Archive for July, 2008
July 31st, 2008
Every once in a while, life notices you. It gives you the equivalent of a free grande Sumatra. And those things you wrestle with and writhe in seem manageable. On such a once-while, you decide–because of that espied fingernail of freedom–to take your day and ride it–ride it the way a psalm-god rides upon a cloud. And you know, in that tumble of time, that good accidents don’t come along often enough and that if you refuse the gift just because of the rarity of those good accidents, because you’re in some pool of adolescent huffiness that refuses everything because of not getting what you want when you want it, well, then you shrink. A little piece of you, some part inside, shrinks, and hardens. And before you know it you’re missing all kinds of good accidents just because you can’t recognize them for what they are…little packages of good, (like plant slips). And, at best, your life resembles a Barry Manilow tune, and you’ll get stuck there, never able, never having the patience, to wait for that CD to end so that just maybe, Taj Mahal, or Bob Marley, or maybe even Sherry-D Williams "doing" poetry (with everything that that implies) comes on. It’s the adolescent part of you that interests you, that is, on those times you rise above. You can see its cloying desperation, vainly pulling and sucking slivers of achievement off of someone else’s life and you suddenly, or not so suddenly, see how long you’ve skidded under that weight like a steel runner under a shit-sled. Your bones crunched like half frozen horse turds. And you wonder aloud, even groaning as you walk a busy sidewalk, "when and how or how and when you’ll ever grow up…? But then you remember you’ve got today. And, you, sink, into, it, putting away the thoughts of your immaturity so that you stop circling and so that you allow yourself to be flung off that desultory orb and ride with god, upon any old cloud, even if only for one split second taste of ice cold rarified air. And that little notice from life prepares you, like summer-fallow, for the receiving of adulthood.
July 29th, 2008
Affliction, like the gray bird of Minerva, flies in through a broken window. Pain storms the body’s broken beach. And the mind fails to ward off objectivity and can only wish, jejunely, for being appeared to, darkly.
But Idealism’s refuge is gone. Its dream long ago ended with a shoeless kick at a boulder. "Ideas are not the only reality," says pain…as if this was pain’s job to point out.
The walk of chronic pain is always an eternity of the moment. A step taken is swallowed and never taken. This is pain’s stasis. And stasis’ affliction. In affliction there is no flow, no motion to be true to, and no walk, and no time.
What could produce a budging, a stirring, a movement? Love only, says the teacher, only love.
Perhaps, when affliction has its say, when the hope for dislodging it is gone, when the lights go out in the tomb and the call to wait is no longer heard–is in fact absurd–then will desire end, and gravity give way to grace, leaving us fallow, and prepared to receive love without filters. Perhaps.
That interminable pain may be made "use" of, and this, only discoverable personally and existentially, is not, and never to say, that affliction has a "why". Affliction can only be a necessary accident of creation…or God is a monster.
That there may be an embrace of affliction’s necessity through something like obedience or acceptance, and that this may find its terminus in a love encounter, as with Simone Weil, as with John of the Cross, as with Theresa of Avila and Theresa, the Little Flower, well, there’s a mystery.
Love and its mysteries eclipse pain, suffering and affliction. That affliction is recognized as evil is also to say that life has value, is a wonder.
July 25th, 2008
The day I walked into the woods above Lake Chickacoo, Thoreau under one arm and a canvass chair under the other, with an entire day lounging before me like Lauren Bacall, was the day I again found the sweetness of being. There among the High Bush cranberries (viburnum trilobum) and old stands of birch (betula) I found bottom. And under the spell of a Spring sky I knew that I knew more than I could tell.
On some level we will always be without words for such experiences, perhaps even struck dumb. What, after all, can you say about the ineffable? But to be struck dumb is also to be at risk of forgetting-by-not-naming. And here, forgetting is a small act of infidelity towards life.
So to "mindfully tag" a meaningful experience is not only to remember it, but in some way to surround it with your flesh–to recall it through your cells. Just as naming a fear clears a way for at least its partial management, so, naming a sublime emotion opens a pathway for its return. And wouldn’t it be glorious if we kept that path clear of debris? God knows–even though these are transient slices of time and therefore underscored by incipient melancholy–how all of us need far more emotionally sublime moments…moments that is, of gaudium essendi, "the joy of existing."
And we’ve all experienced gaudium essendi…that "joy of existing" that comes in the ripple of time when you notice yourself catching of your breath at the smile of an infant. That gaudium essendi you feel in the warm shiver that spreads through your nervous system while listening to a particularly fine melody progression.
Philosopher/playwright Gabriel Marcel, (I’m indebted to John Toren for this reference) went so far as to call gaudium essendi a primordial fact. Raising "the joy of existing" as potentially an existential proof of the Divine. And I think it’s also possible then to notice that even that wake of emotional twilight following the prow of joy, points to God. Because it’s part of the experience. That we sometimes use that inchoate sadness to (unconsciously) block gaudium essendi is of course our loss on many levels.
It’s against this potential loss, and toward the health of our souls, that we can employ the Latin gaudium essendi. (It seems to me that Latin somehow lends itself to this particular process.) When next the time comes, name and remember…so to keep the path open for many returns.
July 21st, 2008
The whistling of the bottle-picker at the dumpster this morning was strangely comforting. It was a tune that at that hour, or in that context, I couldn’t recognize. Most likely it was his own tune. His up-before-the-birds tune. His early round-making tune. No matter that it couldn’t be named. The easy melody was charming enough to evoke a small delight and I caught myself smiling, even at three AM.
I contrast that to the self-conscious sub-woofers that use the eternal duration of the adjacent red light to showcase a bass riff that assaults my resting ribcage turning it into a kind of snare drum. There is no hour or context for that. Music that oppresses cannot be justifiably called music. Can it? Yes, I know, ear of the beholder and all that. Still–and of course I might just be showing my age here–but when it comes to tunes, I like to be invited in, not invaded.
And that is what the bottle-picker did. Invited, I accepted, and hardly noticed the rattle of his shopping cart or the dumpster lid dropping on its metal self. All was eclipsed by his tune and tone. And after all, I could hardly begrudge him his three AM stop, it was the middle of his work day.
July 16th, 2008
Local Edmonton poet, Michael Gravel, offers this gem about people we’ve all observed. Those dissembled beings who owe their other-worldlyness to some kind of inner or environmental slippage. But then, slippage is a perspective.
Muttering
A man at the front of the bus
is talking to himself.
Not just muttering,
as some do,
but having a good discussion.
He does not look crazy,
well-dressed in fact.
He rags on his wife.
His lamentable youth.
His last stand at last call.
He raises his voice a bit.
His hands gesture to someone.
He is ignored by all
(all noses in other business).
The city lights trail and
the route drags on.
He pulls the cord and talks some more.
His jaw waggles to the street
and the bus pulls away.
For a moment, in the city dark,
I see him,
index finger to lips,
shushing and walking,
speaking truth
only when nobody listens.
© — Michael Gravel
July 14th, 2008
A stout man, coffee carefully in hand, takes the entire allotted walk-time to cross Jasper Avenue. It’s his right of course, but his exaggerated caution is just an irritant to commuters. No one shares his approach to the morning–a Monday at that. I understand the auto-emotion and thank civility for showing up and saving his seatbeltless life.
Sometimes, more than manners, it takes a fundamental movement of the heart to see past the ruts of a Monday–the day we naturally know to be born under a bad sign…the day that’s down even before it has learned to crawl. Sometimes, to see your way to a manageable spirit in the perpetual ruins of a Monday it is necessary to employ certain strategies.
For some, counting upon shear endurance, plunging in works; for others, it seems, a new hair colour is an imperative. For still others, me included, it’s within the spark of a caffeinated second, that we see how a small change here, an adjustment there, a new habit or a dropped one (not coffee) might, over time, reach that wellspring of not merely Monday but daily contentment. And so we resolve a correction while convincing ourselves we won’t add to all the previous choked out resolutions. And under the fuelled flirtatious spell of sanguine intentions we envision ease-of-handling coming over us like a breaker on a beach.
But when this passes, remembering that it takes effort to get the emotional combination right to live out even a single day, we go back to experimentation. Like painters, we layer our feelings until the feel is right, or at least close. We’ve learned, even before we entered work-a-day life that there are no pure colours. We just try to find our best shade and stay under it as long as we can. And then live in the hope that the birds of suffering will not be able to snatch away the seeds of meaning.
Perhaps however, the stout man, attentive to his allotment of time, mindful of what is at hand, already has this all figured out.
Technorati Tags:
Mondays,
Emotions
July 11th, 2008
The young Hindi couple love deeply. They are unaware of me and wouldn’t care in any case; even, I suppose, if I stood and mocked their impetuous infatuation or their daylight groping.
They share one chair. They are alone in this universe. The dark girl glances furtively around, she feels the hand of her lover under her sweater and knows she should be embarrassed but she can’t think to be.
The table changes occupants.
An older couple take the place of the lovers. They talk quickly and awkwardly about their house keeping habits. She has a voice on the doorsill of shrill. They are getting to know one another and I wish they would have done this some other place. Now they talk of fabric and car interiors.
He wonders about the years ahead as he listens to this nervous nasal voice prattle on about how bad she is at curling. He weighs his 
loneliness against this future and stays on. And now he finds himself encouraging a conversation about the length of shirt sleeves. She listens with the side of her face and questions her own investment.
The whole thing rises in volume and inanity and I prepare to leave. Yet…I know these two have a story, have felt passion, have cried during a sunrise and a birth, have felt the human predicament of death and loss. They too long for happiness. And they know something the young lovers don’t–they know about a heart in conflict with itself.
July 10th, 2008
…with speech smoother than butter,
but with a heart set on war;
with words that were softer than oil,
but in fact were drawn swords. (Psalm 55)
…just wondering, apocalyptically, about this morning’s Psalm in context of the Corporation
Thank the poet, standing on the ruined ancestral halls of civilization to see clear as crystal the conjured testimony of the ancient system, the corpus-Corporation.
The poet observes…
…that when the smooth words that justify personal comfort at any cost are finally etched into our unconscious constitutions, our own hearts will stand ready for war. Our flaccid faces will hide drawn swords.
Are they not already drawn?
We’ve perjured ourselves, not in poverty or struggle, or even in the quest for happiness, but in the backwash of prosperity. The generations squandered in becoming Capital-Believers will be swept away in a single backfired hour. The engines of war built by our own silent complicity will burst into flame on our gilded doorsteps.
Are they not already bursting?
Yet, even as the flames lick at our archways, still not knowing quite when to stop, hiding from the discovery that we are truly Conservative, we remain as confident in progress as Ptolemy was in a geocentric universe. And not yet ready to draw the swords on ourselves, not yet ready for a mercy-less raid on our own acquisitive desires we stumble ahead by habit.
Mercy-less raid?
Let’s be clear, mercy for all sentient beings and animate life, absolutely, but for the bloated System blind to its own avarice consumption, self-protected by sets of subsets, wherein the flesh of all chiefs and labourers slowly turn grey; wherever this anti-Christ pops up may it die by the singular disbelief of its own, I mean us. May we all laugh it into the very oblivion it prepares for us.
July 8th, 2008
Brian will never pay the $110 fine he got last night for riding the subway without a ticket.
Brian will never find a job. Well, he’ll never look for one in order to find one. He will spend his days begging and if he’s late to the shelter, he’ll spend his nights outside-like last night. In fact I know that when he’s dressed for it he prefers outside.
Last night Brian slept in the ribbon of park that runs through Railtown. And–not being dressed for it–this morning he was deep-chilled, holding in what heat remained by wrapping his arms around himself. That’s why when I first saw him I was concerned he was hurt, or had been beat up, and was relieved that he was only cold. I’ve seen Brian is various states of repair and disrepair and Maybe it was the day but his bundled appearance must have appealed. Within the space of 10 minutes he had a hot coffee–from a nurse he informed me–and enough change from myself and two women in a van to buy a good breakfast.
The day was a self-starter and Brian welcomed the bounty. But good luck to the Commission in collecting their levy.
Happy are those who consider the poor;
…they are called happy in the land. (Psalm 41)
July 6th, 2008
Writers write…still believing–to paraphrase Elie Wiesel–in the dream that a word rightly written takes on the power of a deed.
This past weekend, at my first Canadian Authors Association conference, I was brought into contact with these dreamers. To a person, from seers to pop-pundits, these writers still believe that that “thousand-words-worth” a picture may elicit, will still always take you to the heart of what a picture cannot help but conceal. And today, in a world gone media-graphic, the counter weight of this faith is culturally imperative. Why? So we can imagine in contour and save ourselves from the great flattening.
Hats off to these hope-ers. And next time you’re in, say, Audreys Books, pick up a book by a national or local author.
A highlight, among the many highlights, was listening to the winning CAA authors read from their work. The Literary Award winners were: poet Asa Boxer for The Mechanical Bird, dramatist Colleen Murphy - for The December Man, Mark Haroun won the Emerging Writer Award, history writer Robert Wright for Three Nights in Havana, and fiction writer Paulette Giles for Stormy Weather.
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Paulette Jiles,
Stormy Weather,
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