*
Idea for the Opening of a Play
What Happens to the Original?
Explaining Things to Ardith
Something That Surprised Me About Ageing
Now
Profitizing Seeing and Outrage
James and Scarlett
On Mentoring Oneself
Another Idea for the Opening of a Play
Note to Self
The Opportunity for the Adoration has Passed
It’s Hard to Talk About Happiness
***
1) Idea for the Opening of a Play AT RISE: HERMANN enters shadowy room with twelve desks and twelve clerks, one at each desk. There are streaks of light streaming diagonally across the room. HERMANN hangs his bowler hat on a hat tree in the middle of the room. One CLERK looks up, takes out a nail clipper and watches HERMANN, who opens his arms and looks up into one of the streams of light. The CLERK proceeds to clip his fingernails. Suddenly there is a shout of trumpets and trombones and drums. All the other CLERKS leap to the tops of their desks in unison and begin a fine tap dance routine. HERMANN remains, staring up through the stream of light. A WOMAN dressed to the nines, (not unlike Rosalind Russell in “His Girl Friday”) strides across the stage through the dancing CLERKS. She produces a high-powered machine gun and shoots all the dancing CLERKS. They fall. The music grinds to a stop. The last CLERK takes some notice of this and continues to clip his nails. The WOMAN sits on the desk closest to HERMANN who is weeping silently. The Woman lights and offers him a cigarette, which he accepts. He sits on the desk near her. The WOMAN produces a knife and kills herself. HERMANN and the last CLERK circle her as if they are skating and then tap dance off opposite sides of the stage. CURTAIN **** 2) What Happens to the Original? I am not sure there are original images. More and more I notice musical phrases, lyrical assertions, even startling imagery in poems and fictions that seem at least partially borrowed, stolen, repeated at least in part from the surrounding literary and cultural landscape. A kind of industrialized pre-AI. There are so many books. What use one more? How many stories can we attribute to anything original? Is this the death of language? The death of birth?
*** 3) Explaining Things to Ardith Blanche found her way into the last line in the ever-growing lines of those who were returning gifts after the holidays. There was a perceptible feeling of tension in the crowded smelly room, as if everyone was suppressing the urge to engage in argumentation. She hated the blouse. Why should she keep it? Just to keep Ardith even more self-satisfied than she normally was? Oh… there she was, she could see her in her mind’s eye as the long line crept toward the window in the blank wall ahead. Ardith and her sycophants. All smirks and raised eyebrows, all completely masked in the self-adoration of the shallow and the too thin. The blouse was the ugliest thing she had ever seen. She still itched in places where she never itched from when she tried it on. Stupid holidays. Where was Irma when she most needed her? She was almost positive Ardith bought the ugly thing on purpose. Because she knew Blanche would wear it. At least once. And in front of the group. Suddenly a skirmish broke out in a line two lines over. Two policemen chased a young black girl through the lines. Everything broke apart. The order of the lines, the hums and crinkle of the noises in the room. The shuffling turned to little gasps and grunts as people were pushed away and some tumbled to the scuffed and dirty linoleum When Blanche found herself on the ground (the black girl was being held down by her throat where a line three lines over once was. She was wet with tears of rage as she lie there, unable to speak or breathe. The cops holding her were panting and sweating) she soon saw that the blouse had spilled out of its box and the plastic bag with its holiday-themed advert for the store. There it lay, sprawled over the filthy linoleum next to her leg. Was that what she thought it was? The blouse was torn, yes, but there was something else there too. Blood? Was it blood? She checked her knees and sure enough, there was a bleeding abrasion. Somehow the blouse had her blood on it. How would she explain this to Ardith now?
*** 4) Something that has surprised me about ageing: Did I think that I would, if I was lucky, reach an age when the overwhelming majority of my life’s greatest puzzles, the Gordian knots of my unique and peculiarly individuated combination of random occurrences, personal evolution and instinctive will (as it applied to how I carved a path through the dark matter of existence) would be lifted, even solved? Would I finally achieve the perfectly constructed, preferably brief, question about life? Of course, the constant revelatory nature of continuing to go forward is surely a gift, but it is not an easy one or even an expected one. So few of the cultural stories of aging revolve around the perception of the aging self, the continued evolution of awareness of how the personal puzzle has fit its pieces together. We are, instead, inundated with algorithmic PR copy that wants to firmly ensconce us in the narrow confines of the business of aging. We are reduced in our level of importance to how and where we spend our money, if we have any. And if we do not… if we do not have any money… we are tossed onto the cosmic ash heap, that vacuum of space where nothing and no one surpasses being rather totally unrecognized, unheard. Of course, regrettably, there will be more on this later. *** 5) Now Now the smallest tree buds waver against the blustery grey sky. Now the yellowing heads of daffodils are wise and aware pushing up in our little lawns. There is a rabbit in the backyard. It has eaten all the sprouting spring onions. It is a bunker year for rabbits. The lack of snow has made things relatively easy for them. And evidence of night visits from the city’s little herd of deer is clear: bitten off tulip buds and leaves have been taken just as they push above the twisted brown of last year’s leaves. We had no winter, not this year. Four months of March. One might even have had the audacity to think April would come warmer, but no... normal, dim, uninspiring April is back. Now I have planted my pepper seeds, my cleome and coleus. Now I feel under the trays to make sure that the heat mats are warm, and they are warm. I'll wait until the first seeds break the surface and curl up before I turn on the lights.
*** 6) Profitizing Seeing and Outrage I don't know about your Facebook "feed" but mine has become populated by an enormous number of memes that seem to want to reduce the crimes against humanity being committed in Gaza to single episode or brief and unexplained episodes from the complex and multilayered history of Palestine and the formation of Israel. There is plenty of blood, plenty of dead children and keening lovers and parents. To be sure, when the phenomenon first started to appear, I contributed to these myself. It is hard (and should be impossible) not to be horrified by what is happening in Gaza, at any rate, but I find many of these memes not at all helpful in putting the entire catastrophe in the full spectrum of perspective it deserves. Some of this is a direct result of how social media attempts, and most often fails, to present extremely complex and far-reaching global happenings in overly simplistic and "one-bite" digestible formats that, in turn, feed its amoral algorithmic appetite. Social media profits, literally, by appealing to the human propensity to want easy, black and white, right and wrong, brief, answers to some of the most overwhelmingly complex issues... issues that deserve much much more lengthy exposition, attention, and research than they are given, especially once they are delivered to people through what is primarily an amoral mechanism for profitizing information and opinion. In other words: these memes and the social media mechanisms that create and place them for you to see are not concerned about what you think when you see them, they just want you to see them and continue seeing them. I believe they are a part of the complex interweave of how terrors like the current liquidation of Gaza are allowed to continue to unfold unimpeded: we have stopped being influenced into action by the horrors of what we see. Our seeing and our outrage have ceased to be influential and have been transformed into products that enrich those largely responsible for those outrages. We have fallen into a quicksand that is composed of being seduced into the catastrophe of seeing horrors merely because it is profitable to produce saleable events that people cannot look away from. There is no reason to expect those who profit from our seeing these terrors will be compelled to stop this genocide or any other because we are watching them commit it--when our seeing them only creates more incentive to continue committing them because our seeing has become an additional profit center, a growth industry. I know the length of this may have already scared people away. This addiction to brevity is itself a major aspect of how we are being groomed to fall into line to be profitized through our gaze, our biases and bigotry, and our instinctive horror. I write this largely in response to the onslaught of single episode memes on social media that demonize Jews and Zionists, lumps them in one category when there are many, even most, who have always just wished to find a safe place to live in the years prior to, and especially immediately after, the years of the holocaust. It is important to broaden the scope, the timelines and perspectives in any discussion of occurrences like the one happening in Gaza. Without that we, perhaps unthinkingly, submit to being groomed and recruited into the either/or realm of the antisemitic, the racist, and we feed the beast of turning the routinely dispossessed against one another. We colonize their terror, their grief and their cries to that which is greater than all of us and try to own it when it is not ours to own. Certainly, through that attempt, we become co-perpetrators in its genesis. *** 7) James and Scarlett James and Scarlett walked to school every day. One day James caught up to Scarlett as she walked to school. He passed her and then, almost every day after that, he continued to pass her. It took weeks before they said hello to one another when he passed her. They were unsure of how to act. Later they agreed that walking to school had become a revolutionary act. The lines of cars leading for blocks up to the school every day, delivering children, had become entirely normalized. Only losers walked to school. At least that was the often unstated rationale behind this phenomenon. Scarlett’s mother worked third shift at the local plastics plant and her father died before she was three. She had no memory of him. No one really gave her the details, though one of her teachers… she was in the debate club and the teacher that sponsored it had also been her Dad’s teacher… told her how smart he was. That was all she knew. Her mother made a deal with her that she should walk to school and soon enough she started to enjoy it. Her grandmother looked after her at night but was pretty crippled up and couldn’t drive. Besides, there was only one car, her mother’s, and her mother didn’t get home until about a half hour after she had to be at school. Every morning her grandmother reminded her to dress appropriately for the weather and helped her with her breakfast. Scarlett had no problem with that. James had a different story. And once he beat up a dude who made fun of him every day for walking to school. So what if he was a loser. He didn’t talk about home much. He had to get to school early enough for the breakfast they gave him, but then, after the fight, there was a big argument about whether he should be allowed to have the breakfast because he got into fights with the boys who called him a loser. So he passed Scarlett every day and neither of them said anything until one day he picked up a paper in a clear plastic essay cover that was lying halfway off the snowy sidewalk and he hurried up to her and asked if it was hers. He knew it was hers. Her name was on the title page. There was a photograph too. He couldn’t get a good look at what or who it showed. It looked like some people in a boat. When James walked up from behind her and asked if she dropped her paper she jumped a little. He said he didn’t mean to scare her. Scarlett was very grateful that James had picked up her paper and said so. He said she was welcome and walked past her. She would have liked to talk to him more but wasn’t sure how to start a conversation, especially with someone she didn’t know (and she had heard rumors about him that made her unsure though he must be nice enough if he picked up her paper and gave it to her. Other boys might have taunted her). James walked on ahead. Later that week James caught up to her again. He asked her if she got a good grade on her paper. She said she got an A minus which was good enough. He said he never got any A’s except in band. He was pretty good at the cornet. From then on, they walked to school together. Talking and laughing and sometimes not talking at all. It wasn’t long before they decided walking to school was a revolutionary act. *** 8) On Mentoring Oneself I was at least 16 before anyone in my life seemed aware of who I was vs who they wished I would be. Even then, it was people my own age who befriended and encouraged me as opposed to any adults. I don’t think there were any adults in my life who actively supported who I was vs who they wished I would become until I was well into my twenties. This is one of the revelations that occurred to me in the past few years. It seems like a slow, belated, awakening, this understanding that I was bereft of adult mentors growing up, mentors who had a sense of who I might be and who actively supported and helped me define that Self (and mentors who actually LIKED me! as I was!). In effect, I was left entirely up to myself to discover my Self and set that Self in its evolutionary motion. I’m not complaining. This isn’t a terrible thing. Though there is some grief involved I suppose. I absolutely love the course I’ve set for my life though I have cried about it at times, even recently, but they were really good tears. You know, there is a sense of discovery, accompanied by a relief of being able to finally define and recognize the language that can be applied, that has evolved, to describe and define what had been something of an otherwise empty zone in one’s developmental patterns and self-understanding. Perhaps the language has been there all along. Just unrecognized. The lexicon uncollected. Perhaps one’s gaze has been in some other direction, still dictated by some other erroneously conceived concept of self even after one has turned away from it and is constructing another self, another life, a truer language. I have always been proud of my ability to raise myself to become the person I am most comfortable being. And it explains to a great degree my ability to insist on my own path regardless of the pressures and distortions of Self others and the culture at large have employed to attempt to coerce unwarranted and undesired cooperation with a projected and wrongly conceived concept of who I should be. This can be lonely work, but its heights and views and grand portals completely rewarding and reinforcing: this is the correct way. For me. For my completion and my self-understanding in the world. How I must be in the world. I remember working with a number of young people in past years, when I worked as a counselor, who were likewise bereft of true adult mentorship in whatever form of parents or teachers one might expect that might take. Often enough it was not really the parents’ or teachers’ faults. People have difficult lives. I think Maslow has a lot to say about the kind of work we are prevented from doing in the world if our own basic needs are not adequately satisfied or are threatened. I did a fair amount of reading and theorizing of my own about the phenomenon (more common that not, I think) and remember speaking directly to a number of those youngsters about how they’d been required by the unfolding details of their loves and lives to be their own parents… that they must be a better parent to themselves than their parents had been (or were being) to them. That they had it within themselves to address and “raise” themselves… to recognize, even through intuition alone, who they were and who they were meant to be. Oh… it is a huge task, a mighty undertaking. And many of them rose quite magnificently to the challenge. Interesting: I think, even without knowing it explicitly at the time, that I was speaking to and about myself as well. ***
9) Another Idea for the Opening of a Play AT RISE: Ruins. A group of ten or fifteen children lie motionless in the ruins. There is the sound of running water somewhere. Gradually one child rises and starts picking through the ruins. And then another and another until they are all occupied in this manner. One child carries a smaller child as she peruses the ruins. Suddenly, a child finds a scrap of bread or some other bit of something edible. He holds it up and shouts gleefully. The rest of the children hurry to the spot where the scrap was found and dig away, for a time looking like a writhing litter of canines or other beasts. One by one they break away and start the process over again, each searching through the ruins in an ever-widening, rough, circle. A half dozen men and women in uniform, many carrying guns, some wounded and bandaged, march into the ruins. The Leader shouts out unintelligibly but loudly several times but the children do not pay attention and continue sifting through the ruins. One of the soldiers shoots into the air. This makes the children stop and look, though still largely uninterested. Some of them approach the soldiers, hesitatingly groping the soldiers’ pockets. The soldiers do not pay attention to the children. THE LEADER Attention citizens of the ruins! Attention! (THE CHILDREN slowly rise to stand, brush themselves off.) Citizens! The war is over! We have been declared victorious over our enemies. A celebration is at hand! THE SOLDIERS all applaud. THE LEADER barks unintelligible orders and the soldiers all march off. An explosion rocks the ruins. THE CHILDREN hide for some time. It becomes quiet, the sound of water again— Eventually things return to normal. THE CHILDREN begin to search through the ruins again. A child finds a scrap of something edible, rises up gleefully and shouts out. The rest of THE CHILDREN hurry to the spot and dig away, for a time looking like a writhing litter of canines or other beasts. One by one they break away and start the process over again, each searching through the ruins on their own. CURTAIN *** 10) Note to Self: How is it, after all these years of writing poems I’ve never learned the correct pronunciation of ghazal? It’s enunciation always seemed to me more likely to be related to the bounding African antelope than a somewhat guttural clearing of the throat. In addition, how can it be that I have written a number of variations of the aubade form and never learned how to pronounce it properly. That second soft “a”? Who’dda thunkit? I know, it is said that one should never berate someone who mispronounces a word, because it means they have only read the word and never had an opportunity to speak it. Nonetheless, I feel ridiculous— —and besides, I still think my pronunciations are the better ones. *** 11) The Opportunity for the Adoration has Passed (or The Drowning of the Christ) The bay has that sheen of its Spring colors now, though oddly enough it had that same sheen, off and on, for the entirety of the winter. As it has routinely in the past, it might have gathered and solidified slowly during December and January and stood still in its frozen incarnation by sometime in February. But there was no ice at all this year. I have pictures from past years, into March and April, when the bay’s ice is still thick and glowing. There is a Christian cross with a hanging Christ that was deposited in the bay some years ago. Some attempt to add to a plethora of tourist opportunities here by duplicating the bizarre habit Christians often have of making some completely manufactured phenomenon into an indication of the holiness of just about any image of how Jesus was and is a Christ, the epitome of “Christness”. Jesus under the water. Jesus with the fishes. Jesus’ ass covered in zebra mussels. Hell. I don’t mind, aside from the fact that I can’t seem to get past the potential offense of expressing the unintended humor of the shallow intention of such a thing. I mean it’s not like anyone is making the damn statue bleed…yet. Now THAT would be something to see! In the past the bay has frozen solid enough to support an annual walk out across the ice to the place above the crucifix where it lies on the bottom of the bay. A sizeable square of the thick ice would be cut out, a tent erected over the hole in the ice as well as over a bit of the ice itself where people could lie face down and peer into the water where Jesus, still on the cross, wavering in the frigid crystalline waters, could be seen and, I suppose, adored. The adoration of the frigid drowning Christ. Maybe I’ve got some of this wrong. I only went out there once. These memories are, or were, prior to climate change so it makes the whole exercise a moot one most years over the past ten or 15 or so; these years of absent or too-thin ice. It was quite an event however, quite a pilgrimage, and well attended, that weekend each March when they cut the hole in the ice so people could gaze down at the drowned and adored Christ. The year I went the line was so long I lost interest and went back home. It was quite a long walk, and I had not planned for it. I should have dressed differently. The bay has the sheen of its Spring colors now, as it has for the entirety of the winter this year when it might have, in the past, gathered and stood still in its blinding white frozen incarnation. There was no ice at all this year.
*** 12) It’s hard to talk about happiness It’s hard to talk about happiness. The word, like many, has been coopted and commercialized to death. Even saying this teeters at the edge of cliché. The word has become ripe for the walls in one’s VRBO. The pillows at the discount home decorator’s store. A little animated star above the letter ‘i’. But there it is. There are not many words that compare with it, nonetheless. We’re kind of stuck with it. It isn’t joy, and anyway joy has its own issues with overuse. There’s something ultimately satisfying about being happy even though the word “satisfaction” is not the same thing as happiness either. One can be entirely dissatisfied, and rightly so, and still wake up in the dim light of the morning, just past dawn, and feel beset with what can only be defined as happiness. I was going to say “flooded” with happiness. But happiness does not flood, does it? It does not jolt or flash. What does it do? How does it arrive? Or perhaps that is exactly what it does. It arrives. One wishes that a state of happiness arrives in all people at some point (or points) or another regardless of any concurrent state of satisfaction or dissatisfaction. I think it might. There’s a childlike aspect to it, but it is not limited to children. And besides, my own experience of the arrival of happiness is very adult. And one needn’t be satisfied to be happy. I think it is just as likely to arrive during a state of dissatisfaction as any other “state”. It can be triggered, but just as often its catalysts are difficult to pin down. Often enough it arrives in the morning. With that light I described. But it can just as easily come in the middle of the day. It illuminates almost any activity. I can be in the middle of a thunderstorm while traipsing through an old growth forest, I can see the first trout lily in Spring and then note a clutch of spring beauties. There will be a wind in October. Some children will appear down the street talking and laughing as I take my trash to the curb. They are walking down the street. It can, as it did very recently (and it can happen in very weird places), settle over me in an old eastern European style health club where nudity was the expectation but the pressure of any sex displays at all were forbidden… sitting by the cold plunge pool. Breathing and steaming in the cool air. Quiet. Little conversation. No perfect bodies. It can happen as it did this morning: the light of the day arriving around the curtains. Happiness arrives. Not always frequently but frequently enough. It is hard enough in this world, in these times, to feel anything but cynicism and despair. But happiness arrives despite any pressure to deny it. I am exceedingly glad. Glad is ushered in only after happiness, I think… if you want to know. And blessed. Too. I don’t imagine everyone is lucky enough or comfortable enough to let the door to happiness swing open in whatever winds are capable of pushing those doors open. We can easily be robbed of even fleeting moments of happiness. Through no fault of our own. Still, I believe it, happiness, may be a common experience in almost every person, regardless of their current predicament. And our predicaments are legion. The best we can do is at least try to relieve one another’s predicaments to the degree that happiness finds a foothold from time to time, a portal into the morning with that morning light. I hope for that possibility for everyone. And perhaps any despair I feel about the state of the world and the cataclysmic failures of the race to care adequately for all its members (especially when the resources are there, overflowing actually… in some purses at least they are, overflowing) has to do with how the troubles we inflict upon others and upon our world make it very difficult for even the smallest intrusion of happiness to occur. I have difficulty accepting that there are people, even large numbers, to whom happiness cannot and does not happen. This thought has the capacity to destroy me. Happiness happens. Cliché? Yes. In a way. But also a very small but entirely necessary ingredient to our human-ness and its humane-ness.