Riffs for a Tuesday morning

Language is a monkey wrench. -Charles Simic

If I'm wondering what I think, what I have to say, I can always turn to Simic to ask me the right questions. To make pronouncements that remind me both that: 1) language is just a tool, not an end in itself, and 2) I don't like the Foo Fighters.

Being a man among words, it's sometimes easy to get so hung up on finding just the right word, that I am left sitting, silently, with something to say.

Employ the right tool. You could try to cut down a Christmas tree with a monkey wrench, but you better have a lot of time and a big tree skirt.

Sometimes, a smile is the right word.

Philosophers who seek those moments in which the senses, the mind, and the emotions are experienced together. -CS

There is no instruction manual for that kind of integration. Or if you find one, let me know. Maybe just sitting for long stretches in front of a bowl of gumbo at the dinner table, pausing between spoonfuls to look at my wife and daughters. Eating and being, mindfully in love.

Laughter undermines discipline and leads to anarchy. -CS

Some of my favorite memories are filled with fall-on-the-ground/spit-take laughter. Playing wiffleball in our back yard with my godfather, Doug Hanks, Jr., who could break up a game at any minute with a pronouncement at the plate. That's something he could do, and did, throughout his life.

If philosophy, cosmology, poetry, life--if the big, noble pursuits don't include, seek out, or make room for laughter, then I'm not playing. That's maybe why I'm drawn to those folks who think, who write, who live, or try to, with a smile.

3-for-3 towards infinity

As a child, I saw faces on walls, ceilings, doorknobs and spoons. Then, one day, they were all gone. - Charles Simic

We replace the animate world of the child with test scores. In third grade, if we're not careful, we can usher in the end of innocence via the end of imagination.

The world alive for test scores. Hardly a fair trade. If we facilitate this deal, we deserve what we get.

I'm the child of the rainy Sunday afternoons of my youth. - Simic

Improvisation. What you do when there is nothing to do. That defines you.

When the game is rained out, you can't hit the beach and you are left to fill in the blank spaces around scheduled activities. What do you do?

My rainy Sundays were filled with Tinker Toys, Legos, Star Wars figures, baseball cards and comic books as a kid. Seldom do I come up with something better today as an adult.

On rainy days in our house, if it gets too quiet, I go check on the girls and find them queens and creators of entire worlds that somehow (just barely) fit inside their rooms. On those occasions I smile.

The imagination has moments when it knows what the word "infinity" means. - Simic

Those moments. How to cultivate. How to extend. How to get back to...

How do you embrace the infinite--arms and mind and soul stretched wide...

My recent moments make me sound like a skipping record: breathless on a mud-ridden, water-logged trail run, ground flowers in bloom, hurting, pushed past my limit but still moving forward, hanging on; watching Ava draw at the dining room table; cutting the grass while Anna loops the neighborhood on her bike; reading Wallace Stevens.

Our imaginations are their most fertile, most infinite when we are children. Though we may not know what "fertile" or "infinite" mean, still we know them by being a child, by coloring the grass purple, by never knowing or caring what time it is, by surveying our rooms, our yards, our line of sight, and seeing them as boundless.

Caution: Looks Off Bridges

I can't say if he was in the Army. It was just a jacket. Could have picked it up anywhere. The Army jacket is the second thing I noticed.

First is that he was stopped, standing on the Frederick Douglass Bridge. People don't stop on bridges and just look off at the river. But he did. Stopped time and watched planes land at Reagan. Or the tide. I don't know what he was looking at, but he was stopped and looking.

About 15 years ago we drank beer standing on the Bay Bridge. We were on our way to a Grateful Dead show at RFK (what turned out to be their second to last there) and an accident on the bridge stopped traffic. I had never gotten out of a car and looked off the Bay Bridge. It called for a Bud 10oz.

I've been reading notebooks lately. Charles Simic's, Campbell McGrath's, Sam Shepard's and Gary Snyder's. Writing in a notebook is like stopping on a bridge. Trying to take that pause and get your soul around it. A moment where you keep yourself from just moving forward without looking. Without stopping. Without thinking.

Like the dude in the Army jacket, I stop and look off bridges. I should get a bumper sticker to warn folks.

Winter Break

The coolest Christmas gift I ever got was the Star Wars Death Star. It was put together, set up in front of the Christmas tree when I came downstairs.

Watching our girls open and get excited about Christmas--the season and presents-- I don't know what their best gift will be. The Star Wars trilogy and all that came with it defined our childhood. I'm not sure this generation has that singular zeitgeist for its collective youth imagination. The narrative is pluralistic now, splintered. Maybe it's not a narrative...

Break.

The thing besides Christmas and family that connects our winters to the girls' is snow. Anna tries to ambush me blind with snowballs. We belly-laugh after I counterattack with a sidewinder that SPLATS, imprinted to the earflap of her peace sign fleece hat.

The next day our family will be frozen grinned and smoke breathing at night, at the bottom of a sledding hill, and I'm thinking this is a winter memory, a life memory that we will each remember forever...

Break.

The week between Christmas and New Years has become sacred. Family time, with no plans, no schedule, only impromptu places to go or things to do. It's a sanctuary week to recharge before going into the long, cold stretch of January and February. The cool of Christmas gives way to the dark droll of winter proper. Quiet like ice...

Break.

From the bathroom I can hear the phone ringing, just barely, over the sweeper running downstairs. Technology is a mouthy bitch, discontent to leave the quiet still.

My latest tech indulgence is the opposite--it cultivates quiet. My dad surprised me and my sister's husband with Kindles. I'm a book guy, I like being surrounded by them, to have stacks on the coffee table and shelves (much to my wife's chagrin ;), waiting by the bed and next to the couch. I wouldn't have thought of a Kindle. But I dig it. I'm more than halfway through Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad in just a few days and I'm a slow reader.

Goon Squad squats with Charles Simic's Master of Disguises and Robert Hass's The Apple Trees at Olema in a flat easily taken for a day planner.

As smitten as I am with Egan's Goon Squad (and I am smitten), with its stories and style and characters and connected threads, it's not until I dig into Simic and Matthew Lippman that I have to pick up a pen and start to write...

Break.

Views from the stoop

 
Your body and soul will sit on separate stoops
chewing the same piece of gum. --Charles Simic

Yes, I know those stoops. Each of them.

The one where the body sits trying to draw out the last bit of flavor from a stick of gum that gave it up yesterday. But it's peppermint and she might walk by, so it pays to be prepared.

Meanwhile, the soul gave up on the gum a while back. It doesn't even know the jaw is still chewing. The soul instead traces the edge of the building, from the trash cans, past the hanging laundry, up to where the rooftop meets the gray-lit evening and wants to shake hands, has its arm outstretched, but the skyline puts forth a fist to say, 'pound it, dawg.'

Skylines have always been more hip than rooftops. Especially seen from the stoop.

All in accordance with

 
Would the naked emperor take out the messenger who showed up with a mirror? Yeah, I think so.

We like to realize our flaws on our own, even the emperors among us, or to go on oblivious, thinking more highly of ourselves than we should.

Humility is a dish best prepared alone, or maybe prepared with others and then eaten alone, with enough spirits to numb it going down.

---

That was this morning. In the meantime, I've had a day full of work and conversations with the girls, and dinner out at Chili's and the grocery store and a heart-in-the-throat win that turned into a heart-on-the-floor-stomped-on-by-combat-boot loss by the Ravens. My mind no longer inhabits rarefied space of the morning.

Sometimes philosophy and poetry are where my mind wanders. Not when the heart is pounding or I'm making lunch or I'm walking down the store aisle looking for canned pumpkin.

Che Guevara wrote that, "In nine months a man can think a lot of thoughts, from the height of philosophical conjecture to the most abject longing for a bowl of soup--in perfect harmony with the state of his stomach."

Never take a hungry Che to an Andy Warhol exhibit and expect a conversation... I agree with Che's stomach sutra. I would add to it the hangover/sickness clause because deep, free thoughts don't flow when you're hanging over the toilet bargaining with whoever will listen to make it stop, make it go away.

--

It's morning again. Beans are ground and new coffee going down and Charles Simic and the day ahead. The mind is atop its perch. The emperor is still naked. Maybe we'll leave him his pride.

The New Room

Dear philosophers, I get sad when I think.
Is it the same with you? --Charles Simic

The office in our house is largely second-hand, cast-off or leftover. It's my favorite room in the house.

Our girls call it "The New Room," because it's been assembled and arranged more recently than the rest of the house.

Maybe our lives are the same--overlapping circles of being cast off or jettisoning parts and people and coming together with new-to-us stories and people who are their own cast-offs. But the way we come together, the intersection of it all makes it, us, new.

We watched Toy Story 3 last night. We'd seen it in the theater but the girls wanted to see it again. There's a montage in the beginning, home movies that show Andy and his toys growing from elementary school to college age. Aside: despite getting older, I often feel like the toys who stay the same over time, I rarely feel like I've grown up.

I'm a sucker for storylines or songs or photos that show kids growing older or father-daughter relationships. My heart swells to the point where I'm 2.4 seconds from sobbing over that shit.

Anna is eight and cares about brand names, while Ava at five is concerned only with colors and cuteness. Their vocabulary and expressions, body movements seem to change daily. It's awesome. It's gut-wrenching.

This passage of time stuff. Most of the time I am cool with it. I can embrace it. I love my life more at 38 than I did at 28 or 18, and I dug it then.

It makes my existence to watch and be a part of the girls growing and laughing and beaming happy. At the same time I follow the thread to us being kids and my parents going through this and my parents being kids and their parents going through this and I know/knew their parents and three out of four of them are dead now and... Fuck!!

I'm not often taken in that direction, but that's where thinking leads sometimes. Logical-emotional-existential thinking when you're sitting in "the New Room," looking at your bookshelf that once held your Betamax tapes of Star Wars and your old little league games.

Dear philosophers, I get sad when I think.
Is it the same with you?

An as$ pocket of wonder *

Sometimes I want one book. One book that fits into a pocket (ass pocket, or thigh or even jacket) that I can carry with me and pull out in case of boredom or stagnation; a book that will deliver instant wonder, instant inspiration; a book that induces reverie, reflections on beauty and time; turns me on; and provides both telescope and microscope into existence.

I have a few candidates for the position of carry-all pocket book: Robert Hass's Praise, W.S. Merwin's Shadow of Sirius, will be auditioning Charles Simic's The World Doesn't End.

It's like carrying an aesthetic Swiss Army knife, including a bottle opener because sometimes twist off inspiration just doesn't cut it.

This is a book that you have to be able to get something out of from just reading a page or two. Like with two girls napping in the back seat while wife (or husband) runs into a store. Like just stopped through the coffee shop and have 10-15 minutes to yourself.

It has to be dense, exploratory, experimental, funny, demand and reward re-reading and pondering and memorizing and maybe even reading out loud (though probably not in a mall).

Yeah, to have one book like that. One ass pocket of wonder and inspiration. A Linus Van Pelt security blanket of a book. Sometimes I think that would be pretty cool.

* Title with a nod to R.L. Burnside, whose "A*s pocket of whiskey" remains one of my all-time favorite album titles