Wednesday, June 18, 2008

change in a vase

like a bird on a wire
like a drunk in a midnight choir
i have tried, in my way, to be free

Walking down a country road, so many bones and bodies, so many forms disintegrating on the gravel. A jawbone, delicate as carved ivory, a patch of fur, the trace of wings turned up into the air. And I look up to the sky, half meaty grey, half clear blue, and all I want is you, god, all I want is you. 

Walking through the earth, through all these incorporations of form and matter, all these creatures of breath and shape, all the insane variations of motion, I have reached the age of thirty one and still it only occurs to me to ask why. Haven't I learned my lesson? Haven't I heard the Buddhist teachers, haven't I been told by friends and strangers to give it up? Don't I know god is in the details? Don't I know better?

But I've given up looking for sense. No more looking for the blueprint. No more Platonic ideals. But the why drives me, drags me on, like the carrot on the stick, like the golden thread through the labyrinth. 

I'm packing up my whole house. Dragging all the bags of letters, boxes of pictures, piles of notebooks out of the closets and getting lost in their labyrinths of memory, self. What to do with these things? They exhaust me, but I can't give them up. Mike said "memories are like stones and you're trying to swim." I said "how can you be such an unfeeling person" and he said "I was mostly joking." But I was really arguing with myself. 

This old outcast guy, Vahdet, from my summer house, once told me about some writer he knew who had burned all his notebooks. That's a real writer, he said. A student of mine once wrote a good poem about how Bakhtin had burned the only copy of his manuscript (or rather, used the paper to roll cigarettes). Is this guts? My mother burned all her journals and asks me intermittently if I still have mine. She regrets it.

When you're tired of swimming, let go and float for a while. Float in the ocean of existence, in the knowledge that you are the ocean, the Tao. All these books and pictures, they're all my resistance to change. And within the notebooks are chronicled over and over the same resistance to change. But if the only constant is change, then I'm holding on for dear life to temporality. These notebooks and pictures, these cards and vases, these shrines, these mirrors, these handcarved necklaces-- these are what keep me mortal, and I'm holding on to them for all I'm worth. 

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

TUR-Ki-YE! TURKIYE!


Turkey just came back from being down 2-0 against the Czech Republic and beat them 3-2! It was AMAZing to watch! I want to run around on the street draped in a flag, yell and hug strangers, grow hoarse from celebrating. Man, do I wish I was in Turkey right now. I called my brother and could hear all the car horns beeping away on the street. Now I turned on the TV but all there is is freaking NASCAR and Sportscenter has an interview with the whole Manning clan. The three of them (father and both sons) are standing sheepishly before the camera in matching polos and reminiscing about their Father's Day traditions.

Man! What the F? I want to see people talking about THE GAME! I want to hear analysis of the positions, fellow marveling, wonder, acknowledgment of the glorious game and comeback and victory that I just witnessed! Is that too much to ask, people? Huh? How is it that this entire country does not give a hoot about soccer? I mean, I know that's how it's always been and everything but you cannot imagine how lonely it feels to be just stifled with a great big joy in your throat. It's like a bite you can't swallow. It's stuck! I'm stuck! I'm stuck out here in the world's most anachronistic boondock, with a bunch of people who don't care that Jesus just walked on water!

argh. Yes, I exaggerate, but only a little. Ah well, my dears, at least I can release my emotions to you! You should have seen it: First of all, the Czechs are at least 6 inches taller than the Turkish team, so they get all the headers. In the first half they kept the ball in the air most of the time and scored one goal. In the second half Turkey was attacking a lot but then the Czechs got a fast break and scored a second goal. It really seemed all over-- I was sure that we were outclassed, as well as  topped. But then, at the 76th minute! we got a goal. And then we tied on the 83rd minute and then we scored the winning goal a few minutes after that. It was so crazy tense: this would have been the first time in history an elimination round went to penalty kicks if we had tied: so dead even were the scores between the Czech Republic and Turkey. And then, after we got the lead and there were another 4 unbearably long minutes of stoppage time our goalie Volkan shoved and felled this big oaf Koller (who looks like the non-Buscemi killer guy from Fargo) and, to be honest, helped me get a vicarious thrill, but at the same time the ref saw so he got a red card and got KICKED OUT of the game! We had no one to put in his stead (all the substitutions were used up) so Tuncay, one of the forwards, put on the goalie jersey and he looked so hilariously shrunken between the goals it was terrifying. But we did it we did it we diiid it! Turkey is now in the quarter finals!

So, watch the quarter finals game -- this Friday I think. Turkey plays Croatia this time. And then we can talk about it... right here, if nowhere elese.

Friday, June 6, 2008

beginnings and middles and ends

any light drowns out the light
the weaker light, the incandescent heinies of the fireflies flush against the sky blinking on and off like the planes higher above, and the stars higher still. love is like light not like labels: i just watched Sex and the City (the movie) and it disturbs me how easily they concatanate the two. I guess I should have known, but still. I wish labels were so attractive to me: how easy they are to attain, to have and hold and be fulfilled with. And I wish marriage was the happy ending, but it's not. It just ain't. I don't understand why we keep buying into it, what's so attractive about the happy ending. I think it's not the happy part but the ending part that's so attractive. The idea that it'll all be over once you get there, a sort of secular nirvana. 

But I digress. And that's sort of the point of these blogs, to digress freely (Digression! remember Catcher in the Rye?). Let's return to the here and now. The here is Freeville, NY, an address I keep but a town I've never been to. The actual place is a road out in the country, a sweet house I've all but destroyed in my fits of winter frenzy this past year, neighbored by a swamp full of dead tree trunks which serves as a nesting ground for herons and (by the sounds of it) a city of frogs. The aforementioned fireflies are out on the lawn, moving to and fro against the backdrop of dark pines, carrying their lovelorn light in all directions. 

This morning I took a walk and saw: meadows filled with buttercups and horses, a dead bat by the side of the road no bigger than a folded dollar bill, phlox, daisies, and two kinds of butterflies: one yellow with black dots (dead) and one black with yellow, blue and red dots (alive and "flitting and fluhting" as David Attenborough likes to say). They were like a positive and negative image of each other. The yellow one reminds me of the other day when I was driving down the country roads at a pace, all mad with pain and self-directed rage, just hurtling down the asphalt in my blue pickup listening probably to the classic rock station and I saw this big yellow butterfly flitting before me and for a moment I was taken out of my doldrums (beauty has a way of doing that) and then the butterfly was on my windshield, stuck in the wipers, helpless against the wind and the velocity battering its wings. 

"And all men kill the thing they love,
By all, let this be heard,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword."

That's Oscar Wilde believe it or not, from the Ballad of Reading Gaol. Maybe it was that maudlin sensibility he tried to cover up with his more famous and ultimately tiresome aphorisms. I don't know. I've had one Saranac and it's putting me in a mood. There, now I have another. 

"To alcohol: The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems!" That's Homer talking and don't you know. This reminds me of AA which I sat in on a few times in the past months due to a friend who started the program. I've never had alcohol really be either cause or solution to my problems and for that I am thankful, but I realized going to those meetings that alcohol gave those folks a reason to be there-- a label if you will-- that brought them to this ingenious human convention. In Turkish it's called a "kulp" which literally means the handle of a vessel. The thing you pick it up with. Maybe framework is a better word for the whole AA thing: once you identify (and admit) yourself as an alcoholic, then there's this vast support network to help you through your troubles. I'm not trying to downplay the extent of those troubles. I was particularly moved by the testimonial of a man who told the story of meeting folks in prison who were in there for murders they'd committed while being blackout drunk, and he'd thought to himself: that could have been me. And soon after that I watched an episode of Alfred Hitchcock presents-- often wry, dark segments of fantasy and crime-- which dealt very seriously with a similar story featuring an alcoholic heroine and at the end of which Hitchcock appeared not with his usual tongue-in-cheek humor but completely straight-faced and said "we've diverged a bit from our usual path tonight in the hopes that this episode, adapted from a short story by Adela Rogers St. John, will somewhere, somehow, help someone." Not an exact quote, but close. Comedy's good and all, but especially when it comes from an unlikely source, a bit of serious drama is just so much better.

Anyway, what I was saying is that I'm not trying to minimize the difficulty of being an alcoholic, but I appreciate the access that gives one to a resource like AA where people simply share their stories, their experience, without the fear of judgment. Oh I know, even as I write this, that I sound naive, and I'm even aware of the somewhat self-involved, victim-mentality that this program invites, but I was so surprised and relieved (or released) to find myself in a space where people could share their most secret, most shame-inducing stories with each other, that I developed a good respect for the program. And the best part of it is, that people Listen to each other, and through that listening, through the Sharing, they learn that they are not alone and that it helps to listen as well as be heard. 

Now where are we? That is not a full-stop above. There is never a full-stop. And if I know what's good for me I'll keep writing here until fate doles out my final stop. There is no ending, not until there is. 


Monday, June 2, 2008

First Thoughts on Exile

All my life, I've been a stranger. And all my life, I'll remain a stranger still. Yet this does not mean I can't be at home in every moment, at any place in the world. I carry the I like a mantle, a somewhat lugubrious disguise I have to wear everywhere, like a shaman with the head of a deer or a fifty pound beaded mask. 

(a tiny critter just crawled into my computer's air vent and reminded me of this joke: It's a Temel joke. Temel is the quintessential Laz, a resident of the Black Sea region in northern Turkey, and the jokes about him are somewhat similar to Polish jokes in the U.S., but not exactly. Temel is half fool half genius, as the Laz people are known for doing everything in a different kind of way-- they might seem really absent-minded at times but they can also be incredibly shrewd. The best way I remember it being described is, when told to grab their ears the Laz take their right arm over their head and grab their left ears.... Anyway, the joke: Temel is a watch repairman. One day his friend Dursun comes to him with a beloved watch, an heirloom from his grandpa, that has stopped working. Temel shakes the watch, puts it to his ear, turns the knob and stares at it for a while. Then he opens it up and what does he find inside but a dead ant. Uyy, Dursun! he exclaims. Of course your watch has stopped. Can't you see, the machinist is dead!)

Anyway, back to the whole exile thing. I got to thinking about it again lately because 1) I'm moving again, after having lived somewhere for four years (a long time for me) and 2) I just read this passage in Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces which reminded me of the exile trope in an urgent way. I'll quote at length:

In his life-form the individual is necessarily only a fraction and a distortion of the total image of man. He is limited either as male or as female; at any given period of his life he is again limited as child, youth, mature adult, or ancient; furthermore, in his life-role he is necessarily specialized as craftsman, tradesman, servant, or thief, priest, leader, wife, nun or harlot; he cannot be all. Hence, the totality--the fullness of man--is not in the separate member, but in the body of the society as a whole; the individual can only be an organ. From his group he has derived his techniques of life, the language in which he thinks, the ideas on which he thrives; through the past of that society descended the genes that built his body. If he presumes to cut himself off, either in deed or in thought and feeling, he only breaks connection with the sources of his existence.[...] From the standpoint of the social unit, the broken-off individual is simply nothing--waste.  (pp.382-383)

So, after I read this, I felt kind of depressed. I mean, it's admittedly old-fashioned, what with all those universal men and medieval job descriptions, but what he's saying makes a lot of sense to me overall. The word that buzzes about me, settles on my brow, walks sticky-toed on my earlobe, creeps on my upper lip and rubs its legs together always is Contingency. Our consciousness is necessarily contingent, there is no getting around it, unless very consciously we try to get around it through meditation, etc. And why should we try to get around it, you might ask. Well, once you realize how contingent all those news and views are, how arbitrary the choices (and how culturally delineated the range of choices) are that people define themselves by, you kind of stop believing in anything. It's as though, afloat on a sea of signifiers, you are permanently shipwrecked, but without land in sight. This is when folks like me who are spiritually inclined look to religious traditions for the definition of self, for something unifying that exists among all, something to plant your feet on. Roots.
Shoots.
Leaves.
Not unimportant metaphors. I even have a poem about this, it goes like this:

Contingency Serenade

You all roll very funnily toward the grave!

You are extraneous:
spring ants in the airy house
all the ridiculous weathers you carry like reasons

You wince and shrug your maybe shoulders,
eat your macaroni dinners rubbing elbows
with bosses presidents and
your sons and your mysteries
you carry in cages!

Your: news views smells
your: dandelions knees spit buttocks
your: bozoukis
your: coffee rings and all the wealth of two spoonfuls of secrets stashed away in your snatches under your mattresses, your blistered tongues

Your brains are like birds
flung at walls

rub rub rub til the lamp is raw

tell the genie sing sing sing

damn you thwack you can't get enough
of this rubber ball bird this so very resilient thing
that breaks nonetheless it breaks

thwack sing you sonofabitch

You rain on the rooftop your plink plunk song your little ditty your broken charm bracelet.


That poem was born out of a sense of outrage at anyone's claim at legitimacy. And from the frustration of not being able to have that claim myself. By legitimacy I partly mean confidence. I am profoundly insecure at times but also sort of committed to being insecure. Not in the petty way that undermines people but like another version of humility. Who are you to say? Who are you anyway? That sort of thing. So I was glad to see Campbell go on like so:

But there is another way--in diametric opposition to that of social duty and the popular cult. From the standpoint of the way of duty, anyone in exile from the community is nothing. From the other point of view, however, this exile is the first step of the quest. Each carries within himself the all; therefore it may be sought and discovered within. The differentiations of sex, age, and occupation are not essential to our character, but mere costumes which we wear for a time on the stage of the world. The image of man within is not to be confounded with the garments.[...] The preliminary mediations of the aspirant detach his mind and sentiments from the accidents of life and drive him to the core. "I am not that and not that," he meditates: "not my mother or son who has just died; my body, which is ill or aging; my arm, my eye, my head; not the summation of all these things. I am not my feeling; not my mind; not my power of intuition." By such meditations he is driven to his own profundity and breaks through, at last, to unfathomable realizations. No man can return from such exercises and take very seriously himself as Mr. So-and-so of Such-and-such a township, U.S.A.--Society and duties drop away. Mr. So-and-so, having discovered himself big with man, becomes indrawn and aloof. 

This is the stage of Narcissus looking into the pool, of the Buddha sitting contemplative under the tree, but it is not the ultimate goal; it is a requisite step, but not the end. The aim is not to see, but to realize that one is, that essence; then one is free to wander as that essence in the world. Furthermore: the world too is of that essence. The essence of oneself and the essence of the world: these two are one.[...] Thus, just as the way of social participation may lead in the end to a realization of the All in the individual, so that of exile brings the hero to the Self in all.

The process Campbell talks about, though, is an arduous one. In The Conference of The Birds, an epic allegory from the 13th Century, Fariduddin al-Attar writes of this journey (towards enlightenment, finding one's true self) as one that ultimately lays most aspirants by the wayside. I think the popularization of such practices as Buddhism and Yoga in the west is a good thing but brings with it the danger of 1) missing the ultimate goal of the practice and 2) underestimating the length and difficulty of the journey itself. In fact, insofar as that goes, I wonder if it's not misleading to even think about the goal when pursuing a spiritual practice. I know you've got to know what you're going for, but the point in this case is you can't know, you can't Imagine what it is that you are in fact pursuing. So I feel when Campbell writes about this nice newly minted all essence self, he is in fact retelling a Myth not a fact. I don't doubt that people have reached that stage, but I doubt that Campbell himself has, and without the experience, all he can relate to us is the legend, like the City of Atlantis.  

So, back and forth, on the waves, we bob. I bob you bob and she bobs. I know the postmodernists say enjoy the free play and don't look for land, but sometimes it gets exhausting to doggie-paddle.