For "The Next Big Thing". . .
Or, "Perpetual Motion"
Intro
The poet and writer Alice B. Fogel—whose poems I have adored, whose beginnings and continuings include theatrical costuming and reclaimed materials, whose manuscript “Be That Empty: Apologia for Air” brought tears and confirmation in a corner by the fire, who received the discerning praise of two past U.S. Poets Laureate, Robert Hass and Charles Simic—invited me to answer these questions for “The Next Big Thing.” The Next Big Thing, as far as I think anyone knows, is an online word-of-mouth more or less grassroots phenomenon profiling writers, artists, and specific projects. Having seen a couple of these, I said yes. I'll use this "Che"/hybrid blog site to release the interview (and because this blog is linked to my site, petermoney.com). Today is my day to answer The Next Big Thing questions, and it’s been a long while since I climbed out of the sort of treefort of my blogsphere, temporarily, to live a year while gathering material—material that brings me to you now. To live a year while gathering material? I know: sounds like cover (perhaps I’ll describe the “something else” below).
Preface to the Interview
Off the bat: Thanks, Alice. And because The Next Big Thing also resides in the “Gift Economy” (thank you, Lewis Hyde; thank you, Bel Esprit) that flows against a cultural grain that values other “things,” I’m glad to help keep this going. I will be inviting David Oliveira, Patricia Glinton-Meicholas and others to post their interviews. Please check out Alice’s, and others’, interviews. Alice’s may be found here: www.alicebfogel.com
By way of opening thoughts: I think of Allen Ginsberg and Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams; I think of Cid Corman and “the first improvised recorded poems” and his radio show in Boston. . . and his “ice cream and sushi” shops and brother-in-law’s handbound Japanese books; I think of Theodore Enslin studying with Nadia Boulanger and a dedication that lasted a lifetime, with whole lengths of wall in a Berkeley book warehouse devoted to books he published; I remember the vivid Jack Hirschman marching down the cavern of financial district streets. . . the poet shouting for labor’s sake; I think of Elizabeth Bishop’s subjects, her scanning the National Geographic for clues; I consider Adrienne Rich’s & June Jordan’s & Grace Paley’s & Joan Larkin’s convictions—much of them achieved relatively quietly; and I think about certain images (the bombed out library in Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading, or Robert Frank’s images from Nova Scotia, or the juxtaposition between the push-pull of fashion and status in The New York Times Style Magazine and news headlines: a sort of “Four Dead in Ohio”—each day, featuring Mali, Niger, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Main Street, agriculture, borders, walls, and so on); I think about William Bronk and George Oppen: poets whose work made a qualitative impact on me and I wonder if their books will survive the passages of taste, trend, time, testimony, temperament.
So, The Next Big Thing Q&A
Here we go:
The Next Big Thing: What is your working title of your book?
I’ve had a few working titles. For a long time it was “Yearn” but Yearning got restless after several submissions and I moved forward with the present greatly revised version of that “Yearn” called “American Drone” (at various times: “An American Drone”, “drone poems”, “Am. Dro.”, and “Drone”). “American Drone” has three sections with three equally significant titles: “American Drone”, “To day --- Minutes only”, and “This Bridge Will Not Burn”. I think at one point the whole manuscript was called “This Bridge Will Not Burn”—because this is what I feel about all of our stories, collectively.
TNBT: Where did the idea come from for the book?
In 2002 I began corresponding with Saadi Youssef and around this time my thinking about prose and poetry changed, almost as if I found a new way to keep warm—new material or the notion of layers, or groups of words as nobs. To go back: In 1987 I read Lawrence Durrell’s novel Justine
and felt affinity with what I know to be a painterly-ness, a lush slow rush of language like elaborate and un-/anticipated dressing or undressing, ripe fruit, the surprise meeting of attracted strangers.
I have always “moved around” in language (maybe this was a gift of the theater, where we find characters speak in many accents, many rhythms, and melody that is found in situations). As I’ve said elsewhere, Marsden Hartley did this in painting. So did Picasso, obviously. So did William Carlos Williams. In the late 60s and early 1970s I was aware of the nightly news, in black and white. The themes of news—as the Dalai Lama has been quoted as saying, I heard the other day—are the things that shock us. News, per se, is not the lovely, not the satisfying, but the dissatisfying and ugly precisely because the news goes up like a red flag, a warning. The fact that fewer citizens of our world seem to receive the news in a technically rich and instantaneous time is both distressing and a measure of recovering balance. For centuries people absorbed other people’s realities from word-of-mouth and as information eventually made it to them. Shocking news was dealt with community by community, one community at a time. I tend to absorb a lot of sensory reality. Poets and writers tend to, or else I imagine we’d struggle with content to the point of ultimate frustration. This is my job, my lot, my being, I am comfortable to admit. The “drone” of our culture(s) has been becoming increasingly dense and louder for decades (if not centuries). I realized I happen to be in the middle of this apex of drone (I hope it’s an apex). “Constant droning”—it’s the opposite of and the same as—both—that song “Constant Craving”. Socially and inter-/nationally we’re “looking for something” amid the rush and crush of too much to possibly take in in meditative or considered moments. (This is the nature of our life online or connected to our inter-phone-pods.)
I associate “drone” with barely heard or ambient sound, or with the nightmare we use our pillows to try to drown-out, with the general accumulation of sound in our daily lives now, and in the buzz & blur of what we must understand or dismiss.
A drone is also musical, though. This we know from the didgeridoo, from Tibetan horns and chanting monks, from the moans of birth and conception. But I’m so far refraining from the other obvious reference: we live in a time of drone aircraft and the idea of “detachment” this form of surveillance or warfare “gives” us is both intriguing and upsetting. The “drone” felt like content for this particular time in my life, maybe at the apex of living, at which point the “drones” are ever-present and either have full bearing on our lives or no bearing on how we live—but what it represents is a capacity, a capacity we don’t have to absorb all the necessary sensory information to synthesize our response to our daily and intimate understandings of continuous life on earth. I’ve been composing written “drone” pieces for a few years now and “American Drone” collects a healthy supply of them along with new and select work to this point in my career. The fact of the “drone poems’” presence creates the starting point (mid-point, really) of an arc to which the other two sections of the manuscript mediate and provide textual relief.
Poetry can provide textual relief within culture. We use the senses to arrive in this place. And a poem is like a pod that can travel anywhere, across borders, as well. Here's our "infinite capacity"(Tillie Olsen* on Kafka, Rilke), a "bridge that will not burn."
TNBT: What genre does your book fall under?
The book will be “poetry” but let’s not let this label limit it. Much of the book will be approachable by exclusive readers of prose, by those interested in plays and film, and even by those who scan and skim through topical magazines.
In some ways it is as "non-fictive" as where my mind and mood and measure goes when I re-read Tillie Olsen's *Silences ("This book is about such silences." --Andre Gide).
TNBT: Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
If this question were posed about my novella, Che., I’d have a few answers. Mali? Fenton? Sandy? Uncle? So far, I have to leave this to the filmmakers (joy be bestowed!). But I’d have a few ideas (may they get in touch!). In “Drone” there are many “characters”—but there is certainly the narrative voice of a Ginsberg-like newscaster, an Eliot-like statesman; there’s “Peter” and there’s “Saadi” in the second section, “To day --- Minutes only”; and there are the many different “voices” within the poems in the final more slimmed down lyrical section called “This Bridge Will Not Burn”.
TNBT: What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
It’s hard—if not unheard of—to describe a poetry-based book in a single sentence. In a single phrase, “American Drone” covers “[personal and cultural] reaction, response, synthesis [to daily and international events]” (these were Allen Ginsberg’s terms, through Tungpa: reaction, response, synthesis). But let me add: It’s now through the density of our daily living (and gadgets) we arrive at what matters (an image, lyric, song, dance, line, skin, scent, language, landscape, meaning). Yet through dialog we uncover what’s common among us—and ultimately we discover luminosity and intimacy within the synthesis of our daily responses (consciousness, yes?).
You could also say the manuscript is: “one long sound shared.” From shout to dialog to whisper.
Joan Larkin published a book called Long Sound. A book can do this. Poetry infused in community consciousness has the effect of one long sound.
TNBT: Will your book represented by an agency? Will your book be published soon?
Books like mine are different. Maybe an agency will represent “American Drone” eventually but this would suggest we are farsighted enough. But “American Drone” will be published soon. No question. It has to be, and I’m ready for it.
Individual poems appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry Salzburg, on the CD Blue Square (PAX Recordings), and in several other places over time. The third track on the CD has a place in American Drone (from the middle section, "To day --- Minutes only", the "dialog"/"response" part of the book's arc toward synthesis: "Snow, Saadi, nothing but snow"): http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/petermoney
TNBT: How long did it take you to write your manuscript?
As with most things, the answer is “years.” The next best answer we hear (and it’s always correct) is “all my life.” The nuts and bolts of this one have been solid for three years. It’s now a matter of finding the boldest of publishers to bring it out.
TNBT: What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
Writers (and teachers, librarians, parents, friends) have to teach each other how to read again! (Or: How to read today's creative forms). Culturally, we flip from genre to genre, mode to mode, in music, television, film scenes, conversation, txt messages, Facebook posts, etc. I listened to a lot of Rap while I wrote "American Drone"--and I enjoy "the syncopated" mind (or "mind jumps") that thread through narratives, and vary.
We have not, however, brought the reader along fully.
To answer the question, though, if I had to compare I’d say “American Drone” is my HOWL and Other Poems, my Cinnamon Peeler (by David Ondaatje); to an extent it’s my Capitalism (by Campbell McGrath) and to an extent, believe it or not, it’s actually my Mr. Palomar (Italo Calvino); and it is, a little bit, like my Leaves of Grass (Walt Whitman), or my American Grain and Kora In Hell and Paterson together in shorter form (all by William Carlos Williams);—if I may make these comparisons, which the question uncomfortably solicits.
These are books that assemble a distinct arc of content, in which form and content work with changing ebb and flow of voice and subjects. HOWL emerges in what becomes an almost breathless striving to witness and yet by the end of the book we are all down to the palms, down to the measured, mindful, synthesized "The weight of the world/ is love". . . back to the intimate "yes, yes/ that's what/ I wanted,/ I always wanted,/I always wanted,/ to return/ to the body/ where I was born." Allen Ginsberg ends his sustained long intense mindful witness in the eased-down fuller relaxed breathing of "This is the flower of the World." And this is what I mean: out of an intensity of experience, a tension of expressions and mis-/understandings, we may once again take the fuller breaths and be enlivened at a palm's length, or closer. Books do this. Meditation does this. Poetry will do this. Crisis resolved brings a community to this point. Progress requires the synthesis. . . for we cannot all sustain the highest levels of tensions or shouting without dialog and personal resolution. The books I mention above could be models for such a description. To me, they are powerful.
TNBT: Who or what inspired you to write this book?
“Get away from the hang-ups that destroy the mind” (a quotation from Dr.Dog) is one of the epigraphs to preface “American Drone”—and Sharon Van Etten’s line: “You were high when I was doomed” (from her song “Love More” [See link on "Che the novella Facebook" page or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hq8FGeQ9OTQ]); “I am I said, to noone there” is another refrain from a Neil Diamond song, from my childhood. , that encouraged impetus for writing “American Drone”. And, other than what I said earlier, you could say: a life-time ongoing interest in objects, sensory and sensual reality, perspective and a sense of justice. You could also say: “the big picture,” what’s beyond fog, the daily news, hope, specificity, human contact, Saadi Youssef, Sinan Antoon, Oberlin, India, Ireland, Egypt, Syria, my trip to Cuba and on and on and on. Robert Frank’s and Alfred Stieglitz’s photographs have been, for some decades, influencing how I look at things I cannot reach. Likewise is the case with various musicians. I know there was a song by the Shins that sent me in this direction. I’m just trying to picture for myself and breathe through, event to event, and get to some lasting joy. There’s definitely struggle in the process if you read “American Drone”—and struggle is exactly what goes on between our assumptions and our understandings. It’s probably what we, culturally speaking, need to do more of more often.
Victor Martinez, a wonderful writer I met when I lived in San Francisco, wrote: “The fist you didn’t throw/ was your word.” Well, “American Drone” contains my words.
TNBT: What else about your book might pique the reader's interest?
“American Drone” is a kind of “anti-drone” or “drone antidote” too. There ARE individual lives within the blur and haze of an unseen mass assumption. There IS a human being at one end of a scope and switch. There WILL ALWAYS BE rhythm and melody within the assumption of monotones coming from our drones throughout the eons. “American Drone” is a sort of replacement drone: Let POETRY be the vehicle. Let poetry deliver the news by wide angle and telephoto. Let the drone be on the tongue, for good vibrations (SOMEONE to drive the car, as Williams wanted): Back to “closer,” let’s reverse the cycle of ignorance at arm’s length and let the drone be the syncopation of the individual experience we may not always want to or have time to see.
But I’ll also answer this question by saying that every book is, in one way, “a modest journey.” I had liked filmmaker Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited (which I had been Freudian-ly calling “Express” [its plot is anything but express. . . but, here you have it: poetry wades into the detours—and yet poetry “goes expressly” to it also, its subjects, “the luminous” as Allen Ginsberg also said—as well through juxtaposition). We want the universe “to have us at ‘vivid!’” At a key departure-point early in Anderson’s film, there’s a song I recently realized shares impetus with my “American Drone”. Online, there’s a video that illustrates the scope of narratives I find in the song (it’s The Kinks: “This Time Tomorrow”). I invite you to listen, before we go on: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjMw7eIIUiI&feature=endscreen
Connections, affinity, arise “out of almost nowhere” but they exist all the time. This morning I heard Adam Cole’s NPR report about the information—the signals—flower petals give off and bees leave and it felt to me related to my “American Drone” work. Cole interviews Anne Leonard, a bee scientist. (We all know about “the drone bee”—yes? Or “the worker drone”?) Last week it was Natalie Batalha, on a different program, discussing the infinite relativeness (I prefer this over relativity at the moment) that felt salient and correlative to my experience with poetry, and “American Drone” especially. This morning the connections are with Andrew O’Hagan’s essay “Hope in a Bottle” (subtitled, as far as I see, as “Yes, Please”).
When I watched The Darjeeling Limited for the second time I realized “This Time Tomorrow” was providing interior monolog, commentary (and social commentary), and shared allusions to many of the subjects in “American Drone”.
To my ear, the Kinks put it this way: “This time tomorrow, where will I be?/On a spaceship somewhere sailing across an empty sea—/This time tomorrow, what will we know?/We’ll still be here watching an in-flight movie show. . ./Seven miles below me I can see the world and it ain’t so big at all. . .we will see/Fields full of houses, endless rows of crowded streets—/I don’t know where I’m going,/. . . I feel the world below me looking up at me/. . . Leave the sun behind me, and watch the clouds as they sadly pass me by/. . . I’m in perpetual motion. . . ”
If you're in a bookstore any time after 2014, please ask for American Drone by Peter Money. I hope, by then, it will be there to meet you. And keep at it, through thick and thin. From drone to song. We'll get there on a bridge that will not burn.
Showing posts with label Lewis Hyde. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lewis Hyde. Show all posts
Monday, February 25, 2013
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
Art Matters
There's been so much to say--a constant action of it--through Twitter; Allen Ginsberg's "three-fold logic" (the simplified "haiku" method grounded in observation, realization, and gestalt) has been a springboard to recent selections and posts. We take these things in, work them into a personalized response and offer the brightness of any synthesis. The mode has been this, so much so that the lengthier slog of essay feels just beyond reach (may this be temporary*). However, this two year old link came through Twitter today and the article is exceptional. Relevant Magazine published Why Art Matters by Makoto Fujimura: http://www.relevantmagazine.com/life/whole-life/features/16705-why-art-matters-even-on-9-11
The essay is one of the most apt and quotable pieces of writing on the topic I have read since Lewis Hyde's book about the gift economy.
As it happens, I was up past midnight last night responding to a request from our state arts council for stories about our recent tropical storm Irene (hurricane/tropical storm). Many of the things I found myself writing are uncannily like Makoto Fujimura's, whose article was divined as a tweet hours later. The pressure of the universe seems to release these little stars as our need, unbeknownst to us, most subconsciously requests them.
Here's what I wrote. The threads of affinity are matters of tone and conclusion that surely must arise out of mood, circumstance, yearning, crisis, resolution, a prone abandon in reflection. I neglected to add here that my friend and poet Colin Momeyer was waist deep inside the Zen Center, trying to tend to the situation--until he was called out, as though from a preacher on the stairs above him, I think he said. I also want to emphasize that my press's managing editor was not "mindless" (he is quite mindful)--but the sudden and surreal circumstances of flooding, everywhere he drove (and increasingly by the moments, place to place) must have felt like a dream in which we are mindless, for if we think too much about the fact of it coping through the "dream" of such a situation is defeatist. I've since added "single purpose." And so. . .
•
We put aside our routines to engage in a whole new set of detours, given the odds of chance and necessity during and after one of the most brutal storms to foul our state in almost 100 years. The artist is used to detours but some come at a price greater than delay, distraction, or inconvenience. While my home showed little change apart from loss of power, by morning it was clear that our community had been rocked--and changed almost unrecognizably. The road below our house suddenly ended and became a vast river instead of a once narrow brook with a two lane road beside it. Where there was road there was now a bluff. Such visual rearrangement challenges your sense of whatever was thought to be stable. The view, while opened-up, is unsettling. Not far from there our village volunteer fire dept. looked like it had gone through an earthquake: the pavement was uprooted and water had eaten up earth around the large building's foundation. Several bridges were "lost"--if only in the upset of the first days (to be quickly repaired--although temporarily). The covered bridge to our kids' school was rocked by enormous water (Quechee) digging over and around supports, land, and road--on both sides. It is unnerving, to a child and to the adults, to see one's "bridge to school" a tooth in the middle of no mouth, suspended without way to or fro. How surreal for children to see. And how do you explain "stability," "normalcy," "structure," "you'll be o.k." to children who take this in? Some of these children were children when, at the same school above the same bridge, they were asked to suspend the fact of two towers vanishing.
I direct a small non-profit arts organization in Windsor County, a small press that publishes and presents artists, poets, and other writers. We collaborate with, use the services of, and support colleagues, friends, and neighbors in the creative economy and in the economy of daily interaction. I am a poet, doing this. When I walked to our creative center, The Main Street Museum, I intended to do what any bard would do--what my mentor, in fact, modeled: to transform strife into song. Yet when I got to the place the blasts of a ghost-town dust and wedged sea-fared shipping containers and errant avenue dumpsters made the scene an eery upheaval of context. Workers bid "things" farewell in almost abandon. I could not play (a child's guitar on me, a harmonica in my pocket); I took notes--the words of poems rising in the "blank" of a kind of destruction that seemed to, over night, connect us with war zones and disasters all around the world. I don't mean to make unjust comparisons, but to a poet who holds words as both the wounded and enlivened, the salvaged and the saved, the power to destroy and the qualities of character to contribute, the ephemeral and the lasting--one understands that these dichotomies are not exclusive, that they are--as the vessel of the word tries to tell us--of the same source.
My Managing Editor drove through thick water in Woodstock, almost mindlessly in a dream (with single purpose)--disbelieving, at times, the rising water's threat could be so fast. He avoided Bridgewater and Rutland only after someone who had come from there emphasized the power of this was visceral in extreme. My organization's trustees (on their own) helped dig out, in White River Junction and in West Hartford, at separate sites. My wife drove to where she'd never been to be one of several to answer a call to re-establish a catalog system for a library practically destroyed. Back in my village, I only modestly helped--serving food to volunteers and fire fighters--and kept the sole grill man company for a period. The town had turned out to help a family shovel out from the muck of a high saturated basement. Traveling west, the sights became even worse. Roads dropped off. Boulders had swarmed and stopped around houses where two ponds and a river gave way; a marker, a plaque to acknowledge a hard time between natives and pioneers, was washed away on a pull out where passers by would often rest.
Members of a creative economy are members of communities too, of course. They are partners and husbands and wives, individuals and teachers and storytellers; relatives, loved ones, parents, employees, employers, civil servants, self-employed. In other words, those who witness struggle are also the ones who buy from the local grocery store, farmers' market; who will shop and sing and go to the fair; who stand for, represent, and thrive in a kind of life tourists see as profound in relative rural beauty and self-sufficiency. The humanity that is changed by chaos is not a humanity that disappears but rather this is a humanity that reforms, that gathers its steed, that re-configures through the push & pull of loves and labors lost. Is humanity taxed in the unthinkable recalculation that must summon a collective rebuilding? Sure, there is communal sorrow through it all. We are not immune to the knowledge of those who actually died in the chaos of a storm we call "tropical." (Now we know, everyone does, that "tropical" means the earthquake in Haiti just as much as it used to mean "vacation"; we can look through the screen--and feel for people.)
Whether we are at home having witnessed any part of these strange and unsightly changes or whether we travel on, we carry a stronger sense of suffering and the ephemeral moment--we hold the fragility of living a little closer. Of course the creative economy of artists and participants is impacted too. These will be the places and people who will bring us back, also, along with the volunteers and the construction workers, the guard and the fire fighters, the catalogers of disaster and the curators of what's left.
PM, 9.6.11
•
And I had wanted to add "to celebrate." Given what's left, we do. We must. So we do.
The essay is one of the most apt and quotable pieces of writing on the topic I have read since Lewis Hyde's book about the gift economy.
As it happens, I was up past midnight last night responding to a request from our state arts council for stories about our recent tropical storm Irene (hurricane/tropical storm). Many of the things I found myself writing are uncannily like Makoto Fujimura's, whose article was divined as a tweet hours later. The pressure of the universe seems to release these little stars as our need, unbeknownst to us, most subconsciously requests them.
Here's what I wrote. The threads of affinity are matters of tone and conclusion that surely must arise out of mood, circumstance, yearning, crisis, resolution, a prone abandon in reflection. I neglected to add here that my friend and poet Colin Momeyer was waist deep inside the Zen Center, trying to tend to the situation--until he was called out, as though from a preacher on the stairs above him, I think he said. I also want to emphasize that my press's managing editor was not "mindless" (he is quite mindful)--but the sudden and surreal circumstances of flooding, everywhere he drove (and increasingly by the moments, place to place) must have felt like a dream in which we are mindless, for if we think too much about the fact of it coping through the "dream" of such a situation is defeatist. I've since added "single purpose." And so. . .
•
We put aside our routines to engage in a whole new set of detours, given the odds of chance and necessity during and after one of the most brutal storms to foul our state in almost 100 years. The artist is used to detours but some come at a price greater than delay, distraction, or inconvenience. While my home showed little change apart from loss of power, by morning it was clear that our community had been rocked--and changed almost unrecognizably. The road below our house suddenly ended and became a vast river instead of a once narrow brook with a two lane road beside it. Where there was road there was now a bluff. Such visual rearrangement challenges your sense of whatever was thought to be stable. The view, while opened-up, is unsettling. Not far from there our village volunteer fire dept. looked like it had gone through an earthquake: the pavement was uprooted and water had eaten up earth around the large building's foundation. Several bridges were "lost"--if only in the upset of the first days (to be quickly repaired--although temporarily). The covered bridge to our kids' school was rocked by enormous water (Quechee) digging over and around supports, land, and road--on both sides. It is unnerving, to a child and to the adults, to see one's "bridge to school" a tooth in the middle of no mouth, suspended without way to or fro. How surreal for children to see. And how do you explain "stability," "normalcy," "structure," "you'll be o.k." to children who take this in? Some of these children were children when, at the same school above the same bridge, they were asked to suspend the fact of two towers vanishing.
I direct a small non-profit arts organization in Windsor County, a small press that publishes and presents artists, poets, and other writers. We collaborate with, use the services of, and support colleagues, friends, and neighbors in the creative economy and in the economy of daily interaction. I am a poet, doing this. When I walked to our creative center, The Main Street Museum, I intended to do what any bard would do--what my mentor, in fact, modeled: to transform strife into song. Yet when I got to the place the blasts of a ghost-town dust and wedged sea-fared shipping containers and errant avenue dumpsters made the scene an eery upheaval of context. Workers bid "things" farewell in almost abandon. I could not play (a child's guitar on me, a harmonica in my pocket); I took notes--the words of poems rising in the "blank" of a kind of destruction that seemed to, over night, connect us with war zones and disasters all around the world. I don't mean to make unjust comparisons, but to a poet who holds words as both the wounded and enlivened, the salvaged and the saved, the power to destroy and the qualities of character to contribute, the ephemeral and the lasting--one understands that these dichotomies are not exclusive, that they are--as the vessel of the word tries to tell us--of the same source.
My Managing Editor drove through thick water in Woodstock, almost mindlessly in a dream (with single purpose)--disbelieving, at times, the rising water's threat could be so fast. He avoided Bridgewater and Rutland only after someone who had come from there emphasized the power of this was visceral in extreme. My organization's trustees (on their own) helped dig out, in White River Junction and in West Hartford, at separate sites. My wife drove to where she'd never been to be one of several to answer a call to re-establish a catalog system for a library practically destroyed. Back in my village, I only modestly helped--serving food to volunteers and fire fighters--and kept the sole grill man company for a period. The town had turned out to help a family shovel out from the muck of a high saturated basement. Traveling west, the sights became even worse. Roads dropped off. Boulders had swarmed and stopped around houses where two ponds and a river gave way; a marker, a plaque to acknowledge a hard time between natives and pioneers, was washed away on a pull out where passers by would often rest.
Members of a creative economy are members of communities too, of course. They are partners and husbands and wives, individuals and teachers and storytellers; relatives, loved ones, parents, employees, employers, civil servants, self-employed. In other words, those who witness struggle are also the ones who buy from the local grocery store, farmers' market; who will shop and sing and go to the fair; who stand for, represent, and thrive in a kind of life tourists see as profound in relative rural beauty and self-sufficiency. The humanity that is changed by chaos is not a humanity that disappears but rather this is a humanity that reforms, that gathers its steed, that re-configures through the push & pull of loves and labors lost. Is humanity taxed in the unthinkable recalculation that must summon a collective rebuilding? Sure, there is communal sorrow through it all. We are not immune to the knowledge of those who actually died in the chaos of a storm we call "tropical." (Now we know, everyone does, that "tropical" means the earthquake in Haiti just as much as it used to mean "vacation"; we can look through the screen--and feel for people.)
Whether we are at home having witnessed any part of these strange and unsightly changes or whether we travel on, we carry a stronger sense of suffering and the ephemeral moment--we hold the fragility of living a little closer. Of course the creative economy of artists and participants is impacted too. These will be the places and people who will bring us back, also, along with the volunteers and the construction workers, the guard and the fire fighters, the catalogers of disaster and the curators of what's left.
PM, 9.6.11
•
And I had wanted to add "to celebrate." Given what's left, we do. We must. So we do.
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
The Band in the Closet: What You Find (I mean you), Lennon, Muhl, the [Irish] Calvinists, and Autumn (just the season); your "pilot."
So maybe the teakish live heron steady in the fog at pondside has been revealed to be only a reed, wet in autumn. The mystery of its early presence this morning was musical, even in the silence of the window--and in the distance between this table and pond. The appearance of the "Other"--as it seemed--provided pivot, balance, energy and tension I think: Here's your beacon, mooring; here's a set of eyes.
I keep my inexpensive reading glasses in a hard rectangular case labeled "Pilot" now. The glass and wire didn't come with a case, and I no longer know what I've done with the ingeniously designed fountain pen (made to not leak) that I think arrived with heavy protection. So. . . another object: to lose, to pile, to move, to keep. To open. Open--"like a clam shell"--it's almost touching the green of Gregory Maguire's Matchless. . . which I like for its charming drawings but also because the words amount to a sense in myself I have when I read Stuart Little, for example, or any E. B. White. --Speaking of them, in conversation on another ghostly gray and wettish day yesterday, I participated in a lovely podcast with "Lisa Lisa and the Book Jam" (a play, they say, on the 80s band [no doubt I danced to this?]) at which time we talked about books, ranging the decades but sustaining by influence on the imagination, will, and desire. Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space might have mentioned glasses cases in my revised imagined future edition (glasses cases holding other things, particularly). In the same breath: Alberto Manguel's A History of Reading ("[we all read the same stars. . . ]"--more or less) and Lewis Hyde's Gift, offering a circuitous history of surprising gestures of confluence in humanity.
Beside the Maguire book is a scrap with words scrawled: "Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger" (the name of a newly released recording, recorded "in their living-room"). I've just heard their voices--soothing and fit, a wooden boat (they don't insure wooden boats any longer, I'm told) packed with woolen blankets tied around paperback books that never get wet, and peaches--lots of peaches; two pillows for two heads.
This is all appropriate as fatigue hits the election season, the daylight rather shallow now in the minute cup of a wakefulness that squeezes our quest for sunshine, after reading the section I was meant to read in Matt Gross's "Getting lost in Ireland" article. . . in which the emotional tension of journeying is given character, honored as another being, the essential nature of ourselves being we want to connect. . . ; his observation of one trying to insert themselves in a foreign landscape and social setting brought back memories of my own Ireland, my own Egypt, my own India, Australia, New Zealand, Greece, Italy, Cyprus, England, etc. "[P]ersevering in the face of loneliness and [the harsh country]"--unexpectedly, or at least when least expected: the band (Calvinists), the conversation with the lobsterman Ray (the Western [and Eastern, and all others] World is a kinder place because of their phantom animation. Yes, what do we think about the mosque at "ground zero"? To have the ease and candor of this dialog in the non-confrontational human depot of an Irish bar, particularly one around Galway, makes me--again, again--want to celebrate harbor towns that have managed to dismiss pretension; the sea is unforgiving that way, but giving too.
A mosque near ground zero, perhaps, is not so unlike a friendly bar at the edge of harbor close to Galway--or Goa, or Williams Town, or (you find them, they're still there): if we know where the sand comes from, if we respect the spray of salt in all its incarnations, if we've stood outside searching a depth of cosmos for something we hope we'll discover there; universal signs and intimate conversations, stranger to friend, we will find ourselves in the space of a conversation--welcomed, again (or finally), and experiencing the revelation of unexpected joy.
I keep my inexpensive reading glasses in a hard rectangular case labeled "Pilot" now. The glass and wire didn't come with a case, and I no longer know what I've done with the ingeniously designed fountain pen (made to not leak) that I think arrived with heavy protection. So. . . another object: to lose, to pile, to move, to keep. To open. Open--"like a clam shell"--it's almost touching the green of Gregory Maguire's Matchless. . . which I like for its charming drawings but also because the words amount to a sense in myself I have when I read Stuart Little, for example, or any E. B. White. --Speaking of them, in conversation on another ghostly gray and wettish day yesterday, I participated in a lovely podcast with "Lisa Lisa and the Book Jam" (a play, they say, on the 80s band [no doubt I danced to this?]) at which time we talked about books, ranging the decades but sustaining by influence on the imagination, will, and desire. Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space might have mentioned glasses cases in my revised imagined future edition (glasses cases holding other things, particularly). In the same breath: Alberto Manguel's A History of Reading ("[we all read the same stars. . . ]"--more or less) and Lewis Hyde's Gift, offering a circuitous history of surprising gestures of confluence in humanity.
Beside the Maguire book is a scrap with words scrawled: "Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger" (the name of a newly released recording, recorded "in their living-room"). I've just heard their voices--soothing and fit, a wooden boat (they don't insure wooden boats any longer, I'm told) packed with woolen blankets tied around paperback books that never get wet, and peaches--lots of peaches; two pillows for two heads.
This is all appropriate as fatigue hits the election season, the daylight rather shallow now in the minute cup of a wakefulness that squeezes our quest for sunshine, after reading the section I was meant to read in Matt Gross's "Getting lost in Ireland" article. . . in which the emotional tension of journeying is given character, honored as another being, the essential nature of ourselves being we want to connect. . . ; his observation of one trying to insert themselves in a foreign landscape and social setting brought back memories of my own Ireland, my own Egypt, my own India, Australia, New Zealand, Greece, Italy, Cyprus, England, etc. "[P]ersevering in the face of loneliness and [the harsh country]"--unexpectedly, or at least when least expected: the band (Calvinists), the conversation with the lobsterman Ray (the Western [and Eastern, and all others] World is a kinder place because of their phantom animation. Yes, what do we think about the mosque at "ground zero"? To have the ease and candor of this dialog in the non-confrontational human depot of an Irish bar, particularly one around Galway, makes me--again, again--want to celebrate harbor towns that have managed to dismiss pretension; the sea is unforgiving that way, but giving too.
A mosque near ground zero, perhaps, is not so unlike a friendly bar at the edge of harbor close to Galway--or Goa, or Williams Town, or (you find them, they're still there): if we know where the sand comes from, if we respect the spray of salt in all its incarnations, if we've stood outside searching a depth of cosmos for something we hope we'll discover there; universal signs and intimate conversations, stranger to friend, we will find ourselves in the space of a conversation--welcomed, again (or finally), and experiencing the revelation of unexpected joy.
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