mine — I’ve studied it my whole life, first as an undergrad and then in several grad schools. Like the author of ZAM, I’m ABD and always thought I’d teach. But also like the author, I felt that I needed to really understand it all before I could responsibly do so.
Since Hegel has been my white whale, that’s been somewhat untenable. Pirsig has his own white whale in the book, which he calls the “metaphysics of quality” (MOQ), and hides its utter incoherence inside the story of the main character going insane from such deeply original thoughts. This is of course nonsense, there are no original thoughts in MOQ, but when pressed about Hegel, I might want to hedge like this too. Like the author, my main line of study has been both deep and debilitating. But I’ve at least read western philosophy before mouthing off about it. It’s quite clear Pirsig hasn’t. Calling MOQ a white whale is not to legitimate Steiner likening it to Moby Dick, which is simply mind-boggling.
The last parallel between Pirsig and myself, and my supreme qualification to review this book, is that I too have some sons now. Pirsig has more than the one son that he focuses on in the book. He evidently had another son and a daughter and also a wife but you never hear about them. His wife and other kids are so MIA in his book, one feels sorry for them and then Googles them to learn that they were super fucked up and upset after publication. Pirsig also remarried and moved overseas to live on a boat. It makes one wonder a little about the author. I have a wife and three boys. If I focused on my favorite of them, I’d still be at least mentioning the shortcomings of the others. Pirsig doesn’t tell us anything about them. The book is subtitled “an inquiry into values” and there’s definitely some fucked up family values in the book. But still, I’m not being entirely fair. ZAM was without a doubt the most important book of my life.
After doing my BA, and actually reading Kant and Aristotle, I realized that the first pillar of the book was a little rickety, so I stopped carrying it with me everywhere. It was a relief to not always have that book with me. It weighs at least a pound and my copy was so ratty that it required kid gloves and a protective wrapping of imported Japanese rice paper. I used to take it backcountry camping, an enterprise where one is so laden down with supplies that one needs to choose between things like spare socks and food. There was never a time where ZAM came in handy on one of those trips. But to be fair, Hegel isn’t useful there either and his books weigh more.
ZAM seems relevant enough to pack on one of those trips though. It’s full of detailed exegeses of the motorcycle maintenance any sensible person needs to perform on a road trip. The whole story is framed around just such a trip with his troubled twelve-year-old son. But just a year into owning a bike I learned these exegeses were nonsense. In one scene, Pirsig wakes up 45 minutes early one morning to adjust the tappets on his bike. I remember the magic of that word when I first read it. Other readers I’ve interviewed for this review mentioned that word to me too. What on earth are tappets? It turns out this is insane.
Adjusting the tappets is a job that takes hours and specialized tools. You need to remove the gas tank, the rear brake line and the engine head to do it. I did it once, because my CM450c had tappets and because Pirsig made me feel like tappets might be the inner essence of technology and soul work. So for no real reason I adjusted them. Nobody in the history of motorcycles has done this while on a camping trip. Also, tappets are proleptic shitty engineering and this is why no modern bike has them anymore. Pirsig also changed his tires and chain after what I calculated must have been under 600 miles of driving. The amount of maintenance he performs would have required that he be tailed by a tool and parts truck. But I didn’t fully realize all this at the time. It was only on re-reading it as a fully fledged adult-philosopher-biker-dad. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I’d be lying if I said moving on from that book was easy. It was easy for me to leave the Jewish faith — Israeli nationalist Hebrew School made that easy — but I imagine it felt like what someone who loved the Church as a child felt when they realized God was dead. Or like leaving the girlfriend at the time who I loved but just knew was all wrong. To be honest, she left me. I told friends at the time who knew of my obsession with the book about the break up. ‘It was that tappet bit,’ I said… and that the Aristotle and Kant which formed two thirds of the book was wrong, and so I needed to just move on. But I looked back for a long time and the book looked back at me.
Twenty-five years went by in my life without thinking too much of it. Somewhere along the way I even lost the relic. But a few months ago, I rented an Airbnb with a friend who I had known even earlier than ’84, and who probably tolerated my obsession with this book back then. He told me subsequently that he had loved ZAM and read it around the same time as me. But he hadn’t become a philosopher-biker-dad. Why? Why had he become a lawyer? Pirsig doesn’t even like lawyers. I should mention that most of my family was with me in that Airbnb even though they have nothing to do with any of this.
On the shelf of that Airbnb was the same edition that I had originally read. It was a mint green paperback and on the cover there was that image of a wrench emerging from a lotus — a clever symbol of one of the ideas of the book — that science could be spiritual and that we do ourselves a favor by learning how to get to the meat of things. I agree with this perspective. It’s who I am and anyone who knows me knows I don’t pay people to do most things like building stuff, engine repair, or plumbing, to name only three random things. This quality has enriched me but has also taken a pretty big toll: think the destructive power of a table saw and the fragility of the human hand.
There’s a song on Blood on the Tracks, I think it’s Tangled Up in Blue, maybe not, where he croons about Verlaine’s words burning off every page as if it was written in his soul. Somewhat sheepishly I report this experience, though it wasn’t Verlaine that did it to me. I hadn’t picked up ZAM in 30 years, but I felt my mouth forming every word I read. I had this book literally memorized and so I continued, trance-like, to recite this book to itself. My bad memory is legendary in my family. Only my oldest son has a worse memory. I forget if he’s the oldest. But I really did remember every word of ZAM.
And as I read, I relived my life, as it was and as it continued to be in the present. As is my penchant, I mostly saw the mistakes, the three pillars kicked out after only 50 pages in. But there was still some fine writing and a touching but troubling relationship with his son and the core values of the book were still mine, well maybe not the fathering and husbanding or the epistemology, but the do-it-yourself values, the descriptions of red wing blackbirds and a certain amount of bullshit. I feel like I’m still not being totally fair.
Here’s the thing to say about this book, if it isn’t already clear. It completely changed my life’s trajectory without my sending even a dollar to someone like Tony Robbins. This book made me sell everything I had to buy a motorcycle, which then led me down the backcountry trails of Montana where I saw bears who were disappointed I had this stupid book instead of food. It found me love because I had a motorcycle and a fluency with Kant. It led me to Hegel who then wasted decades of my life. Lastly, despite Pirsig’s bad relationship with his son, it didn’t scare me off from having kids though it did give me the wisdom to prevent them from reading this book.
As I was recently waxing nostalgic for ZAM, the story of realizations and lessons learned, etc., my middle son (I think he’s my middle son) bemoaned that I had told him not to read it. Why, he asked, would I have denied him this book that had so transformed my life, the father that he loved so much. He was 16 at the time I scared him off — the same age as me when I had first picked up this book. He could have had a similar experience to mine. Well, I said, get your own fucking book. You like Wittgenstein, so go build a cabin in the middle of Finland or something, like he did. This is my story and it’s a three-legged stool with no remaining attached legs — so why would you want it for yourself anyway? It’s no Moby Dick no matter what stupid George Steiner said. And then my youngest son chimed in and said he was gonna get a motorcycle when he’s older and I said, no fucking way. I might preemptively sell all his shit.
And so, dear reader of this Amazon review — 40 years on, I say, “This vacuum cleaner changed my life, made me what I am, but it’s really a piece of shit, has tappets and you should buy some other book. This one is mine.”