Another kind of wildness

(Sonnet. Words yanked from "returning the books to their shelves" by Bernadette Mayer)

city          Feeling far from the city finally in Desolation.
time         Time to walk and stretch and swim and think until
19            19 o'clock in the evening
stream     when I hope we will eat a big fish you caught in the tide stream.
taxi          It's running so fast gulls taxi by
it              on blocks of driftwood; wing back; do it
mulch      again. Scent of kelp sea urchin and dessicated crab mulching
then         on the shore. The dog sniffs, then pounces cracking
window   shells with her teeth, each delicious crab leg a window on
nothing    another kind of wildness. Nothing can take this from her.
books       Like I here with my sketchpad and books,
cold         feet slippered against the cold, disregarding
phone      the insistent phone, opening turning
shelves    emptying the shelves of ordinary life.

I finish reading the 25th anniversary edition of Bernadette Mayer's wonderful Sonnets (Tender Buttons Press, 2014) while we are anchored in Desolation Sound. Despite their distance from where I am, Mayer's urban words and images suffuse my dreams, and I tap away at her lines, trying to understand how they fit together. One of Mayer's projects in particular, undertaken with Philip Good, strikes me: a list of fourteen words finds its way into a sonnet, one word per line (66). I decide I will try to co-compose with Meyer, by pulling words from another of her pieces that I love very much, a love sonnet entitled "returning the books to their shelves" (67).But as soon as I've decided on this method and pulled the words from Mayer's poem, I think, I can't make a poem from these words! I'm north of 50 degrees north latitude--what have I to do with cities, time, taxis, windows, phones or shelves? But as soon as I let the poem begin with that dilemma, the rest follows: being where I am lets me empty these words of their ordinary contexts and make other associations. Evidently, the neighbourhood is everything, no matter where you are.

Image: reflections north of 50.

On Not Reading

A couple of weeks ago I tried an experiment--not to read for a week.  I didn't think of this on my own; I was under the influence of some ideas popularized by Julia Cameron in her famous (or infamous, depending upon how you look at it) program, The Artist's Way.

At first the idea struck me--as it will no doubt strike you--as ludicrous.  Give up reading?! For a week?  During the teaching semester?! IMPOSSIBLE. But then I remembered that over the summer, while on the boat and in the throes of repairs, though I felt terribly guilty about it, I'd sometimes gone days without reading.  I knew I could do it, so I decided to try.  The week before the week I was going to give up reading, I read relentlessly.  There were classes to prepare, things to find out, a sort of bottomless well to fill up before I ceased moving my eyes across print. 

And then, suddenly, there I was, in my week.  I resisted the urge to look at the paper in the morning, to log online and cruise the pages of the internet.  I avoided facebook, long letters, magazines, and peering over the corners of others' desks at the publications scattered there.  And with each gesture of "resistance" to the thrall of print, I became more settled and more relieved.  I sat and just listened to what others were saying around, their stories and jokes and worries and tantrums.  Sometimes I laughed, as if to myself.

Peculiarly enough, the week that I was to give up reading, I was also to go to Ohio, to celebrate my mother's 70th birthday.  That meant that I would spend long hours in flight and transit lounges (there's a euphemism--uncomfortable places where loudspeakers exhort you, repeatedly, to watch your bags, report suspicious behaviour, step carefully onto the moving sidewalk and other inanities) without print to distract me.  What was I going to do? 

I walked.  I looked at things.  I spoke to people.  I listened to more conversations.  And I did, I'll confess, grade my papers (all of them!)--something I'd already decided wasn't quite reading, but more like accounting (ah the flexibilities of redefinition!) Once in the bosom of my family, I resisted the thousands of books stacked and shelved and lying about the house. I sat quietly, sometimes, or took photographs, or talked with my parents and siblings and their spouses and children.  And I learned a few things--

Among them, that reading is often, for me and others in my birth family, a compulsive act of abstraction, a determined flight from the discomforts and disagreements so close at hand between us.  I also realized that if I had a bar against reading, then I wasn't compelled to read whatever was set before me...the airline magazine say, or other books lying about, the "extra" and never finished supplements to my classes, or one research project or another....I permitted myself, thanks to the fact that I wasn't reading, to imagine or observe other things while I was waiting, or sitting for a moment, or eating breakfast or dinner alone.  (Imagine simply eating! No words!)

I found I was happier, more at ease; I didn't feel guilty all of the time.  I wasn't forever accompanied by that awful incompleteness that reading seems to deliver, the threat or the promise of the forever more, the feeling of being out of time, out of step with myself, forever behind.

I'm going to try this experiment again sometime--as soon as I can get through this stack of books and articles and magazines on and beside my desk, the bed, beside the bath, on my other desk, the floor....

Days of Death II: Awake So as to Find Words

4:44 am

I cannot sleep.

The crescent moon has risen, and throws an hour-glass shaped path of light across the bay.  It's bright enough that a few of the islands are illuminated. 

Why am I wakeful?  I feel, somehow, a failure of words.  It's not just a failure in the face of death--though our neighbours' son's suicide, and the impossibility of saying anything meaningful to anyone or about anything in the face of such a yawning gap plays its part in this night.

Suicide is a break in the compact we make with each other to try to survive; it is this compact that keeps us alive.  We all see how the parents have plunged, themselves, into this brokenness.  We say, I don't know how they'll survive it.  And as we speak perhaps we mean that phrase metaphorically or psychically.  But it is also terribly literal, awful in its concreteness--the father speaks nonstop like someone drowning in waves of emotion beyond words--and he is.  The words keep him drawing breath; without them he simply gasps for air. 

I can't stop hearing his cry as he ran upstairs and paced the empty rooms: oh Sonny, Sonny, Sonny, why did you do it?  Anguish so large it spills over, laps around our necks.  I hold my head above it, but just barely.

Every heart knows something about such a cry.  --But not this, not this: the sudden shot to the head.  Who could know that? It's beyond knowing.

Just before he ran off and began sobbing, the father stepped over to me and asked, Is my eye bloodshot?  I feel like my eye is bloodshot.

No, I said.  His eyes were red-rimmed, but not bloodshot.

Well I think it's bloodshot, he said. It just seems bloodshot.

Oh my dear, I said, it's your heart that's bloodshot.  The words just tumbled out of me.  A truth.  Blood shot indeed.  And he ran off, gasping.

I feel badly about that, although I also know he probably barely heard what I said.  The wailing wasn't about what I'd said.  It was that his son was blood.  Shot.  Who knows? Maybe in the eye.  We've assumed it was the head.  Because for us, in part, it is.  Your mind just stops working when you think of such tragedy, such catastrophic collapse.

Words are dangerous.  They always say more (and less) than you think you mean.

Perhaps that's why I've been finding them such hard going of late.  I seem to be able to find a few right ones. A few wrong ones. And then pockets of silence, that's all.  Pictures hum more loudly, echo in my inner (bloodshot) eye.

I think of one of Paul Celan's last poems, "All those sleep shapes" ("Alle die Schlafgestalten") written not so long before he too committed suicide, unable any longer to count up the fragments:

All these sleep shapes, crystalline
that you assumed
in the language shadow,

to those
I lead my blood,

those image lines, them
I'm to harbour
in the slit-arteries
of my cognition--,

my grief, I can see,
is deserting you.

I know we cannot guard others' grief for them, or from them, no matter how wakeful we remain.  My wakefulness this morning will not have meant, I am on watch so another can sleep.  My watch relieves no one; it simply keeps me here, in the compact with other sorrowing souls. All it really can mean is that I, too, rise, dull before grey dawn--to continue, with the rest, as best we can.

Notes
 Paul Celan, "All those sleep shapes" ("Alle die Schlafgestalten"). First published posthumously in his final book, Zeitgehoeft (1976). In English in Poems of Paul Celan. Trans. Michael Hamburger. New York: Persea Books, 1988, pp. 336-7. 

In fact, however, I've quoted this fragment of Celan from American poet, Claudia Rankine's meditation on death, depression, loss, family, sleeplessness and hollowness of contemporary American life in Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2004, p. 61.