Category: wondering

Safety pin note

Been so much dismal storm around safety pins, their moral meaning and weight, that wearing one, which was meant to mean

I’m with you and will help you out if you need me to if I can—

is at risk of meaning instead

I have taken a position in the debate over safety pins!

Goddamn. If anyone decides to kill off all the liberals, it won’t take a pogrom, it’ll only take putting us all in a room, and an invitation: “Talk to each other.”

That said. I’m wearing one and it’s sharpening my attention. Same as the precepts I took should (that’s another post). And I’m bothered by a small encounter and want to think and feel it through here.

I’m at Elizabeth Station, nice beer store / watering hole. Got an IPA I’m ready to buy, standing in line, and right beside me is a tasting going on – beers from my favourite brewery in the world. Unibroue, out of rural Quebec, they do the awesomest Belgians. (And you know, I’m tired to the bone of being American, suddenly keen to get my Canadian on. Quebecois, moi – vraiment? )

And K so, I’m not the best at breaking into ongoing conversations – I’m pretty damn bloody socially awkward, it’s been given me to know, on this point and others. That known, truth be told, I’m not at this point too aware of the guy presently tasting. He’s sipping from his taster glass, he’s not presently talking to dress shirt Unibroue dude. I step up

—Oh, are you doing a tasting?

And the spiel begins. Aged in cognac barrels, whatever. Pretty quick I can feel that the guy to my right, previous taster, is a bit put out. I’m not sure what it is exactly – strained smile? awkward stance? – but you’d sense it, too. Here’s where I take a few more visible facts of him in. Latino, thin well-trimmed beard, short, stocky, muscular. A smile that looks like it’s used to being friendly but just went to being thin and pained.

Okay. I’m in the middle of a micro-aggression I done. Even sweeter? I’m wearing the GD safety pin.

I want out. And am quadruply trapped: In the checkout line. At the tasting table. Wearing the GD the safety pin. Took the effing Buddhist precepts.

Quadruply stuck in a triangle of mutual misapprehension. I come up with

—Wasn’t Unibroue bought by Heineken or something?

—Sleeman’s. And they were bought by Sapporo. And they let Unibroue pretty much do their own thing. The Japanese can’t even pronounce the names of our beers.

That, from me, got a head tilt. A small thing, but the safety pin sent it to me, and I meant it as apology to the friend I didn’t make beside me, and I could see it got the message across the other spar of the triangle. The invitation to collaborate in an us-and-them, I’d turned down. Unibroue dude stumbled over his words a bit for a minute or two, till I bid him adieu.

Don’t wish him ill. He wanted to make connection in the how he knew to. Should be said, he sorely mangled the names of the beers he was pouring, Fin du monde, Trois pistoles.

Wanted, as I left, to find the friend I didn’t make, make eye contact, anything, but couldn’t. Liberal friends, conservative friends if I have any, we live in dukkha. Just gotta suck it up.

Did I break into an ongoing conversation cluelessly? I can do that. And that does happen all the time, esp. where beer is drunk. More to the point, did I feel licensed to because the man in the thin well kept beard wasn’t white?

I’m pretty self-aware, when I have time to reflect and introspect, and when I look in, I don’t find any sign of that. That a blind spot? Can’t, by definition, know.

If I’m honest about all the grubby factors that go on in male dominance calculi, our height difference was more likely a factor. But even that – not so much. He seems to me in memory grounded, muscular, sound in his frame, also open, friendly. The gorilla dog in me felt not threatening not threatened.

I can’t find a dominance intention in me. But maybe some cluelessness as to his sitch. Really the question here is, did he feel shoved aside, because I was white, and Unibroue dude was white, and he was not?

And here we are, that awful term and awfuller thing, white privilege. I don’t want it, don’t feel I have it, feel continually inadequate, but appear to be given it. At least that’s what I take from the body language and pained smile of the friend I didn’t make – something was not right for him and I was involved in it.

Tried, after I’d bought my beer, to catch his eye, make a connection – something to atone for what felt wrong and unfinished to me – and could not.

Atonement, that’s another post.

Last thought, a thread left stray above. One of the things we’re in here, with the election of Sad Trump, is a change in the chess game of the gestalt of masculinity. (Chess comes to me as trope because you can look to be losing badly – as I’ve felt we, who want to be voices of enlightenment and kindness, are – only to turn it round, wow, whew.)

I hope we’re seeing an old sense of manhood in its vital death throes. Not, please no, a victorious fascistic resurgence. (Fascist surges have never been victorious, long run; there’s comfort there.) But masculinity will not itself be extinguished. It needs to metamorphose. So I’m going to here if I need to be in my small way (10,000 hits in 2+ years is hardly more than a smudge) open, even at risk of being heterodox, about what that metamorphosis might ask. Of men, of all. Love to you friends.

Exercise: Mythtime, mythworld

Their writing exercise for this week, and it’s a tough one:

Write a poem that taps into myth consciousness. Pointers. Not literary myth consciousness, Hera, Zeus, Leda and the swan, that sentimental crap. The myth consciousness of Ghandl’s poems, all the world potentially sentient, stuffed with spirit beings. Awe, wonder, the sacred breaking down the door. To help that happen – no names of any gods or goddesses.

That would be Ghandl of the Qayahl Llaanas, classical Haida mythteller, in Robert Bringhurst’s translation.1 

Tough for students for whom Thor is a Marvel Superhero. I try to get across that the Greek and Norse gods of popular imagination are attenuated forms – you have to go back to Sappho at least, the Homeric hymns, to get a whiff of the sacred those forms were to their makers. Don’t know if I get my point across very well.

I say, when we talk about mythtime in Ghandl, that’s not only a distant past – it’s also just under the skin of this moment. Other cultures call it dreamtime. It’s what people take hallucinogenic drugs to get to. When you wake from a dream supercharged with with meaning – that’s myth consciousness.

Write a poem from that place.

How I put it in an e-mail to a student wanting to retell an Arthurian story:

The key to the assignment is to tap into myth consciousness. The state of mind that finds an enlarged significance in anything it pays close attention to. In Ghandl’s stories that enlarged significance is expressed as spirit beings and metamorphoses – how a bird skin can turn out to be weather, or a wife can be revealed as a cloud. In Greek myths, originally, that enlarged significance got expressed as “Zeus,” or “Aphrodite,” divine beings that embodied something awesome and terrifying – sacred – about being in the world.

But those myths have long since been attenuated, turned to literature, pretty stories. So I think have the Arthurian legends (which are legends, not myths, there’s a difference, though also some overlap). So it might be hard for you to tap into myth consciousness retelling one of those stories, whether or not you use the names.

I’m not going to tell you not to do it though; I’d sort of rather you didn’t retell anyone else’s story, but if you’re keen on this one, it’s not my business to stop you. Do apply this test to your poem though: Does it express wonderment? Not second-hand wonderment, coopted from the story you’re retelling, but your own, discovered in your encounter with the material.

The trick? The emoji on our iPhones, the Pokemon chars they spent a while chasing after, they too’s attenuated forms of that. We’re still after scraps of awe. Some of them are called metaphors.

A sorry nostalgic chase, I say, when leaves, wind, rain, sun, deer 953.

photo-23

1. Around which controversy skirled awhile. Whether Bringhurst had the right to. Whether those who said he didn’t spoke for the whole Haida people or no. I feel tender, tentative, around it all, but from what I can tell, Ghandl knew what he were up to, when he sold and told his stories to John Swanton, an anthropologist committed (unlike most – astonishing) to transcribing the stories he heard word for word. Was Ghandl coerced just the same? His culture was in grave peril. He could have had his stories die with him – perhaps let many to. He also, for reasons we can’t ask him, chose to sow this killing culture with seeds that flourish even today. Though the book‘s out of print.

Stray thought on the Heart Sutra

Home from a reading. Had to say no after to someone I love but not in that way. Hurt; the world hurts. Met a guy there, another practitioner, he’s giving a class on the Heart Sutra at the local Shambhala centre, I might check it out.

I walked home, got home, had to pee, went and peed. Stood there peeing and the Heart Sutra said there’s room for this, me with my dick in my hand, and the little piss bubbles breaking in the toilet, and my cat in the tub waiting impatiently I knew for me to draw more water for her to lap up, and the bit of sway in my stance from having drunk too much, and the sadness in me from having had to let someone I like, no, love, down, and the balls I felt in me for having had the whatever to do so anyway, and the joy alongside that that she liked and trusted her own affection well enough to say so to me regardless my answer. And then I was crying and there were all these forms mixing and crossing and the Heart Sutra said it’s okay like this.

Don’t even know how to put it. When you chant

Form is emptiness, emptiness is form
Form is exactly emptiness, emptiness exactly form

you don’t think, piss bubbles breaking into smaller bubbles in the toilet basin, or, sadness I feel at not having felt what someone wished I felt for them, which is a clean sadness, not the bitter sadness I would have felt if I’d dissembled. You don’t think, cat impatient in the tub for you to run the tap because for what ever effing reason that’s how she drinks water except as soon as you run it she jumps out of the tub. You don’t think, these two and a bunch of others all intersecting wildly and the whole of it and each portion of it. But – did everyone else know this already? – that’s what the lines mean. Form is form. No one is left out. The photo is my teacher and his teacher. Muge Daido Daisho. Taizan Maezumi Daisho.

 

Thought experiments

One.

Say Donald Drumpf wins the presidency. (He might.)

And say American democracy doesn’t survive the insult. (It might not.)

What comes next?

Two.

End to all climate accords? (Bad.)

End to the pax Americana? (Bad-good-bad.)

Mass deportations, end to free speech, guns on every corner, people of colour herded into, what’ll they call them, “protective enclaves”? (Bad-bad-bad-bad.)

Rise of Canada, under inevitable climate transformations and enlightened global leadership of an incipient Trudeau monarchy? (Good-bad-ish.)

A regional nuclear exchange, accidental or no? (Bad-bad-bad.)

Three.

Don’t like Clinton. Gotta be honest. Huge Obama fan, moderate Sanders fan, would have got on Biden’s wagon. Clinton grates me and I don’t give a flying fuck about the e-mails. (After those years of intrusion? I’d give as little of the truth as I could, for as long as I could, too.) Just don’t like chameleons.

But mostly, maybe 3/4, I like where she stands – now that she stands there – and the choice we got, seems to me, is between a bee-sting and apocalypse.

I watched his nomination speech. Didn’t want to, but I said to me, later this will be history having happened, you watch it. And it was, no exag, fascism.

Expect to find myself, notwithstanding a fat teaching load and renewed job search, pounding the pavement on Clinton’s behalf this fall.

Likeminded friends – please let’s make a Drumpf presidency not happen.

On Socratic method

Just quick, it’s late, and I’ve a torrent to watch. Witch.

I was made sad beyond all reasonable bound by a student’s complaint. “He has a great sense of humour but he doesn’t teach.” Someone I admired and respected so was open to feeling hurt by.

I guess in a sense she was right. You know that guy Obama? Whom I aspire to be when I grow up? And who got mocked for saying something about leading from behind? I sort of teach like that. Want you to be your own teacher, and poke you till you find it.

Times I want to say, some students, smart and shallow, young and coddled, they aren’t up for being poked. Entitled brats.

Times I want to say, it’s me fucked up, poked when I had no okay to, missed the cues, all my bad. (I’m leaving out all the lovely times it went bitchin’ fine.)

Seems to me, as of this now, it’s neither this nor that.

There’s no telling how the combos, one person and another, or 20, are going to work it out. We like to think our sciences can say, but no.

All there is, is, I do my most honourable best, you do your most honourable best. And if we fail to meet – no harm, no foul, okay?

I like to think, when I’m feeling sympathique to Plato, that that’s a premise to all his dialogues (just as all his dialogues are together a premise to all our universities). If we fail to meet, no harm, no foul, okay?

It happens to the best of stars, too. They fly on.

The bit I’ve put in my syllabus newly, with that student’s, and another’s, negations in mind.

I work by Socratic method. I ask questions meant to sharpen distinctions, shed light on unexamined premises, and enhance a student’s own capacity for inquiry. It’s a messy, improvisational process that sometimes falls flat and makes everyone (me included) feel awkward. Sometimes it looks sort of inefficient. And yet it’s the oldest teaching method we have (older than the university, as an institution, itself) and has survived this long for a reason. It makes the student her own teacher.

If it causes discomfort sometimes that’s why. Or I think so anyway. Being asked to be your own teacher is not easy or comfortable.

They’re growing more tender by the year. What’s the bearing we need to meet them rightly and kindly? I want not to do harm – want also, not to let up.

Spider-chastening

I want to affirm for reasons I maybe only partly understand something President Obama said today to graduating students at Rutgers.

Facts, evidence, reason, logic, an understanding of science – these are good things. These are qualities you want in people making policy… In politics and in life, ignorance is not a virtue.

Affirm it because I may want soon here to try to understand the draw of Drumpf. He poses a grave danger and the danger’s got to be understood. And I think for me, understanding it, how he draws so many in, means going to what’s irrational and tribal and hungry for authority in me. What feels worn down by liberal piety and wants to be told its first thought’s okay after all.

I’m a poet and believe in a beauty outside the precincts of the rational. That’s a bound on Obama’s statement, one I think he’d assent to. Irrational, arational, supra-rational.

I’m also a Buddhist, and that’s meant finding the whole range of human goodness and depravity in my own breast. I don’t get to say the bad shit’s out there. To understand Drumpf I need to look at some ugly right in here.

I want us to be governed by compassionate reasonable people. We deserve to be. After all we’ve been through, some of us more than, we all deserve to be.

Don’t take any thoughtplay to come to mean otherwise.

Just want to bring light into dark corners. Mine own. Spider-chasing.

Belatedly he feels the bern

Walking home from the beer store it came to me. I’m voting for Sanders in the primary. I so did not see that coming.

Symbolic, I know Clinton1 is going to win, but still it matters somehow.

I really don’t much like her. Was going to hold my nose and vote for her just the same. She’s better rounded and worlds more pragmatic. She’ll get shit done, and most of said shit will be, at least domestically, more good than not, these fingers cross. What Sanders wants, I love and love him for, but he’s wildly unrealistic. Heaps of sympathetic economists concur. And he ain’t too very strong on facts beyond these murkin’ borders – and that, a little, turns internationalist me off.

What shifted it for me? Three thoughts fell, feather-light, to the floor.

He’s a better person than she is.2

His values align better with mine.

Most quadrennia, he’d be the weaker general election candidate, but this time round he’s stronger. And keeping Drumpf from power is the vital matter.

So, Bernie, you have me.

1. Am I fussy to be bothered by the sexism in her so often being called Hillary? It’s not like we need to distinguish her from Bill. Sanders’s advocates call him Bernie, yes, Drumpf’s fans skeptics and detractors call him The Donald, but Clinton is called Hillary rather more generally, by commentators assuming neutrality. Same phenom I see among students who call male authors by last name, female by first.

2. I know how problematic such a thing is to say. But it’s the form the thought came in and so I set it down in that form. I’m totally into authenticity. If I subscribed to Drumpfism, and never second-guessed my most base impulse, this footnote’d be fired.3

3. Some day in the future, when daring, a post on the liberation I think Drumpf seems to offer. Something to do with id energy uncensored by a super-ego. Something to do with a counter-swing from the sort of impulse-control of which President Obama – may blessings rain down upon him – is an acme.4

4. A complexity here. The counter-swing to Drumpf is a racist swing – from a scarily other president to a reassuring xenophobic anglo-puffball. And some of the anxiety around Obama is that he doesn’t plug into any familiar racialist narrative around American black men. He’s no animal. He don’t even talk black. He speaks Harvard. (Or Yale? I get those two confused. Went to Oberlin and worried more about the difference between tofu and tempeh.)

No wonder white trash find him condescending. That’s where you’re left when the back-and-forth of projection and introjection runs out of juice.

“White trash.” Well now that was asshole of me. I’m going to leave it, cuz I think Drumpf, his upwelling from the deeps of ‘Murka’s psyche, if it has value, it’s that he exposes the tribalism we’re all of us given to.

Myself too. “White trash” the surfacing of an ineradicable tribalism. I’m white and don’t want to be that white.

That’ll be the next post maybe – tribalism, rationalism. We all still do us-and-them, folks. We do it by skin colour, we do it by creed, we do it, here in Bellingham,  by bumper sticker. You might have time, before I get to it, to read Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, which lays out how Hume and Voltaire lead to Hitler, Hollywood, and our present bind.

“Return of the repressed.” What you repress returns, doublestrong.

That includes, repress the repressor. Trump’s our asshole, and that’s hardly even a metaphor. He’s America’s id, unrepressed but constipated.

Mother’s Day, a hard day

Mother’s Day’s a hard day for me. My mother and I have been estranged for some years. We’ve started talking a bit by e-mail recently, and that’s good, but this day’s still tough, even with all my humanistic skepticism re: the greeting card–industrial complex.

So I did what I usually do when something tough comes up. In no particular order. Meditated. Neglected the dishes. Wrote in my journal. Cut myself some slack. Stared into space thinking/feeling. Neglected a pile of grading. Pulled some weeds. Chitchatted with neighbours passing.

The journal writing (nothing very new vis-a-vis my mother) (inner mother and outer mother) (a distinction for another post) (one maybe never to be writ) (curious? buy my poetry!) after photocopy mojo looks like this.

Mother's Day
Click on me for some up close face time.

Veiled, I know. Do I want you to put the work into decipherment? Ish. Confession, I swing madly between nutshell-to-others and severe overshare. Seriously – I mean no glib appropriation here – I’m close to the spectrum on this one. Can’t figure out the norms, read the signals, can only see the shudder or shoulder-turn when I’ve overstepped.

With that proviso – maybe proof of the point it makes – I’ll for once give the source text of the aasemic text above.

8 May.

Mother’s Day. Not ever an easy day. With the chime of an email arriving came in quick succession—dread of an email from my mother tearing into me for not writing sooner or in a better way—shame, at that feeling—and, a thought, the connection is broken for good isn’t it. As to that shame: thought later: wherefore? The feeling (dread) verifies itself. I mean I would not feel it if I had never had reason to feel it. So—I thought later working at weeding—instead of shame, maybe, sadness. That I think is what comes in when the shame steps aside a little—sadness, for me, for her too, in the grip of she knew not what———.

I want to affirm three friends, all mothers, who’ve borne me up today.

One, Beth Thomas, an old friend from New York, who told the truth for her about Mother’s Day today on FB and made me feel bold to do likewise.

Another, S., even longer a friend, who wrote to me today

And thinking of you because it’s that day again – how is it that day again so quickly? – and I know it’s a hard one for you. As always, I hope you not just know but believe and feel that you’re loved.

Brings tears cuz I guess I don’t always.

Third, came to me a memory of a student in our program, she’s a mother, maybe a month ago we were both at a reading, her son was with her. And seeing, late in the evening, how heavily and easily her son draped in her arms sleeping – how quietly and carefully she packed up her bag, his toys etc., so as not to wake him – how fixed even so, all the while, her attention was on the reader reading, taking the words in.

Is it strange of me? Do you find it ordinary? It was so moving to me, her undividedness, her totally being nourished by what she was there for – the poetry – and being totally there as what her son needed her to be.

I need, as we all do, to be mother to myself, and lack, as many do, a good interior image of that. And so I savage me.

A lot of my inner life is trying to find relief from that.

Some relief comes from inner resources. Some more comes from chosen works – teaching, say, though I should be grading right now. And some comes from blessings like rain – friendships like these three.

She’s also, that third one, one of the most kickass poets I’ve worked with.

We ask a lot of mothers (fathers also) (children also).

Who are we that we think we get to ask so much.

Donald Drumpf. That’s your koan. Pass it and I’ll vote for you.

Good luck w/ that.

Addendum May 9.

Not Mother’s Day. Mothers’ Day.

Or just Mother Day.

Be a mother to what needs you to.

Something, someone, in here, out there, do.

Have I tucked this where none will see it?

I do that.

Syria, wildfire, climate change, and the 2nd Coming maybe

Article in the Times this evening, about refugees from Syria who, having settled safely in Canada, find themselves escaping flames once more, as a wildfire of great speed and scope sweeps through the oilsands town of Fort McMurray, Alberta.

Ms. Wedad Rihani, 68, a lawyer once of Syria – just where the indefatigable Ian Austen does not say –

“I left fire back home created by humans to come to the fire here,” Ms. Rihani said, her son providing translation. “Here you can escape; at home there’s no escape. Here you get a smile; there you get no help.”

Good for my home country.

It should be said though. Both conflagrations – war eating Syria, fire eating Fort McMurray – are climate change at work.

Our works are coming home to us. As to the one. As to the other. Viz, do.

I don’t mean to be unkind. These sufferings are awful, some beyond awful, beyond imagining, mine anyway.

I mean to say – root causes.

Am in a torn mood tonight. The Republican Party is tearing itself in two. But before I get too giddy happy at that – what rough beast, yo? Nuclear codes, yo? The tear comes by a terrifying claw.

American democracy survived, tho’ battered from the inside yes, eight years of Bush Dub. Eight Obama years – and I’m a big fan, would love for a third go – tested it in a few ways, too. This ginger puffball, I don’t want his name on my blog, this one, I don’t think so, I think he’s a grievous threat to the form itself.

He’s a totalitarian clown and I want just to brush him off. But we see by now where underestimating his strength, his appeal, gets us.

Hit me tonight how much hate there is in this country and it made me sad.

There could be a measure for that. Hate Per Capita. And an emergency global compassion fund to take care of it. Probably some climate change would get taken care of, and some income equality, and some other social justices also.

Seriously. Not to be condescending, but America’s HPC is higher than Canada’s, yes? For identifiable understandable karmic reasons, sure. So maybe Canada should be making some sort of lovingkindness donation southward. Without expecting recompense. Cuz that’s not how it works.

Tho’ recompense somehow comes. E.g., Ms. Rihani, whom I’ve not met, and never will, feels affection for northern Alberta – northern Alberta, in its early spring and laid waste by wildfire, and she speaks well of it! What a mind.

Imagine M. Ginger Puff had said to bar the door to her great spirit.