Dreaming With Beauty

The first morning of the zero years began, for me, driving back to Dallas from San Antonio where I spent New Year’s Eve 1999 at the funky old Cibolo Creek Country Club listening to the music and some of the hopes of Terri Hendrix, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Lloyd Maines, and friends. A bagpiper in full regalia took the stage to summon the decade with his squalling, somehow still beautiful sound; the essence of high lonesome

On the morning of Jan. 1, 2000, I began driving home, slowly, in a fog so densely white that I couldn’t see 30 feet ahead on the highway. I didn’t hit or kill anybody, I supposed because everybody else had enough sense to stay off the streets until that fog dissipated.

I heard the piper again, and touched the knee of dark-eyed, emerging Beauty, who tried to sleep, warm under my coat, in the seat beside me.

I pulled the car to the side of the road. We got out and walked toward the music, finding ourselves on a path under a canopy of gnarled apricot trees, green, heart-shaped leaves slowly dripping moisture.

Eventually, almost but not quite timelessly, it seemed, the fog lifted, and we came to a clearing and saw the entrance to a traveling circus. The ticketmaster collected money from a lengthening line of people who slowly approached in ones and twos and small groups from the surrounding forest. He looked at Beauty for a moment, and waved us into the rhythmic sounds of mechanical rides, the murmurs of voices, and the shuffling of feet on hard ground.

Hand in hand, two damaged souls, we walked past the waking fun into the nightmare lane of sideshows and barkers.

We heard the voices of the people around us, the thoughts, we saw some of the images, felt some of the fears and hopes, like magnets, as we passed close in the growing crowd, almost touching the people’s faces covered with other people’s ashes. We heard bits and pieces of thoughts: . . . “two planes hitting buildings in New York” . . . “helplessness and hopelessness of Katrina” . . . “the world just changed forever” . . . “my mother passing away” . . . “an old and suffering horse named Is being shot in the forehead with a rifle outside of Oslo, collapsing with a thump to the ground, shit and piss flowing from its dead body for minutes afterward” . . . “cicadas buzzing and fireflies dancing” . . . “dear friends sharing the afterglow” . . . “losing my best friend” . . . “birth of my granddaughter” . . . “Steven Fromholz performing ‘Texas Trilogy’” . . . “listening to Brian Burns’ American Junkyard” . . . “a morning in East Texas, traveling with a new friend, seeing a big yellow junction sign saying ‘church’ before the rains came down so heavily the wipers couldn’t compete” . . . “a roadside café’s light glowing, and inside four people who looked like they’d been sitting in the exact same chairs for 30 years” . . . “the hope during Barack Obama’s inauguration” . . . “driving back to Minnesota from Nashville in a storm I later found out was a tornado, with all my earthly possessions, heading to a house I'd never seen but bought anyway” . . . “the first time I saw a bald eagle circling the river very low so I could see his markings” . . . “standing out in the middle of the blackest night gazing up at the Perseid Meteor showers” . . . “finding my husband laying on the floor unconscious in the kitchen with his head split open, laying in a large pool of blood” . . . “the ugliness of a used car lot that went on for acres, maybe miles” . . . “the sight of my son sitting a horse like he was born to the saddle” . . . “a U.S. soldier running while on fire in Iraq” . . . “the home movie of the birth of my twins” . . . “seeing my wife alive for the last time” . . . “the brightness of a full moon atop Enchanted Rock when I wasn’t supposed to be there” . . . “learning my own life is very finite and how to savor every moment” ...
Reality became conditional or quantum.

We heard the barkers in their shiny suits, urging us all to come through their curtains, to pay to hear their truths: . . . “don’t believe science; Earth is only 6,000 years old” . . . “the people in New Orleans got what they deserved for living in that sewer” . . . “hate in the name of god” . . .“mission accomplished” . . . “just stall and say no to everything” . . . “deny it long enough and loud enough” . . . “lie for the truth” . . . “death panels are real” . . .

Beauty and I stopped near the end of the nightmare lane and hugged one another, feeling the texture of consciousness.

Among the best of the humanity around us, we also felt the residue of too many lives led in a continually narrowing funnel rather than in the blossoming of flowers. In a society that’s too often more comfortable dealing with the trivial than what matters, we heard intellectual Luddites rail against artists, teachers, and intellectuals. We felt the pains of America coming to terms with its place in the world, not yet ready to shed its sense of privilege nor ready to reclaim its best ideals. We wondered, does dignity rest in peace? We wondered, are our lives written in neon, to be lived in a circus?

Winter becomes a cold time to survive, dreams polished by soft, warm blankets, the hours of darkness slowly warmed by the idea of sun’s heat in spring. I lay with Beauty; her warmth and her slow, steady breathing in sleep comfort me under the full blue moon as we dream of distant possibilities of the next 10 years.

Hudnall Planetarium, Tyler Texas
21 November 2009



I’ve been
to Venus
and to Mars

I know
several of the stars

I’ve been
east of Jupiter,
and I’ve seen Fate

on two fists,
I count the people I hate

the spoon feeds me
the moon touches me
the loon sings for me –
its song all night long
willing souls to the heavens


Reality intrudes. Venus is a small town south of Dallas. Mars was an even smaller town between Ben Wheeler and Murchison. Fate is a small town in Northeast Texas. Jupiter is a street in Dallas; just east of it is the Lone Star Café where I used to eat nachos and listen to music.

U.S. poet laureate – or just past – Charles Simic doesn’t separate the serious from the comic in his writing. Tonight, I won’t separate myth from fact from fantasy – in hopes of making them all more interesting.


Robert Coover refers to the notion of art as speech, as discourse with time. Philip Booth refers to time as the apple Adam ate.

miles beyond the crossroads,
spirit comes to the edge of time:
rubble of forgotten civilizations
shifts, beginning to slide over the edge,

endless falls of dirty water
begin to sparkle like faraway stars

exposed roots of old trees,
persistent wind pushing
sudden, brief calmness

verge of vastness twilit
into darkness disturbed

gravity begins to fail

you begin to feel levitation
like, perhaps, a balloon
on the verge of flight or fall,
its string a history of the years

wind swirls,
pushes and pulls

time collapses
in the gravity of a new planet
with huge skull-shaped moons


when the universe exploded,
time felt useless and lonely, and remained
like a sadness forever
expressed in the silence
between two clean, high piano notes
in a star-lit desert night


If we are truly human, we want to know the unknown. We simultaneously go inside to explore ourselves and reach out to explore the universe. Psychologist-educator Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s ("chick-sent-me-high-ee") contends that the bigger the world we inhabit, the closer we come to truth. Substitute “universe” for “world.”

Novelist-poet Jim Harrison said “The dark side of the moon is merely dark and cold, and Jupiter and Saturn only distant flecks of brain hurled out before time was.”

Loren Eiseley wrote of the need for “the contemplative naturalist, a man who, in a less frenzied era, had time to observe, to speculate, and to dream.” As a child, Eiseley watched Halley’s Comet cross Earth’s sky, and began to appreciate the profound sense of time and space he wrote of in his essay collection “The Invisible Pyramid” – first published shortly after Americans landed on the moon. He explores inner and outer space and the so-called limits of what can be known. He said man would not be man if his dreams did not exceed his grasp. “If I dream by contrast of the eventual drift of the star voyagers through the dilated time of the universe, it is because I have seen thistledown off to new worlds and am at heart a voyager who, in this modern time, still yearns for the lost country of his birth.”


Eve stared at the yellow-orange light, reflected from the moon, looking many times larger than usual, through the nearly bare fall branches of tall sweet gum trees. Each time she swayed to the left or the right, the trees’ limbs made the light almost seem, with a little imagination, to move like a flame. It looked like a fireball on the horizon. She never saw anything like that before. It was beautiful and delicate and, in some way, frightening in its oddness.

Eve wondered.

A serpent glided across the soundless path of moonlight on the ground, paused beside a fallen tree turning soft under lichen and mushrooms. Nearby, a stream of green water waited as still and quiet as the serpent.

High above, gods gathered to watch through pinholes of stars. The sky was crowded with stars. The air was already cold.


the ghost of a sun
on an overcast day

we imagine a museum of light
far into the future, dark Earth
where pale creatures pay
the price of admission to seek
their own reflections

you come to me, timid for a moment,
so you may be worshipped
as you begin to learn your own power

something dead or dying is caught
in an invisible web;
(something moving,
or blown by the breeze)
the glisten is all
we see of the web in the ghost of a sun,
and something dead or dying caught


land at the end of time,
property at the pulse of eternity,

the man who never
touched his own future
wandered, wondered
in the never forest
on the shore of the once lake,
dry to its white, white bones

the man thirsts
for his own presence


On some nights in the city, the clouds are thick above, and lightning moves from horizon to horizon without rain. On such nights, the man usually stands at the window for hours, feeling as much as seeing and hearing the synapses.
The air almost lives. It feels fresh with potential and excitement.
Pendrift wonders how something – a moment or gesture, a trauma, or a joyous act – becomes mythology. He has distinct memories of several times, as a child, though he does not believe these memories, levitating into a clear, light blue sky from the ground of the first home he remembers. The sky was almost translucent, with a few small, white clouds as he willed himself a little higher, higher still until he could look down on the glitter in the roof’s shingles, as he willed himself even higher until he began to wonder whether, if he went too high, he would ever return.
Now, as the lightning moves in the sky, as he moves “backward over the cemetery of spent hours,” as Italo Calvino wrote, the man wonders about the quality of memory and mythology: creating and living with personal mythologies, embracing, letting go, something in between.
Blood, sweat, and years, he thinks to himself, smiling quietly at the wordplay, perhaps clichéd.
The classic mythological themes cross many cultures; our academics showed us that. The man moves away from the window to a table near his desk, searching cluttered stacks of paper until he finds the Sherrington quote: “The brain is an enchanted loom, weaving a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern, though never an abiding one, a shifting harmony of sub-patterns.”
Without memory, Pendrift thinks, can there be meaning? Are personal mythologies just memories that we believe? Is every personal mythology a mask?
Taste: a long, slow, full swallow of life.
Pendrift remembers walking in the ruins of ancient civilizations, and hearing the silence.
He remembers watching a lone Monarch butterfly on its ancestral flight to find warmth.
He remembers floating through a hotel lobby on the shoulders of jubilant friends.
He remembers the solitary lull of a desert’s heat.
He remembers wild horses, alert and free, along the Rio Grande.
He remembers watching a castle burn, and smelling gunpowder in the air.
He remembers pausing in old forests, and listening to trickles of shallow water over smooth stones.
He remembers losing himself, and coming back again, in the songs of some of the world’s best musicians.
He remembers perfect moments of timeless love.
He remembers that, from time to time, he inspired people to visit their own creative places.
He thinks briefly of peace with a long-gone woman, of her invitation to stay forever in her quiet apartment with gentle sunlight reflecting off dust in the air. He thinks of slumbering drunkenly with another woman. He thinks of the angel who once called him, talking but not making sense, then taking a deep breath and blurting to him, “I’m losing it. I don’t think I can fly anymore.”
Journey, not sitting still, at least for long, is one of the greatest of all personal myths. Whether we walk or fly, the trip we take is to be in harmony with the universe, or at least with ourselves. And passage; brief moments of death and resurrection rituals. Death, when we sit still for too long; resurrection when we begin to move again. These are rites of passage.
The thoughts of peace, of drunken slumber, of answering a call for help – these are part of Pendrift’s personal mythologies. (Myths are not true; mythologies are.) Each is intoxicating.
Long ago, quiet beauty, the taste of sweat and salt and “love,” walking away from the perfect invitation is a distant form of purity when it’s real and it’s gone.
Not so long ago, the several times he drank too much wine – or just enough – with the crazy woman he loved almost as much as any of the others, and they always fell asleep under the heavy blanket like twins in a womb, until one of them woke, startled by the other side of distance, a woman called Distance, the sense of distance, the feel of distance – vast, hollow, more grey than dark.
A timeless moment, still, of caring, of the angel (whatever that word means or doesn’t) who came to him for help when she needed it. The man thinks of creation as nurturing—what the taste of creation would be. He realizes that moments of creation are as close as we come to immortality.
Pendrift stands at the window. The lightning is gone. There is only a hint of the moon in the moving clouds. The moon is barren and distant; its pull is unmistakable.


The moon. It lures us beyond its reality.

Many years ago, English laborer Charles Hyde was acquitted on murder charges on the grounds that he was under the spell of the full moon.
The Greek king Lycaon was transformed into a wolf for playing an ill-conceived trick on Zeus. So, with many cultures’ legends and with Hollywood’s help, we get werewolves, appearing at the full moon.
The moon is, traditionally, the most visible symbol of feminine energy in our solar system.
Of the moon, Sylvia Plath wrote, “This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.”


hand
plucks
moon

from sky, holding it
carefully so it won’t break,

puts moon into mouth;
moon tastes of expectations


silhouette of blackbird moves silently, unseen,
between man and place where moon was

light from long-gone stars
illuminates Earth
on harshest of February night:
snow on ice,
hardship and
hunger



the moon smiles

slowly
its mouth widens
into a surprised “oh”

as it watches us catch the thunder every night for a month and
put it in a jar of lightning bugs
to hear them gasp at the deep,
bone-jarring glory
of the boom



the moon,
dead,

winks
at us all


the moon circles and slowly winks omens
that fall like hard rain
toward brittle Earth

while the bell
tolls
for the virgin who wanders

through fields of wishes
for all eternity



The yearning for “beyond” – for eternity – is another part of what makes us human. Myths supposedly help us understand ourselves. As many people have said, we can deny the actual science of myths and still appreciate their importance, their “power to free the human imagination, enabling us to envision new worlds, overcome old boundaries, and eventually move us all forward to a better understanding of ourselves and the universe around us.”
Most ancient cultures saw pictures in the stars. The lion, the bull, and the scorpion date back 6,000 years.
Homer referred to the Greek constellations in the Iliad in the 7th century B.C.: the creation of Achilleus’ shield by the craftsman god Hephaistos, showing the earth, and sky, sea, sun, and the moon waxing full, and all the constellations that “crown” the heavens.
By the 5th century B.C., most of the constellations came to be associated with myths of the gods who “serve” us, with no distinction between astronomy and mythology.
As everyone here knows, the planets have names from Roman mythology: Mercury, named for the speedy messenger god, revolves fastest around the sun; Venus, named for the goddess of love and beauty, shines most brightly; Mars, named for the god of war, appears blood-red; Jupiter, named for the single most important god, is the largest planet in our solar system. Even the names of the Galilean moons of Jupiter (the four largest, which may be seen with even a small telescope) are drawn from mythology. Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto were all desired – and taken by force – by Jupiter.

Galileo found a “new” planet in 1610 – Saturn with its beautiful and once-mysterious rings – Ringworld. Four hundred years later, not all of the mysteries have been solved.
Mythologically, Saturn has a bloody, gruesome past. Cronus was the ruling Titan who came to power by castrating his father, Uranus. To ensure his own safety Cronus ate each of his children as they were born – until his unhappy wife Rhea tricked him into swallowing a rock instead of his son Zeus. When he grew up, Zeus revolted against Cronus and the other Titans and banished them to the underworld. Cronus, though, escaped to Italy, where he ruled as Saturn. (The period of his rule was said to be a golden age on Earth, honored by the Saturnalia feast.)

Recently, NASA scientists discovered a nearly invisible ring around Saturn -- one so large that it would take one billion Earths to fill it. Its diameter is equivalent to 300 Saturns lined up side to side. The bulk of it starts about 3.7 million miles away from the planet and extends outward another 7.4 million miles. The ring is made up of ice and dust particles that are so far apart that if you were to stand in the ring, you wouldn’t even know it.

Which, in this modern, twisted world, might make the literary mind think of Purgatory.

The underworld. Purgatory.


Slow-moving clouds
cover one tip of the thinnest rind of a moon,
a silver-orange expression of otherness
in dark sky. It is night,
after all, and the moon appears almost empty.
This is purgatory.

We approach a gate
made of damned souls who fall on us
like thin veils in a swirling wind through an open window
to caress our bodies in a room still lit by candles.

. . . the slow whir of a ceiling fan,
the persistent restfulness of dust,
slow, regular breathing of lovers asleep, in dreams . . .

from the flickering candles:
scents of jasmine and lemon


more conjurer than carpenter
more smoke than substance
more hope than honey

We live
in a strange world
of beauty and fear

a strange world of beauty and fear
a strange world of beauty and fear

where what’s real
where what’s real
where what’s real

is often lost to us all
is not often enough
is not enough
is too much

where what’s real belongs
more to the conjurer
than to the carpenter
more to the smoke
than to the substance

a strange world
of beauty and fear



We are all, perhaps, as Joni Mitchell put it in her song “Woodstock,” stardust, walking along a road trying to reach a festival of music, to join a rock ‘n’ roll band and free our souls:

“We are stardustWe are goldenAnd we’ve got to get ourselvesBack to the garden.”

Billion year old carbon.


. . . a lace of stars across a wide, dark sky, cold as frost, as the poet leaks out like red blood on a sticky honky-tonk floor, odor of the hunt: “only one AK47 per household” patience learning and teaching looking people in the eye shallow creeks speaking in deep forests the Alps the ocean Twain & Tolkien Gray’s “Swimming to Cambodia” Tomlin/Wagner’s “Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe” Hillerman’s clean easy prose Straub’s ghost story Monty Python & Fawlty Towers Northern Exposure: the middle years Appalachian music done by people who understand it Townes Van Zandt’s “we all got holes to fill” Angela Carter’s “Nights at the Circus” compulsion sleepy sex before daylight still her presence hurts her absence more truth & surprise, occasional silliness unnatural blondes strong, huggable women slow gentle movement snow falling thank you. A woman dancing stops to watch her reflection in the mirror, but nothing is there.


The moon reflects, and is bitter above the wide desert borderland and the ribbon of a muddy river now guided by canyon walls. Light reflected by the moon echoes, becomes music. The desert cemetery in black and white: distant high clouds and low mountains . . . plastic flowers and rusty wire . . . chalky soil once stone . . . insects and snakes crawling in the heat . . . missing slats from picket fences . . . wooden crosses that would crumble at a touch . . . fading inscriptions and everything else that’s not there . . . the harmonies of wind, percussion of rare rain and footsteps, and beating of wings . . . the hollow taste of abstraction. Wind blows, dust rises; each mote a planet with entire histories of pagan civilization and gods, each moon a tiny shiver. He thinks to follow his passions through the rubble and the night, to lie down in bright moonlight on desert sand, to wait for the rattlesnake or the dawn


Walker Percy wrote that “small, disconnected facts, if you take note of them, have a way of becoming connected.”

The moment is what counts, not what leads up to it. Is that a lie? Yes. In a two-digit relational system, the zero – the unknown – is always implied in moonlight. We are strangers in the flight, in the lull of gravity, standing too close to reason and too far from instinct.

Human progress remains a struggle despite our tired, stumbling trot along the rutted road just out of reach of the torchbearers who would bludgeon us, would pull us to the ground and drag us backward in the darkness.

We are still on the early edge of human possibilities, like we are still in the Big Bang.

The September issue of Scientific American deals with origins of all sorts, telling us that our universe began with that big bang 13.7 billion years ago, expanding and cooling ever since, evolving from a formless soup of elementary particles “into the richly structured cosmos of today.” In the first microsecond, seeds formed that would become galaxies; dark matter, still unidentified, that holds it all together was created. The editors said the future of the universe “lies in the hands of dark energy.”

Before the big bang, there was nothing that we could identify as matter, energy, space, or time. From the dark ages to the modern era – most of that 13.7 billion years, we did not exist. On a 24-hour clock, we would live in the last second or so. Eventually, our Milky Way will collide with the Andromeda galaxy; from there, who knows – continued expansion or collapse, or, most poetically, the last stars burn out and the universe expands eternally. In between, sacs of water and RNA stimulated by heat and cold, more complex ribozymes that create chemical reactions that help protocells find nutrients, symbiotic relationships, DNA, and, billions of years later, us.

Along the way, we get light

We get life, which physicist Erwin Schrödinger once called the ability to “self-assemble against nature’s tendency toward disorder, or entropy” and chemist Gerald Joyce called “a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution.”

Only 35,000 or so years ago, we made music and other art, which Scientific American’s editors said indicates we were thinking symbolically by then. Our minds are different from other animals’ minds in four ways, they said: 1) generative computation, which allows us to create “a virtually limitless variety of words, concepts, and things;” 2) promiscuous combining of ideas, which “allows the mingling of different domains of knowledge – such as art, sex, space, causality, and friendship – thereby generating new laws, social relationships, and technologies;” 3) the ability to use mental symbols that “encode sensory experiences both real and imaging, forming the basis of a rich and complex system of communication;” and 4) the ability to think abstractly, which “permits contemplation of things beyond what we can see, hear, touch, taste, or smell.”

We get “the ability to infer the presence of others,” and we create narratives “to make sense of what may be a disconnected jumble of events.”

We get bitter chocolate, which pre-Columbian cultures offered to the gods.

We get clocks, designed to tell us what time it is, even though Einstein’s theory of general relativity says time has no objective meaning.

We get marketing, which sells diamonds by convincing us that they are “the only acceptable symbol of everlasting love.”

We wonder about rainbows. And romantic love.

Paranoid, we look for “meaningful patterns in random noise” and come to believe in conspiracies too complicated to exist.

We hope.

We get bursts of speed to race ahead of the torchbearers, to feel clean air cooling the sweat on our faces rather than the heat of the fire. We hope for the slow, colorful coming of dawn.

CONTENT WARNING: If you are easily offended by political or cultural opinions other than your own, please do not read this eletter.



I Will Worry, I Suppose, But I Will Not Hate Nor Will I Fear
August 2009 email newsletter, Vol. 2, #006

I will not live in a shroud of fear. I will not wander in a cold night fog of rumors. I will live with some sort of hope. And trust.

Today, I photographed the dried husk of a locust clinging to a stick that my parents use to stir the ashes as their trash fire burns down.

Five minutes later, I photographed the pale, discarded skin of a snake dangling 10 feet or more above me in the fork of two large branches in a large shade tree. In the light breeze, the thin skin (discarded as the snake grew) moved slowly back and forth. While the husk seemed somehow otherworldly, the snake’s skin seemed eerie. I was uncomfortable; snakes, no matter what I “know” intellectually, stir two instincts in me: run, kill.


We have a president and a congress duly elected by the majority of voters. He and the voters who elected him give me hope that we can actually solve some of this nation’s cultural and political problems.

Some people genuinely agree with his policies. That’s fine.

Some people believe they will lose a lot of influence and money if his ideas succeed. Some people, for whatever reason or reasons including racism, simply hope he fails. Many of these people fail our country by twisting truth out of shape to improve their own chances of “winning.” Some tell big lies; too many people with real but culturally and politically unjustified fears believe the lies. Fear cripples us. Fear of anything “different” and fear of losing whatever we have, however great or small or real or imagined.

Are people who fear and people who hate (isn’t hatred a product of fear?) so much that they won’t accept a progressive nation really any closer to being “democratic,” with the lowercase d, than those people in so-called third-world countries who have feuded for centuries? This win-at-any-cost approach insults the democratic concept, and the very thought of civilization.

I, a white man, will not isolate myself from the world. I will be a part of the world, not in any big way, surely, but in simple daily acts.

Even if, some days, that act is just in remembering.

I remember, as a child in the Methodist church in the early 1950s, riding in a crowded car with other children and a couple of adults one Wednesday night to attend another church, and sitting in the car watching rain slowly fall through the halo of light from a streetlamp as one of the elders went inside the church. He came back and told us we couldn’t go in because the people in the church were black and “some of the parents” at our church might not like us going in.

Later, in the early 1960s, as an older teenager, some of us skipped church one morning and drove around, ending up outside another church, an older, well kept, white frame building where a black congregation sang familiar hymns. We parked, and listened to the singing come from the open windows until the people inside noticed us and began to stare and stir. Finally, I remembered that this was just a very few months after white men bombed a black church in Birmingham and killed, if I remember correctly, four little girls. I drove away, so that we would not cause any more discomfort.

As an adult in a late 1980s trip to Washington DC, I walked to a corner near the National mall early one evening to catch a cab. I wore a business suit; the black man standing on the corner was, perhaps, a little older than me. He wore a clean white t-shirt and clean, creased jean, and had stood there for at least as long as I could see him as I walked down the block. Several cabs passed. He looked at me, frustrated, and said, “I’ll bet you get a cab before I do.” I agreed with him. I raised my hand. A cab stopped. I stepped back, and gestured for him to take it.

Some days, the simply daily act is touchable. More often than not, it has nothing to do with race. It’s trying to help a young woman get off drugs, or helping publicize a fundraiser for a nonprofit that battles child abuse, or spending seven hours at a local high school talking with a graduating senior who’s had more than her share of problems, but who dreams of being a writer.

There are, potentially, more simple acts than there are people. We never know which ones will really make a difference in someone’s life, but some of them will.

Not long ago, I read a quotation by the often, and rightly in many ways, maligned Robert McNamara, a major architect of the U.S. war in Vietnam, who said, “All the evidence of history suggests that man is indeed a rational animal but with a near infinite capacity for folly . . . In the end he plugs away obstinately with the only building material really ever at hand: his own part-comic, part-tragic, part-cussed but part-glorious nature.” In the same story, filmmaker Errol Morris said of McNamara, “If he failed, it is because he tried to bring his own idea of rationality to problems that were bigger and deeper and more deeply irrational than he or anyone else could rationally understand.”

I will not live in a shroud of fear, nor wander in a cold night fog of rumors. I have my own fears, of course, for our world and for our country and for myself. My own greatest personal fear, perhaps, is that I will find myself homeless with my clunker of a car broken down in a desert night, and that I will die there, alone and quickly forgotten without having made any lasting impact, however small, on the world. Until then, I will live with some sort of hope. And trust.

The snake’s discarded skin waves in the breeze like a flag from the past. The dried husk of the locust still clings to the stick that my parents use to stir the ashes. Tonight, other locusts cry noisily in the dark. I think that our daily acts can be poetry; then I think of the Leonard Cohen quote someone shared with me a couple of days ago: “If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.”

Patience, Rhetoric, and Common Realities
July 2009 email newsletter, Vol. 2, #005

The night fell like freedom on the oppression of the day’s heat. After spending much of the day shooting photographs at an Independence Day celebration in tiny Ben Wheeler, Texas, I got home and finished reading a novel, Gregory Maguire’s “Son of a Witch,” that is the sequel to his “Wicked,” the real story of the Wicked Witch of the West. If we believe Maguire, she was misunderstood and misrepresented in “The Wizard of Oz.”

“Son of a Witch” tells the story of Liir, who might be her son and who is trying to find himself and to do something good in that strange land.

The novel’s coda is a quote that Maguire credits to Thomas Jefferson from 1798: “A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true spirit, restore their government to its true principles.”

It is such an appropriate quotation for the hope of this July 4 as we look toward the end of the zero years (2000-2009) and toward, perhaps, the emergence of a new era. Give me that romantic notion. As I took the truth of Jefferson’s words, the real witches were those people who, one after another, ruled Oz for their own ends or who blindly followed orders.

I share another quote that grabbed me recently, this one from a newspaper column by Eugene Robinson: “But what about those who might not understand that it’s all just political theater . . . whether all the blast-furnace rhetoric coming from the right is giving validation and encouragement to some confused, angry man or woman with a rifle or a truck full of fertilizer – the next ‘lone wolf,’ preparing to howl.”

I try to decide if we live furled in the Jimi Hendrix version of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and have done so since well before 2001, flowing into “Purple Haze,” or if we live in Ray Charles’ version of “America the Beautiful.”

I try to keep in mind that it is fear, not hatred, that drives so many people and that patience, meaningful education, and experience can overcome fear. I abhor the egotistical fringe that fuels its own flame by fanning that fear.

Sometimes I would like to be the eccentric guy in one of those mediocre horror movies who tells everybody the truth but nobody believes him until it’s almost too late. Sorta a post-civilization, New rAge catcher in the rye, I suppose.

What would I say? I would remind, perhaps, that scientists recently discovered that 35,000 years ago during the Ice Age someone or some group sat in a cave in what is now southern Germany with a carved ivory figurine of a woman and played music on an 8.6-inch-long flute made from a hollow bird bone with five finger holes and a notched end. That information, from an archeological study, fascinates me for some reason.

In June, I planted some pale green vines that I hope will flourish, and will eventually share crimson passion flowers with me. It is an act of patience, a single opening of a door for the passing of all sorts of witches’ spells. It is an act to summon beauty, and I hope the beauty is worth the trouble that some tell me is a part of the vine’s selfishness, its habit of, like the world’s ordinary people, coming back again and again. That habit is a strength, however selfish it might be.

Today, I see tiny, inch-long red flowers beginning to bloom from another plant. These are the first flowers to bloom from something I put in the ground last fall. They do not listen to political theater. They will grow stronger. There will be more of them.

An Unfortunate Myth

Contemplate the unfortunate myth of common knowledge in a world that may, indeed, too often seem culturally vapid but is not as common as we too often believe it to be.

Sandra Day O’Connor, surely a wise old woman, once said, and is recently and often quoted as saying, that a wise old man and a wise old woman would come up with the same solution. That simplistic statement, surely no more than a sound bite in some larger context, is wrong because we don’t all have the same experiences and perspectives to begin to base our decisions on.
We need to apply diversity of experience to make the best decisions. That’s neither to support nor to dismiss Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, although I see no reason to not support her nomination in whatever small way that I can. O’Connor’s sound bite, removed from its context, is no better or worse than Sotomayor’s contention, in context, that a Latina could make a better decision than an Anglo male. Sure she could; so could an Anglo male, applying each’s experience and perspective to the issue at hand.

Either sound bite, especially, for some unexplored reason, O’Connor’s, sounds like something a person with more answers than questions, no matter how intelligent, would deliver.

It took me many years to realize that everybody is not just like I am, that everybody does not think like I do, that everybody does not come to the same conclusions that I do. It was, at first, a quiet revelation to myself that slowly blossomed in sunlight.

Houghton Mifflin published E.D. Hirsch Jr.’s book, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, way back in 1987. I still agree with the basic premise, cultural literacy, despite the criticism the bestseller got, and despite Hirsch’s assumed and surely best-intended arrogance in the appendix which tried to list (pages 152-215) what literate Americans should know. I would, without a doubt pass his knowledge test, and probably would even make a good grade on it if it were multiple choice. I shudder at how some of Leno’s “Jay Walking” guests would no doubt respond; I can’t believe how ignorant some of those people are, although I am less ignorant only by degrees.

We do, surely, prosper if we are culturally literate. The interesting problem, though, is in knowing what we need to know.

If I were compiling a Hirsch list, I would start with The Golden Rule, which Hirsch includes on his list. It basically tells us that we should treat people like we would like to be treated; it’s a “rule” that too often seems tarnished beyond recognition these days, submerged in some once dusty, now flooded basement in New Orleans. If basements even exist in New Orleans, filled with old knowledge being crushed by the skyscrapers of mirrored-glass trivia.

After The Golden Rule, I would assume a global rather than American approach.

Then, before I began to even try to come up with a meaningful list of what we, as members of a species sometimes trying to understand each other, need to know, I would consider process more important than content. Does content matter? Sure it does. Process matters more. Because process – critical thinking and problem-solving skills – based on The Golden Rule is more likely to force us to think. Problem-solving skills begin with the recognition that a problem exists. Commonly, that’s followed by properly defining the problem, looking at possible solutions, deciding what to do about it, and then doing it and making sure whatever’s done is done right. Critical thinking, according to a Wikipedia summary, involves both logic and broad intellectual criteria including clarity, credibility, accuracy, precision, relevance, depth, breadth, significance, and fairness.

I apologize, in this culturally vapid, sound bite world, for using the word intellectual.

What We Do To Each Other And Ourselves

Consider, for a moment, what we do to each other. And to ourselves. Consider what we could do for each other. And for ourselves. For several days, I planned to write about mentoring but the thoughts never came together well enough. Never felt more than ordinary. We (all of us) have the opportunity, though, to share. That’s a better word than mentor, I believe right now.

We can know, if not understand. We can feel the heat of the sun and the pull of the moon. It is said that we can forgive.

Mark Twain once wrote, “Forgiveness is the scent of violets on the sole of the shoe that crushed it.” It doesn’t seem like Twain, but he’s most often credited with the words (as he is also most often credited with apologizing for writing somebody a long letter by saying he didn’t have time to write a short one) which have been quoted many times, most recently by Holly Gleason in an email to me and I don’t know how many other people.

In a rambling piece filled with short paragraphs about many subjects, Holly wrote: “Out of every painful thing, lessons emerge, compassion rises, understanding deepens. Sometimes we get to see the vulnerability and fragility of others in a way that makes them even more beautiful.”

I see beautiful young women (or girls on the verge). I signed two autographs for one who was too shy to read her poetry in front of classmates and visitors a tiny East Texas high school, but who let herself be convinced and survived the experience. Later, she stood in the (short) line and bought two of my books, grinning bigger and bigger and blushing, and showed me some more of her face-the-world writing. I felt good for the tall, 20-looking 13-year-old girl who had the courage to stand in front of an audience and read, for the first time in public, her prize-winning poem, “The Killing Addiction,” about, for too long, liking the pain of cutting herself: “Not enough to kill but enough to feel . . . it’s you against yourself.”

I was glad to spend a day in the counselor’s office with the high school senior who wants to be a writer, and wanted to spend “shadow day” with me because she wants to be a writer. Her school is typical: sports and cliques and so much teenage self-absorption, while she makes excellent grades and lives in the world of books. I told her that life is better after high school, and didn’t need to tell her, in plain words, that life can be better than family.

What we do to each other and to ourselves. How much can we spare them from and how much must we share, so that they can become whole?

“Forgiveness is the scent of violets on the sole of the shoe that crushed it.”

Forgive, perhaps, but not forget. I cannot, and do not want to, forget.

This spring, I photographed pretty flowers because they are pretty, and because I choose to see, and share what I see. I get close. I see beautiful young women (or girls on the verge). At the poetry reading where the 13-year-old was brave enough to read about cutting herself, I listened to another one, almost as young, who is as promising a writer as I’ve seen in a long time. I think of the peril as well as the promise. When I read my own poems, I read them directly to the little girl – maybe seven years old – on the front row whose sister is, or was, addicted to the pain. The little girl loved the attention, and it was obvious she listened intently and looked thoroughly engrossed in the words, in the cadence, and in the attention. She didn’t understand most of the words, but she understood the listening.

Today, I talked briefly with a sweet, shy, curious young one – all of 20 now – from a good family whose simple, infrequent presence makes me feel good because she knows the scent of violets but does not, as far as I know, understand, beyond an academic sense perhaps, the sole of the shoe. She likes my photographs of flowers, and paints them.

How will each of us be remembered, if at all? How will I be remembered? Not by the few copies of the handful of books I publish and sell, I am sure, but by what I share with others, that they share again. And what others share with me.

Souls, the Edge of Madness, and Writing


I dialed a phone number last week and, when a lady answered, said, “I’m looking for Mercy.” A week ago, I sent a Facebook message that began, “Thank You, Jesus.”
Both statements, if I had a sense of humor anymore, would have seriously tickled me. I did, in fact, laugh, alone at home, several times about each statement because both were just ordinary expressions of everyday needs. Mercy is Mercy Rushing, the economic development director for the City of Canton, whose name I turned into a phrase in some creative piece I once wrote, and who I called on business. Jesus is Jesus Chairez, who lives in Mexico City, and who had wished me a happy birthday.

I laughed again Saturday morning in the checkout line at the grocery store when, standing in line at Sarah’s counter to pay for a newspaper (remember those?), Christy opened the express lane and called me over. “But Sarah will be so disappointed if she doesn’t get to help me,” I said. Which made both of them laugh.

Saturday night, Kate Hearne said I saved her life. I laughed because what I did was stand beside the ladder she climbed to remove a banner from the front of Crossroads Coffeehouse. Once, halfway down, she slipped and fell. I grabbed her arm just about the same time her booted feet solidly hit the ground.

Somebody once said that people who laugh a lot are happy. Or mad, as in insane.

Joe Parsons, an interesting man I haven’t heard from in a long time, once said of something I wrote, “There is no place anyone can go to learn to write like that. It is something that seems to rise more or less effortlessly out of the depths of one’s soul but, at the same time, finds a way to devour it. It can’t be taught and it can’t be controlled. It’s just there.”
So, writing devours my soul. Maybe it’s a fair trade.

Tina Marzola sent me an email a few days ago after we exchanged first chapters of the novels each of is working on. Hers is a traditional novel. Mine is what I’m calling free-form prose, although I could just as easily call it a free-verse poetry novel. Tina wrote, “Ah, your poetry is dangerous and delicious. It’s amazing to me how one vessel (you) can contain so much truth and raw beauty without going mad. It pulls my guarded heart in directions I’m not sure my better judgment wants me to go.”

So, now I’m in danger of going mad? And soul-less?

A newspaper article recently reminded that lefthanders, such as I am, tend to be more intelligent than you righties, tend to be better at solving problems, tend to be more forgetful, and tend to live an average of nine fewer years. (The article pointed to Charlie Chaplin, Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein, Jimi Hendrix, Babe Ruth, five of the last seven presidents (all but Bush II and Jimmy Carter), and the Olsen twins as lefties.) I also read once that we tend more toward madness.

I’m not writing this for ego, but for self-examination. The unexamined life, and all that . . .

When Jory Sherman, a Pulitzer-nominated novelist, asked me what a free-form prose novel was, I emailed him the first chapter. Jory has published more than 300 books and, now legally blind, taken up watercolor. He was part of the San Francisco Beat scene back in the day (one of “the days”), and thinks a free-form prose novel “might” work.

“Worth a strong try, I think,” Jory wrote. And, “I remember when John Martin, who owned Black Sparrow Press, asked Bukowski to write a novel. Hank called me up in a panic, didn’t know where to start, how to finish. I told him to just think of it as one of his letters. Write a short piece every day, put it in a drawer and forget about it until he was finished. So, he wrote ‘Post Office’ and it was just fine. He went on to write other novels.”

At the time, Jory said, he was thinking about how Richard Brautigan wrote “In Watermelon Sugar” and “Trout Fishing in America.”

“He just wrote something every day and let his mind take him on a journey through his mental landscape,” Jory said. He said he hopes my free-form prose novel “shines like the moon in your hand.”

I am privileged to know Jory, and many of the creative people who receive this monthly message from me.

On Sunday morning, back at the grocery store for another newspaper, Sarah, a high school senior, bought one of my new books, the free-verse poetry collection “Stolen Lies,” telling me that her class is studying free-verse poetry right now. So. $10. Maybe there’s a method in my madness.

the bluster of winter wind

the bluster
of winter wind
before the edge of spring
barely stirs the surface
of stagnant green water
thick with the sludge of clichéd excuses

where evil comes from
(“Some said the original evil was the vacuum caused by the Fairy Queen Lurline leaving us alone here,” from Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, by Gregory Maguire)
belief, like brittle leaves,
dances in the harsh wind


a tiny, dark-eyed sprite
on the verge of tears and laughter
cowers at the water’s edge,
her dark hair cut jaggedly short
and darkly made eyes
and near-child-thin body

she
smiles at a stranger
who offers hope
only to toss it into the wind

evil is not
in the conflict
of tangled thoughts

but
in the giving in


the luster
of winter (when
before the edge of spring)
barely stirs the surface

the sprite seems
so fresh, so clean
that a stranger
washes his soul
in her arms

she
shares her intention
with a stranger:

to bring souls
back from Hell

a stranger
tells her she must go
insane and return

she must cross
the stagnant green water
thick with the sludge of doubts

belief, like brittle leaves,
dances in the harsh wind
that suddenly dies

she flees
to an inner sanctuary:
calm, cool, slight dampness
from the slow drip of water
like echo of percussion

Joy in Tonight’s Sunset

I see joy in tonight’s sunset, which looks like fire low and long across the horizon after an odd day of human contact. It’s time for a sleepless night or for dreams. Nearby, the Neches, which bubbles up out of earth a mile or two from here, barely flows. Some people call it the last wild river in Texas; it moves slowly through trees and tangled brush where the snakes lie. The river nymph Eurydice, bit by a snake, died and Orpheus followed her to the Underworld but, because of his momentary doubt, lost her forever. So that he might sing of her deep beauty until he died.
Distance becomes a series of tiny deaths and resurrections. Trees that cling to the edge of the Neches dwell in three worlds: the surface, the roots that descend into earth, the branches that reach toward the sky. I want to touch her smile with both hands, to slip inside the heat and taste the sweet soul emerging into clarity through Nietzsche’s theory of the necessary balance between Apollonian intellectuality and Dionysian passion; life demands the truths of laughter and intimacy. (Tom Robbins wrote that true intelligence is always in the service of serenity, beauty, novelty, and mirth.) Her voice is as soft as flowers singing time. I see joy in tonight’s sunset. Joy for the night’s satisfactions, and for the coming sunrise. Her eyes, brown and deep with gentle meaning, sparkle as they reflect first light. I trade memories for moments to live again. Some mornings, fog lurks above the river’s crooked bed, eager to catch my imagination.

Diamonds and Distance

The bell tolls for joy. Once, twice, three times. More. Slow peals that resonate over and over as we pause in our daily routines to listen. To realize. There are many kinds of joy. One of the greatest joys should be, but never is, a simple one: finding someone to talk comfortably with. It’s rare. Not daily chatter, but trusts shared with enough ease to walk in shadows as well as sunshine.

Someone to discuss books with, who reads. Someone to discuss fears with, who fears. Someone to share intimacies with, who overcomes fears. Someone to discuss creativity with, who dreams. Someone to discuss beauty with, who is beauty. Someone interesting enough to explore, and to let explore you. Someone to, from time to time, share silence with.

Don’t take even one moment of such simple joy, when you find it, for granted. Don’t forget to balance that simple joy with the universal, semi-true notion that “nobody knows me.” The bell tolls for joy, sudden long, low, lingering sounds that eventually fade into the high sky on a clear, cold morning, the last star near the western horizon like a diamond in the distance.

THREE DREAMS IN MY NEW HOME

The magic castle morphed. Instead of living in what looked like a 30-footlong, 240-square-foot trailer as I thought I did for the past four years, I now live in a simple-seeming, 500-square-foot house that’s just big enough for my needs.

There’s hot water for showers and dishes. There’s a washer and a dryer for clothes. There’s a fairly big, covered front porch with two rocking chairs on it where I can watch the seasons change. There’s room on the walls to hang some of my photographs and, in the office corner, some of the quotes I love, printed on colored paper and pinned in rows. Here’s one from Ron Jenkins: “Clowns are kaleidoscopic emblems of human imperfections, and comedy is the chronicle of their struggle to survive.” There’s room in the office corner, too, for my fifth-grade class photo with all of the smiling faces, and the softball team photo from Parkland Hospital; I played first base and we won 21 games and lost only four, taking the championship with a 9-0 win over some, at the time, hated rival. There is room in this new version of the magic castle for books and for music to breath.

The tiny brass dragon hovers near the window in the kitchen area. I remain at the foot of the mythic mountain. The endless sea ended last New Year’s Day when the dam broke, but it will be back. The ghost in the dungeon is free to roam among kindred souls in the forest near the Neches, which is just a creek here but perseveres all the way to the Gulf of Mexico to mingle its waters with the seas.

I feel a sense of liberation; I don’t think I’ll ever take a hot shower for granted again.

I went to sleep one recent cold, almost-winter night with ice forming in the rain-dropped puddles on the ground outside. I felt warm, and delightfully, for the moment, alone. Sometime during the night, I dreamed fragments.

I dreamed that, as I walked along some back-country road of life shepherded by old-growth trees, I saw myself walking toward myself. I felt the pull of the full moon far away, and heard blood lap languidly, patient on some distant rocky shore. I heard myself tell myself of the woman with the pale skin who dances through my dancing mind. I asked myself how many of her mysteries I might ever learn.

I dreamed again, awakened by a pale, dark-haired angel sitting on the edge of my bed. I reached to touch her and she moved just beyond me to tell me of her fears and joys. She does not belong in this East Texas place where she finds herself, she said, and she will leave soon. She is sad. She’s vaguely worried that the human race is suicidal, and she wonders about her own future. Sometimes, she said, she wanders forever, it seems, in the massive loneliness of the Cygnus Loop supernova remnant or the ghostly debris from a dying star in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

I dreamed for a third time. Of freedom so pure that I wouldn’t recall the concept at all, and of soaring with that pale angel (her sad eyes sparkling like stars) in the stardust of endless galaxies.

HOW TO EXPLAIN AMERICA

How would I explain today’s America and the world to a bright, doubly sheltered young woman? She’s 19, with a shy smile and a sly sense of humor. With her fairly long, fairly angular body she evokes, just a bit, a Calder mobile only prettier and infinitely more interesting. She seems to be a really fine, conscientious person, but doubly sheltered: raised in Northeast Texas, home schooled in a fundamentalist atmosphere as one of soon-to-be-13 children. She wants to go to Africa to teach; she wanted to go to Mexico with her grandfather, but didn’t feel right about traveling on a Sunday.

With so many differences between us, she and I dance around each other, tentatively approaching and pulling back. We talk about love of teaching and about learning; we talk a bit about her family, and about a few other safe subjects. When the election is settled and “my” candidate wins, how would I explain today’s America to her learned sensibilities?

I went to vote early at the Van Zandt County courthouse, and stopped for lunch at a restaurant on the square. There, another beautiful young woman of about the same age but a very different, often harsh upbringing asked if she could ask me who I would vote for.

“Obama,” I said.

I told her that during the past two or three months, since John McCain wanted to be president so badly that he sold his soul to the Rovians, that the whole Republican campaign had become like a “Saturday Night Live” script.

She agreed.

After lunch, I walked across the street and voted for Obama, for many other Democrats, for a Libertarian, and for a Republican. Obama got my vote because I believe he holds a glimmer of hope for a renewed America and its place in the world.

I am a real (progressive) American, and I am ashamed that some people believe “real Americans” only come from small towns or have small-town, isolated attitudes. I hope my vote, which I cast early, counts. I hear that talk about how everybody should vote, no matter who they vote for, but if you’re not going to vote for the same candidate I did then I’d just as soon you remain at home.

I felt for John McCain (for the candidate he wants to be) when he took the microphone and told a supporter that Obama is a decent man; otherwise, I’ve lost so much respect for him. This week, as much as I want to respect other viewpoints, I smiled when the news reported that someone high up in the Republican campaign called Sarah Palin a “whack job;” while McCain disappoints me, she scares me on several levels. No, that’s not quite right; I don’t like the way she’s lined her pockets with taxpayer money, and what actually scares me is the people who chant in chorus at her rants.

Today’s America is so much more complex than most of us know or accept or are willing to admit. There is the Constitution. The Bill of Rights. The blood spilled. The changing face. The problems solved. The problems still to fix, certainly. Many of them. In my lifetime, a civil rights revolution, a gender revolution, and a whole cultural revolution that is still in its teen years. There are rock ‘n’ roll and blue jeans. There are the KKK and neo-Nazis and al-Qaeda and talk radio, and “partisan news” where provocation trumps thoughtfulness. To toss out more labels, here are liberals and then there are financial conservatives and then there are cultural conservatives. There is so much SIGI: Self-Interest, Greed, and (too often) Ignorance. And political sleight-of-mouth in a premised land where fear and joy seem equal partners, where bewilderment and bravado are common.

Here are some statements that lead to questions for the young Calder woman to ask herself as she turns in the sweet, southerly breeze:

There was Tex Ritter, who once said at the County Music Association awards banquet that “the most vivid picture we have of our country is contained in the songs of the common man . . . and those songs are country songs.” And, “We seem to better understand each other in songs.” And, “His songs are not unlike the mirror held before the dirty-faced little boy which causes him to wash his face.”

There are theories of faith (of the songs of life) that I do not understand at all, except perhaps as attempts to fill the emptiness and to grasp at immortality. There is Emil Cioran’s statement: “A book is a suicide postponed.”

There is Heather McHugh, who believes that “a poet’s love of words does not compete with his love of silence.”

There is Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart’s statement that “things only get magical at the Edge.”

There is music at its best, emotional seduction from Beethoven to Guthrie to Mingus.

There s the T-shirt for my favorite, at the moment, fictional band, Strangers in a Strange Band. The colorful, dancing letters on the black T-shirt tell us, simply, “World Detour.”

There was Tony Hillerman, who I exchanged emails with and who died in October, who wrote wonderful novels about the clash of civilizations in Navajo Arizona, and who once wrote, “Those places that stir me are empty and lonely. They invoke a sense of both space and strangeness, and all have about them a sort of fierce inhospitality.”

There is my Depression-era, farm-raised father, who gave me a $10 bill with the comment that it was the last part of a $20 bill he’d kept in his wallet for nearly a year.

There is Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, who told us that Democrats must accept the finality of their powerlessness.

There is the Ellen Goodman comment: “In all the talk of clashing civilizations, do we understand that the basic clash is between fanaticism and tolerance, the closed fist and open hands? This line cuts through the heart of virtually every religion – Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism.”

I can’t help thinking that we all owe it to ourselves to hear, if not make, meaningful music; to look at, if not make, meaningful visual arts; to read, if not write, meaningful words, to explore and share ourselves.

There is art criticism which focuses primarily on technique rather than on the art’s emotional or intellectual impact. Technique is a means, not an end.

All of these (and so much more) are parts of America. Another is the world of Wal-Mart, Cici’s pizza, and reality TV; still another is Goodwill, pawnshops, and tiny homes on wheels when there is a home at all.

Last year, I saw a church sign exhorting that the sheep shouldn’t stray far from the flock. Last year in the Mensa magazine, I read a letter from a man named Ric Brown who challenged conformity, saying it takes “a measure of intellectual arrogance to claim to have an original thought.” If any one of us were to have a truly original thought, would anyone else understand it? When the whole world goes mad, it considers the individual insane. What am I bid for this human soul that I stole, that I may be free of it?

Conscientious young Calder woman, I do not apologize for giving you more to think about than any supposed answers or self-assuring comfort that I might give you about this election.

Angels of Life & Death & Lunch & Dinner

It is cool enough this morning that I put on a long-sleeved T-shirt and a dark plaid flannel shirt over that. Some of the flowers I recently planted near the edge of the forest bloom red and yellow; no doubt they will grow strong to add even more quiet joy next year.

I am restless. I seek to define the single or primary unifying idea for these little essays (or whatever they are; perhaps they are just some sort of journal entries) that I write. Perhaps the unifying idea, if there is one, is a search for purity in a soiled world. Whatever that means. Perhaps I just do what I do, and the unifying idea is for someone else to define.

I am restless, and may play for the rest of the day. Or take the notes for my next, tardy poetry chapbook, “a long night of dreams in an old hotel in a weary little town,” on a short road trip where I can spend some time with them. That seems like a responsible thing to do.

I am restless. I am no longer content to occasionally remember the notion of creating a waitress hall of fame. It would be a tribute (half playful, half sociological, and the third half poetic) to the best of the ones who serve our dreams, to the best of the ones who have dreams of their own, and to the best of the ones whose lives connect briefly and brightly with our own.

There are so many intriguing candidates. The young, fresh ones. That older one with too much silver eye shadow who was just right for the moment. All the ones in between. Humans being. Going on to become.

Just yesterday, if there were a clone for a diner waitress, I saw her. A bit of a swagger without any arrogance. “Honey” and “Sweetheart.” Eager. Easy, friendly eye contact. Young and becoming. (Purple braces on her teeth.) Looking for a car she can fix up herself to drive toward her dreams. Even her name: Brandy.

Two days earlier, I asked another one what she wants to do with her life and she said, “I like to make coffee.” There is very much more to her, of course; she shared some of her sad story with me.

Tonight, I expect to see the angels of life and death.

No. Nothing as dramatic as that might sound. In a part of the state where many people drift, these are “simply” two young women with plans.

One lights up any room se enters. Days, she’s in nursing school and expects to become a midwife who brings life into this world.

One is quieter. She stands back near the shadows and watches. She’s still in high school but working to graduate early. Her brother died in a car accident a couple of months ago; her dad just got out of the hospital after a month-long stay. She wants to graduate early so she can join the Marines to be a combat radio operator. It’s not a decision I, as a veteran, would make, but it’s hers to choose. I give myself permission to think of her as an angel who wants to go into Hell and bring lives back into this world.

Both intrigue the artist in me. Many of them do. Angels of life & death & lunch & dinner.

I enjoy wondering what will become of them, and the ones like them who interest me, too.