Mysterious significance

I’m sitting at the table where they used to sit, looking at the large variety of big, beautiful trees outside the window they used to look through.  They’ve died, but I’m here now looking at the trees they used to look at, the trees they planted.  All the things they left behind evoke in me a sadness, not only because they’re no longer here to enjoy those things, but because I feel almost as if I should refrain from enjoying them, perhaps in honor of their memory.

Certainly, I don’t expect people to last longer than their belongings, longer than trees, longer than it’s time for them to last.  So what is it that’s so difficult to accept in walking around a houseful of coffee cups, pots, pans, tables and chairs that they used for over fifty years, and now all those happily- and well-used things are old and still.  They’ve seen their best days, all the dishes and hutches and lamps and beds.  Now they’re deserted, all the laughter and activities and conversations around them that gave them a life of their own are gone.

It’s as if I feel all the things people left behind in death are sacred, should be protected, but how?  Why?  It’s not practical that these things become sacred and protected.  So it’s nothing I act on, yet I nevertheless feel a tug toward a need to honor the dead on this insignificant level, as if the preservation of their things, the only tangibleness we now have of them, is somehow freezing time for them, as if life shouldn’t go on, as if something should stop to mark the momentous event of a life ending.

But the dead are no longer here to care, so why would we care but for a few valuables and keepsakes?  And in those keepsakes we can keep as many memories of them as alive as we can.  So it is that all the things they’ve left behind are dispersed to family, and the rest, the majority, are given or sold to strangers.  So it is that pieces of people’s lives get thrown away or scattered, as pieces of themselves, all the pieces, all the things that they chose carefully to buy and loved having and using.

That I must keep reminding myself people’s lives are not their things and throwing away their things is not throwing away their lives, I think is tied to the bigger issue of the significance of a life.  We have loved and highly regarded people, yet as soon as they die, memories of them begin to fade.  Our lives are flashes in the pan.

All lives are significant to people close to them, but when you zoom out and look at those same lives, they seem so insignificant.  They were born, they went to school, they got married, worked, raised kids, retired, died.  Others were born to do a little more, maybe in government or entertainment and the like, and therefore they may be remembered more widely.  But the swiftness, the callousness of coming and going, and the pit in the stomach, the melancholy, the sense of futility it causes, is a haunting thing.

At the same time, at the very core of ourselves is a thing that tells us we are significant.  And for most of us, when the voice of that thing, the feeling of it, is up against what we see with our eyes, there’s a major collision.  We don’t appear significant on the grand scale of things, yet something tells us we are.  This sends most of us on a mission to find out what’s real.  Are we or are we not significant?

Because we all want to be significant, many of us search for religions that tell us we are.  Some can stop at the being told part and be perfectly happy all the way to the grave.  Others don’t feel quite right about stopping just there and continue drilling down further.  Some find a different definition of significance that suits them a little better, albeit still a bit tight around the chest, but it’s good enough.  Others end up full circle at the thing at the core of themselves and find that it links to a greater thing, the thing they were looking for all along.

We all have to find our way in this regard and that’s what life becomes…any one life becomes the answer to the big question, “Are we significant?

What new insights regarding life did the death of someone close to you give you?

Have you heard the message within yourself that says you are significant?  If so, where do you feel that it comes from?

What answer to the question, “Are we significant?” does your life as a whole give you to date?

Sunday Scribblings – A passion for admiration

Joseph Addison, a 17^th century essayist and poet, said, “Admiration is a very short-lived passion that immediately decays upon growing familiar with its object, unless it be still fed with fresh discoveries, and kept alive by a perpetual succession of miracles rising into view.”  Admiration is indeed a passion.  I’ve experienced it and love the feeling of it.  Coming straight off yesterday’s “The drug” post, I can continue the basic theme by admitting I live to be in the state of admiration in general.  To me, admiration is adoration of the exceptional.  Whether it’s an exceptional person, thing, or idea, I enjoy the feeling of excitement, enthusiasm, and aliveness that pervades my entire being, possibly to the point of addiction.  And I’ve watched others in varied states of admiration.

The most excessive admiration I’ve seen, yet understand completely, is that of groupies—groupies of musicians, politicians, athletes, even firefighters—of anyone who represents a measure of power and elevation above the norm.  It’s not just admiration from afar.  And it’s not always so much about the music, or the politics or whatever the earthbound deity’s gig is.  It seems hardly about craving an autographical brush with a star, but more about a desperate desire to be assimilated by greatness, perhaps out a gaping lack of self-worth, inventiveness and skill of one’s own.  Even if that were not the case, and the groupie nature comprised a sort of corporate arrogance, maybe gained from being the one with the attributes the stars are most attracted to, in my opinion it still wreaks of the ultimate unbalanced sacrifice, the laying down of one’s soul to be trampled at the feet of another who is no equitable god.

Probably most, if not all groupies would argue that point, preferring to consider themselves muses, or simply involved in the occupation of supporting and sustaining the stars.  The Penny Lane character in the movie “Almost Famous” says, “We are not Groupies.  We are here because of the music, we inspire the music.  We are Band Aids.”  And Pamela Des Barres, maybe the most famous of real-life groupies, in an interview with David Templeton of AlterNet, kept trying to sell groupie-ism as having played an integral part in the history of feminism, “We were there doing exactly what we wanted to do. That’s the heart of feminism, isn’t it? We were paving the way. We were the real feminists, breaking new ground, throwing out the rules of how a decent young woman was supposed to behave.”

Nice spin.  But it kind of clashes with another Des Barres quote from that same interview, this one in more traditional groupie language, a more conflicting statement, pathetical yet punctuated with egoism, “A groupie was more than just some girl who wanted to get laid by any member of the band. Sure, it may have been like that in the late ’70s and the ’80s, but when we were doing it, it was more about being a part of the scene. It was about being embraced by the group, like we were embraced by all of Led Zeppelin, who, I must say, adored me.”  Oh, but of course.

I dredged all that that up, went straight down Excess Lane, because I wonder if there really is what’s called a “healthy” admiration.  My favorite online dictionary doesn’t help the case with the adoring pictures chosen for each of the different Thesaurus entries.  And it could be just me, but I swear the definition itself at least points toward fixation:  “1. A feeling of pleasure, wonder and approval.  2. An object of wonder and esteem; a marvel.”  Wonder?  Marvel?  The awe twins.  And awe is over the top to the heavens.

If there is a line between healthy and unhealthy admiration, I feel like it’s a ridiculously fine line.  Can you admire someone just a little, just enough, stopping short of wonder, a.k.a. awe?  Perhaps some can, but if I question myself, if I do a quick mental check from now back to then, of all the people I’ve admired, I’d have to say I don’t remember admiring anyone short of being crazily amazed and awed.  It’s been either all or nothing, below deck or overboard.

But as the Addison quote says, admiration is a passion that can fizzle out as quickly as it skyrocketed toward the stars.  Again, if I check my experience and that of others I’ve watched, it’s true.  If we don’t keep up our relationships by continually adding the spice of sharing inspiring thoughts and ideas, and participating in activities and projects that freshen and bolster the bond, the relationship will crash, or at best, become mechanical and mundane.  I would like to say this shouldn’t be work but after many years of knowing someone, something like work may be necessary, although I’d like to call it something a little more appealing…like keeping your richest, lushest gardens thoroughly watered with plenty of Miracle-Gro® in the mix.

 

What’s your definition of a groupie?  Have you ever been one? 

Can you admire someone just a little?  Or is it over the top or nothing? 

If you can be subdued about admiration, how do you do it?

Do you keep your relationships fresh and lively?  If so, how?

Photos above by Getty Images 

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Click here  for more on prompt “#99 – Passion” from other Sunday Scribblings participants.

The drug

What it is… 

It’s what powers the writer to write the exceptional thing. 

It’s the high that comes from inspiration, from the elation in writing like mad, soaring atmospheres above the mundane self looking down at a body, at arms, at fingers flying, and recognizing the body as self, but not recognizing the extraordinary words flowing out.  The words are above the writer’s natural ability, they’re way out of his or her usual league. 

It’s what powers the writer to write the exceptional thing that, in turn, intoxicates the reader of that thing.

It’s phenomenally-written material that begins with the writer’s willingness to give away their very essence, their aura, if that’s what it takes, and in this appeal, this openness to go beyond, a connection is made and something beyond the writer takes over. 

“Moving Forward 

The deep parts of my life pour onward,

as if the river shores were opening out.

It seems that things are more like me now,

That I can see farther into paintings.

I feel closer to what language can’t reach.

With my senses, as with birds, I climb

into the windy heaven, out of the oak,

in the ponds broken off from the sky

my falling sinks, as if standing on fishes.” 

–Rainer Maria Rilke 

I can read anything written by Rilke or I can read this, for example, and I can feel it speak to something in me that responds by leaping joyfully in perfect harmony with a big all-around, “YES!” to everything about it—every meaning, every nuance, every feeling, every emotion.  What is it that speaks through the words and what is it that leaps and answers?  Does the soul of the writer speak to my soul and my soul answers?  Or is it beyond even that?  And what is that glowing feeling in my chest area, the heart area, that occurs when I read inspiring words?  What is that abounding, glowing thing that’s almost too much to take?  The chemistry of the purest joy and love combined, heating up and overflowing like lava?

Whatever it is comes to me out of the words themselves.  It’s born from the words, and it matters not whether the writer is alive today or has been dead for decades.  The meaning of, and the feeling from, the words never dies.  It seems then that they’re not mere words, but more like code that links to something greater, that links to wherever inspiration comes from.  And once the writer has got the words down, they always speak the thing they were set down to mean, and they are faithful to always deliver the same feeling that was present at their conception.

What’s involved in that process?  It seems a circular thing, never explainable logically or sensibly.  Circular, in that the writer receives inspiration from somewhere, then receives the most perfect words to express that inspiration, then he or she writes or types the words, and those who read the words get not only the meaning of the words, but what’s beyond the meaning—their hearts leap with the same inspirational feeling of joy and harmony that made the writer’s heart leap when he received the inspiration.

Looking for it… 

It’s a perpetual desire to connect with this unnamed thing of a spiritual nature, to enter that zone, to open to it, invite it in, or out to play, whatever it wants, so that you can feel the rush of its inspiration and write the thing that’s out of your little league. 

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Double dose… 

It’s a steady search for writers who can deliver the very same unnamed thing via books, magazines, newspaper columns, the internet.  This is very often an even better high, when you find a writer who is better at opening to the source of inspiration than you are as yet.  It seems there are degrees of this opening.  And a writer can only hope to step out of his or her own way and let it happen. 

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The ultimate high… 

If you are so fortunate as to find a writer that produces the material you think you need, and without it you feel you might possibly perish, then the closest thing to heaven is to be able to interact with that writer.  Something extraordinary happens.  There’s something like an instant transference of inspiration, red hot and ready to go, the crest of the wave already high and ready to ride.  You read what they wrote and instantly you’re in the zone, that place of intense inspiration, and you are the flow, writing with the exact same, if not greater, intensity of force.

That ultra-rare phenomenon reminds me of something I once read.  Something to the effect that we’re all made up of the same basic things and capabilities, both physically and spiritually, but it can happen that some individuals reflect back to us more intensely than others, the love, or the quality, whatever it is, that we’re looking for.

   

What do you get from writing?  What, if anything, does it do to you?

If you get a rush from writing, where do you think it comes from?

And where do find the best high?  From writing, reading, writing/interacting, or other?

All artwork and photos from Getty Images 

Sunday Scribblings – The sleep machine

When I read this quote from Henry Ward Beecher, “We sleep, but the loom of life never stops, and the pattern which was weaving when the sun went down is weaving when it comes up in the morning,” my initial reaction was fear-based.  I didn’t see a litany of bright colors weaving together with other colors to form the richness, the fabric of life that constantly renews and goes on and on.  Some other psychological switch had been flicked.  And multiple reasons as to why trickled down through the possible issues in search of a river to lead it to the ocean, the understanding.

The Trickle:  an image of a gigantic mechanism was there.  Wood and metal and gears came up, courtesy of the loom reference.  The loom of life.  The mechanical, bloodless thing of life.  Advancing steadily.  An unmanned steamroller with the ignition and kill switches both jammed.  Life may be an impersonal Source or a white-bearded, incomprehensible God, but what most of us feel, and know for sure, is before us—warmth of presence, of touch, day to day.  Today, soft or rough skin, silky or course hair, violet, hazel, ice blue, grey, chocolate eyes looking at us, asking us, telling us, teaching, learning, giving, taking.  Until there are no more days.  It’s as simple as that.

The River:  when I lie down at night, the mentality is the flipping of a shop sign from Open to Closed.  I am my world and when I’ve decided I’ve had enough of the day I shut it down.  And people in different time zones all over the planet are shutting down their worlds when it’s time to, or opening them up with the sun, clouds, rain, snow.  All this is going on while I sleep and it doesn’t bother me a bit, doesn’t make me feel like I’m missing anything.  It’s all OK, has always been OK.  It’s not a machine, it’s all of us doing shifts.  And my shift is over, so now I can rest peacefully knowing others are taking up the slack, doing the job.

The Ocean:  the analogy of the loom bothers me to pieces.  Word association game:  you say loom, I say machine.  It’s the word “machine,” what it means to me—huge, monstrous, gears turning, rolling, unstoppable, out of control.  What’s in a word?  Whatever quirky thing is in a person’s head.  And we’re all different.  In different parts of the country, you order a soda and the waitress goes blank.  A pop?  You mean a pop?  And if you say, “Why yes! I’d like a pop, please,” everything will be OK.  Poor Mr. Beecher was just saying the same basic thing as I was with my people-doing-shifts analogy.

Sleep’s a lovely word.  When that word enters my head it pads about softly, cushily, in fuzzy slippers, making ready the big, white, woolly room with the tall, four-poster bed, plump mattress, and silky sheets.  There are soft, freshly laundered blankets everywhere.  And the warmest, fluffiest down comforters that I can pack around myself, pull up high above my head, and make a little tunnel that lets only moonlight and a little fresh air in.  And in those few, luscious moments before drifting off to sleep, I draw close to the sweet-smelling thought of eternal rest for a few glorious hours, maybe longer.

There is divinity, ultimate peace in my word Sleep.  And while it’s happening, life goes on, but not like a lovely loom even, and certainly not like a loom with cold moving mechanical parts working, never stopping, always weaving, weaving, weaving and when I wake up it has filled the room with an infinite timeline of tapestry, and just a minute longer of sleep and I would’ve been suffocated…

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Photos/artwork above from Getty Images.

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Click here for more on prompt “#98 – Sleep (and/or Teeth)” from other Sunday Scribblings participants.

Martyr in Heartsville

 

I wasn’t planning on doing any writing today, well maybe a few comments during the process of reconnecting with the wonderful world of blogging.  I had gotten a late start this morning because of a late end last night, and late starts always put me off my game to some degree.  I had finished setting up my little office environment here in NY just so nicely when I heard the dreaded question, “Are you going to write something for Valentine’s Day?”  Perish the thought!  That is one hundred and eighty degrees from me.  It’s so blatantly conforming.  Yet the pit of the stomach feeling had already dropped me and the childhood conditioning had already begun kicking the dickens out of me the instant I was downed.

Too dejected even to invoke the great idea gods, I cut straight to research and found this one-stop-shopping gem of a site, a valiant effort on the part of an unnamed hero of a writer who packed every fact and conjecture around a custom so vague that it’s unclear to me why the countries who’ve adopted it have adopted it and embraced it with such zealousness.   Which of the saints named Valentine, that the Catholic Church recognizes, was responsible for this custom of giving cards, flowers, and chocolates?  What was his true cause and how was he martyred?  And which of the three possible reasons is most probable as to why St. Valentine’s Day is celebrated in mid-February?  There are various legends to choose from.  Take your pick.

So I did.  In reference to the calendaring of Valentine’s Day, for its intrigue, my interest was piqued by the explanation that involved the Christian church interjecting its Valentines’ feast day midway into February as a diversion from the pagan Lupercalia festival of ancient Rome…like some say the Christmas celebration day had been strategically interjected by the bishop of Rome in 137AD amidst the pagan multi-god celebrations of the December months.  I love a little plotting expertise and the Lupercalia festival offers that and more.

The same thing in humans that makes us rubberneck at car accidents made me read every gory detail of the Lupercalia festival dating game rituals.  After a day’s worth of animal sacrifices for fertility and purification and dipping goat’s hide strips into the sacrificial blood to slop on women and crop fields, the city of Rome’s bachelors would gather ‘round an urn of ladies’ names and each would select a name and be paired with that woman for one year.

I’m not sure which thing was more shocking, that they did all that period, or that the one-year pairings most usually resulted in marriage.  I realize arranged marriages work splendidly in many cultures, but thinking about it always rouses within me that annoying fast-food kind of question, “Would you like attraction with that?”  I suppose if we can work our way around to loving some man or woman that shows up on our doorstep, we might also eventually find them attractive, so why do I get stuck on that?  Perhaps my own culture imbibed in me?

Culture’s a tough thing to break from, and the mores of mine would plague me again as I continued to tear up the internet looking for something, anything interesting.  Then I saw it.  The story of two Americans, a poet and a writer.  The poet, the very same Marie Howe whose poem “The Star Market” I featured on 02/08/08.  And the writer, Michael Cunningham, best known for his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Hours,” based on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dallaway and how it affected three women—one of whom was Woolf herself—in three different time periods.

And there, all mixed up in their story of unusual friendship, which would probably be a bolstering tale to most, was that same bothersome something within me.  Just as with arranged marriages, the accompanying awareness was of a feeling of something not being quite right, of something not synapsing.  There was the very same sense of incredulity and futility around our destinies that always produces an especially difficult brand of melancholy in me. 

Although Howe and Cunningham have a loving and devoted, supposedly platonic relationship, as featured in Garrison Keillor’s Literary Friendship pilot series, I couldn’t shake the melancholy left as an impression from Keillor’s interview  with them.  They have so much in common—they’re close in age, grew into their lives and crafts in similarly winding and unlikely ways, and there was a mutual sense of destiny when they were introduced to each other—yet their alliance took on the flavor of incompleteness and futility, similar to that of the hopelessness of a doomed extra-marital affair.

At the beginning of the interview Howe and Cunningham were highly energized and sounded to me like a couple madly in love, laughingly, agreeably finishing each other’s sentences.  But just as relationships often unravel exposing more and more of the not-meant-to-be-highlighted working parts beneath the pretty outer skin, it seems the interview unwinds and exposes more and more details that take the two from happily carefree friends to unlikely pair.

The shine of their relationship is definitely dulled by the fact that Cunningham’s novel-writing career took off in the way of fame and fortune and left little miss Howe in the dust teaching at Sarah Lawrence College with only three days off per week to write and only three collections of poems published.   But actual chrome seems to start to peel off when Keillor’s more personal questions force the two over the hot coals of their sexual attraction, their dear friend Billy who died from AIDS, Cunningham’s gayness and the “straight like me” game he enjoys when he’s together with Howe in public.  You can hear it in Howe’s voice, not so much in Cunningham’s.  Once bouncy and confident, toward the end Howe boils down to a faltering delivery of words that include “um” and “you know?” way, way too much.

Even when Keillor attempts to give them back their dignity with the ingratiatory question, “If your friend Billy was here right now…what do you think he’d say to you?” it was too late.  Too late like the suggestion that I write something for Valentine’s Day couldn’t be reversed and here I am writing to you.  And not only that but that I’m now telling you, after all this realization that relationships are hard enough, that I think it’s a saving grace we’ve pressed the St. Valentine’s Day tradition into the red-hot, hearts-and-candy lightness that it continues to be to this day. 

 

If you do listen to the Keillor/Howe/Cunningham interview, I would love to hear what it left you with.

 

OTHER LINKS:   

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A selected poets, writers, and speakers site with a nice piece on Marie Howe:    http://www.blueflowerarts.com/index.html 

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Two poems by Howe:  http://www.readab.com/mhowe.html 

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Norton poets online on Howe:  http://www.nortonpoets.com/howem.htm  

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More in depth on Howe from “Ploughshares:”  http://www.pshares.org/issues/article.cfm?prmArticleID=3450 

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Michael Cunningham’s site:  http://www.michaelcunninghamwriter.com/ 

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Lorri Holt of Pif Magazine interviews Cunningham:  http://www.pifmagazine.com/SID/525/  

Road trip!

 

As Yahoo rejects Microsoft’s not-so-friendly takeover offer and the mortgage crisis fallout spreads and the race issue presses in hard on Obama, my idyllic VT stint comes to a close.  Yesterday I tore down my portable office—except my life support (laptop) of course—and packed all my things.  I ran by the rapid fox and waved a see-you-next-time good-bye.  Actually, he doesn’t even look like a fox at all anymore.  He’s had something like two feet of snow dumped on him since he “attacked” me at the end of January.  Now the configuration of tree stump and snow looks more like a harmless, Disney snail.  Harmless, Disney…that’s an oxymoron, isn’t it?  Anyway, you’re reading VT words now, and soon you’ll be reading NY words.  I wonder if there’ll be any difference.  If I feel different I suppose there will be.  I wonder if I’ll feel more or less inspired.  I wonder if the connection to the infinite source of ideas will be stronger or weaker there.  Well, you’ll be the judges.  Something to look forward to?

Paper or plastic?

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“The Star Market

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The people Jesus loved were shopping at the Star Market yesterday.

An old lead-colored man standing next to me at the checkout

breathed so heavily I had to step back a few steps. 

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Even after his bags were packed he still stood, breathing hard and

hawking into his hand.  The feeble, the lame, I could hardly look at them:

shuffling through the aisles, they smelled of decay, as if the Star Market

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had declared a day off for the able-bodied, and I had wandered in

with the rest of them—sour milk, bad meat—

looking for cereal and spring water.

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Jesus must have been a saint, I said to myself, looking for my lost car

in the parking lot later, stumbling among the people who would have

been lowered into rooms by ropes, who would have crept

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out of caves or crawled from the corners of public baths on their hands

and knees begging for mercy.

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If I touch only the hem of his garment, one woman thought,

could I bear the look on his face when he wheels around?”

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–Marie Howe

This poem from the1/14/08 The New Yorker caught my eye.  What a perspective-shifting work I thought.  And within the context of Christianity from which this poem was written, I found myself going back and forth on so many issues that would be instrumental in determining the look on Jesus’ face when he wheels around.  Here’s a small section of the winding path of thoughts… 

We can be anything from middle of the road (relatively successful, healthy, and nice looking in our reasonably priced clothes) to elite (living in the upper echelon of society looking magazine-shoot-polished) and anything not that (the old and broken down, the young with less than pleasing attributes, the poor, the disabled) can look anything from piteous to mildly distasteful to utterly disgusting to us.  And yet every single one of us are that vulnerable, that subject to the possibility of being repulsive to another due to our looks, actions, ideas, or aura. 

But could we be repulsive to a divine being that created us, in this case Jesus in the religion he represents, Jesus as God on earth, God incarnate, God being the creator of everything we can and cannot see?  The creator, implicated in the Bible to be the ultimate in goodness, so intensely so, that humans cannot look upon the glory of this creator and live (Exodus 33:7-23)?  The very same creator, implicated as well to be the ultimate intelligence, so unfathomably and infinitely greater than our intelligence which can barely figure out how a fraction of the whole of creation works?  

Would a creator thusly described make something it disliked or despised, such that it could look upon it and pass a negative judgment?  The folks in biblical days interpreted God’s reactions to certain events as anger, jealously, wrathfulness, and vengeance.  These are very human characteristics and so we might falter, wondering if God could also be fallible in other areas. 

In Genesis 1:27 we read that man is created in God’s image, and although we hope that a creator capable of the same reactions as humans at least moderates them wisely, we can still be bothered by the dichotomy.  And if we get stuck in that place we can see how, in the Luke 8 parable the poem alludes to, it would be possible to be bleeding for twelve years and reach for the hem of Jesus’ garment with confidence, knowing we’d be healed because Jesus is God, but still risk the possibility of enduring a pathetical or disgusted look from Jesus who is also man. 

And certainly this poem’s ability to transport us so graphically there, to the Star Market, does immerse us so totally in the humanity of it.  Via the imagery we can feel so disgusted by the wheezing, hawking old man and so appalled by the diseased and near-dead crawling, reaching, that when we get to the last verse we might automatically assume that Jesus, in the crowd that is crushing him, feeling a tug on his cloak, would shout (as opposed to asking tenderly), “Who touched me?!” and turn to look about with indignation showing on his face followed by disgust when he zoomed in on the desperate, bleeding woman in the parable. 

But what if we focus on the God-is-love side of Christianity, that God loves his creation, has always loved it, that he looks on it, looks on us, only with love, and that if the wrath of God is released, it is also out of love, as a parent might lovingly discipline their child?   

What if we go with the Jesus as God incarnate theory and keep to his track record of looking at outcasts with love, of healing and forgiving all who seek healing and forgiveness for whatever reason?  In that regard, would the look on Jesus’ face when he wheels around perhaps be that of the purest love, the deepest, most genuine unconditional acceptance, and we, in our humanness, as doubters and disbelievers in ourselves, cannot withstand it? 

What was your first reaction to the poem?  

And when all your reactions played out, what did you end up with? 

What do you ultimately see in it?

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Photos from Getty Images.

   

Greg Delanty

I heard he was going to be profiled on PBS.  I decided to blow it off.  Then on the night it aired, I was doing dishes while the interview was starting.  I heard “Um” too much from him, filling too many of his spaces, like stopgaps, and I wondered how sharp he could be.  So it was that, the curiosity, the mean desire to see if he could turn this thing around and prove himself, that made me sit down to watch.  It wasn’t the sunshiny expectancy around finding out about a poet that invited me in.  But I was in.  And he did.  He turned it around.  He must have been too nervous at first to think from the place from where poetry comes, too nervous to be able to be what I wanted a poet to be.  Slowly, with the questions, his every move, look and sound gained strength and the beauty came.  It was rapid-fire brilliance in brogue.  His talk about himself, his talk about his poetry—the arm around my shoulder.  The reading of his own poetry, the sounds of the words out of the tenderness from which they first emerged—the kiss.  I ran away to the kitchen.  Grabbed paper and pencil.  Scurried back, scrawled lead shavings, information onto paper so I could learn more, read more, know more.  And on that note, I’ve fallen in love with that part of the turning of this world—you can turn on the good side of a TV, you can turn on the technological magnificence of a computer and turn on enlightenment, anything you want to know, it’s there, you can turn it on, flip a switch, press a button.  Ah, here, from Poetry Daily…

Just listen to this…

Snow and Wind Canticle to an Unborn Child

Now the morning snowstorm is a swarm
of white locusts, not a biblical black wind
devouring all before it, but a charm
of benign creatures whose seeming simple end
is to becalm, dropping a bright humility
on the world, bringing the city to a stand-
still, turning their wings into a white sea
of, when walked on, what sounds like soft sand
that gets piled in snow combers or cotton candy,
or shaped into a button-eyed, carrot-nosed fatso.
Our plump snowman, whose eyes are still as blind
as buttons, soon we’ll show you this and so
much more; how now what is called wind
blows a snow kiss, invisible as they say God is.

–Greg Delanty

 I’ll leave with my thoughts, leave you with yours…

All artwork and photos from Getty Images.

LINKS: 

Pulishers Weekly mini-interview with Greg Delanty:  http://www.poems.com/poem.php?date=13647 

http://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?owner_id=172 

http://www.munsterlit.ie/Conwriters/greg_delanty.htm 

http://lsupress.typepad.com/lsu_press_blog/2007/04/lsu_press_poet_.html   

Give and take, Part II (the final episode)

The squirming, tentacled beast of Give and Take, Part I has been stilled; the border collie did prevail against the ideas onslaught; and what was giving me no peace let up once I internalized these two things and all that they entail that I’m aware of: 

Be real about why you blog

Be real about why you contact other people 

I feel like the bloggers who have commented on this site thus far get this.  I thought of deleting Give and take, Part I but decided to keep it and go ahead with the wrap-up of Part II just as a record of my forward motion in the blogosphere.  These are my growing pains, not Everyone’s.  But based on my theory of unoriginality—that if I have a thought, chances are thousands of others have had the same or a similar thought—the mere mention of them might be helpful to someone who lands here by mistake, providence, or the like.

The thing we don’t always want to be real about, the primitive essence of giving and receiving, is not necessarily a human faux pas.  It seems no one wants to be so impolite as to say, “I’m giving this to you so you’ll give me that.”  It’s an unspoken human rule that we really shouldn’t dig that deeply into another’s psyche at certain times on certain levels.  And all but a few of us are signed onto that rule and willing to play the guessing game, which can be a pleasurable dance of give and take in its own right.

So let’s put that aside and push on to something more absolute than another’s true intentions, namely our intentions—we can make sure they’re pure, that we’re giving for the right reasons as far as we can tell, as far as we can be honest with ourselves.  For the sake of everyone, we can do a deep heart and psyche check and drill down to the real reason we’re giving.  And if we’re giving to get something, we benefit by another of those deep checks to uncover what it is we really want and why we really want it.

When I was considering starting a blog, I did an internet search.  I had an idea what blogging was about but I had no idea about the mechanics of it—how to get a site, how to equip that site, etc.  The majority of the information I found obliged the freezing-cold steel of it.  But I found one article by Earl Mardle, of A Networked World, that concisely covered the mechanics and ended with the heart of it.  From the article, Earl, if I may?   

“Think about what you want from your blog.

Why are you doing this?

Who do you want to attract?

What kind of an impression do you want to make on them?

How do you engage that objective in what you post?”

I answered these questions before starting my blog but it wasn’t until I actually began it and started to interact with people that I realized my answers were incongruent with what actually happens in the blogosphere.  I got a hit that if I answered these questions every single day, I might then stand a chance of getting to the root of why I’m doing this and, if I fit in the world of blogging, where I fit.

What I didn’t get at first: 

Blogging done well is not as easy as it looks:

Having a drift is crucial—a theme or a common thread running throughout, or a consistency of temperament. 

Offering something of supreme value is essential.

Personality is key.  It seems people will do no better, or not much better, in the blogosphere than they do in person.  A skill can only carry one so far, but a knock-out personality gets the gold.

To write every day, or as often as possible, you have to be beyond “with the program.” 

There’s a lot of talent out there.  There’s a lot of poo, too, so you have to watch where you step, but there are a lot of people who have blogs for all the right reasons, i.e. their reasons are genuine and produce value, and as a result, their blogs are an awesome thing.  In addition to being “wise, amusing, informative and […] very lucky,” as Earl wrote, the successful bloggers seem to be people who are…

…ultra-sharp in general, the high IQ set, able to turn any topic into an intricate, yet enjoyable, science

…at the top of their professional game with cutting edge advice or a valuable service to offer

…highly educated, the letters after their names spelling S.U.C.C.E.S.S.

…out there in the world with top end know-how doing meaningful, impressive, if not avant-garde things

…high energy go-getters with grade A personalities

Law of averages says we can’t all be king of the blogging hill, nor may we care to be that.  The main and basic purpose and beauty of blogging is free expression, and we need only be true to ourselves in that regard.  But if we branch out from letting loose in our living rooms to interacting with others in theirs, there are the unspoken rules to consider and the breathing room and courtesy that they’re there to implement.  In relation to that, I’ve found this a great question to ask myself no matter who I choose to interact with, “Am I interested in expanding myself from what this person has to offer?  And what do I have to offer in return?”  Every human is unique.  Every brain is unique.  There is something from some angle that each of us has seen or done or thought that another hasn’t seen or done or thought.

What I’ve learned, the synopsis:

Be real.  Real about who you are, what you have to offer, why you want to offer it, and what, if anything, you want to receive in return.  Who you are out in the world is who you’ll be on the internet.  If you’re a winner in the world, you’ll be a winner in here.

What do you think?

Am I off or on target?

Is everything I’ve written here all too obvious?

What did you find out when you first started blogging?

What are the best lessons you came away with?

What makes a blog a bomb or a hit? 

Game on!

All photos from Getty Images and stock.xchng