Step Away from the Fridge

I've never shot my refrigerator with a .357 magnum. Or any other caliber revolver for that matter. But I think we've all reached the level of frustration in life that Henry Lightcap/Edward Abbey outlines to begin "The Fool's Progress," (I love that the NY Times review is titled, "Beer, Guns, and Neitzsche") his autobiographical novel. The hope is that we don't get to the refrigerator-shooting point in our lives, or, that having been there, we know how to avoid finding ourselves there again.

We've got a habit we try to keep of around the dinner table, before we eat, saying some of the things we are thankful for in our lives. Not just at Thanksgiving, but any night we sit around the dining table (which isn't every night). For me it can be that I'm thankful for a great day; I'm thankful for a roof over my head and food on the table; I'm thankful for the girls' being healthy and making honor roll; I'm thankful to have a job where I look forward to going to work every day; I'm thankful to be outside in cool, fall weather that reminds me I am alive.

I'm thankful for books, movies, art, that transports my mind and opens my soul to the Universe. I'm thankful to be reading at present a couple heroes of mine in John Muir and Edward Abbey. Heroes not just in what they thought or wrote, but of living their lives outdoors, on their own terms, even if/when those terms weren't shared by others.

I recently watched "Into the Wild," the film version of the John Krakauer's telling of the life and story of Chris McCandless. It's freeing to see Alexander Supertramp slough off the conventions of modern life and live his life his way. But I got to the end and felt, no, where McCandless went wrong, someone like Muir had a handle on it. I'm an introvert, but not a hermit or a recluse. Life, love, adventures are meant to be shared. And Muir found something, being out in Nature, that he felt so passionate about that he had to communicate it to others. Muir wandered the country on his own terms more than McCandless, but still found ways to connect and make sense of it all without having to die alone in his 20s. This is not a knock on McCandless, per se, it's just seeing other paths to live life on my own terms, with deep meaning and connections to Nature, people, place, community.

"Into the Wild," sent me back to my bookshelves for Muir and Abbey; for Gary Snyder, and also for David Abram. And this is where the me that was going to be a philosophy professor loops back onto the scene. Abram's book, "The Spell of the Sensuous" has been calling me for a challenge for some time. Over the course of trail and ultra running, I came across Abram and the concept of ecophenomenology. Phenomenology (what I was going to get my PhD studying) sets itself the task of looking at how we find and make meaning in the world. If you add "eco" to that, you get the idea. It's a way of combining the natural world and our experience of it, and the value of being out in it, with philosophy. From Abram

As technological civilization diminishes the biotic diversity of the earth, language itself is diminished. As there are fewer songbirds in the air, due to the destruction of their forests and wetlands, human speech loses more and more of its evocative power. For when we no longer hear the voices of warbler and wren, our own speaking can no longer be nourished by their cadences. As the splashing of the rivers is silenced by more and more dams, as we drive more and more of the land's wild voices into the oblivion of extinction, our own languages become increasingly impoverished and weightless, progressively emptied of their earthly resonance.

There is a reason that Muir, Abbey, McCandless got the fu** out of Dodge and went their own way. Abram wrestles philosophically with that need and our need to be in contact with, connected to, the natural world around us.

Studying our surroundings. For me, that yokes together trail running, bird watching, paddleboarding, the various ways I dig exploring outside. It's a framework for examining life and the world around me.

It makes "outside" part of my reading list. It creates a space where reading sends me outside, and my experience outside informs my reading and writing. In the words of George Peppard's Hannibal on the A-Team, "I love it when a plan comes together." Creating existential reasons to avoid shooting the refrigerator.

Wrestling Rilke

Rilke stands in the doorway. You have to reckon with him. If you write and think and feel, there is no getting around him. He has said too much. Even to folks like me who have and will only read him translated. I put Rilke and Rimbaud in the category of favorite poets whose asses I would sometimes like to kick. Because as brilliant and breath taking and mind and soul expanding as they are, sometimes I don't want them to be right.

Let me explain. Here's Rilke from the first of his "Duino Elegies:"

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic orders?
and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart:
I would be consumed in that overwhelming experience.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Every angel is terrifying.

Fu**. Now what? I have sat reading Rilke in the Oxford Park. On Deer Isle in Maine. In the library at Washington College, though I never studied him in a class. Sitting on the back deck of the last three houses we've lived in.

"Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror..." that, "serenely disdains to annihilate us." Picture Jack Nicholson in military uniform leaning forward in your face saying, "You can't handle beauty!"

Those things we spend our lives looking for, hoping to find. Beauty. Happiness. Peace. Then wrestle with the idea that beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror. And let's talk about love for a minute as something of beauty. The early days of being in love, as fantastic as they are, for most people who harbor healthy insecurities, there is also some real fear lying just behind the beauty of it. Fear that it won't end well; fear that you'll be swept away and maybe it won't be reciprocated; fear of losing yourself; fear of getting hurt. In matters of the heart, that fear is there.

That's not a perfect analogy, but it points the finger, for me, at what Rilke is saying. But there is more to Rilke than that. A shit-ton more. This is what I've got time for this morning. So wrestle with beauty and terror is the same experience. Wrestle with Rilke. And maybe we'll come back to him and show why sometimes you don't have to feel like he needs an existential ass-whooping.

Revision, the improv gut method

Improvisation and revision aren't the same thing. Maybe not. And I'm not sure which I'm doing, but I'm going to call it the latter.

Ulysses may remain a mystery a bit longer. Reading Joyce is confronting a master. I've known that since "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" and "Dubliners." Ulysses is stunning. But I'm not feeling it. It's an exercise in discipline only at present, without soul. And one thing about my reading and self-directed studies, since college really, is that they are soul-driven. There is so much out there to read, if I'm not feeling it, what's the point?

So my resolution to have finished Ulysses by 40 (Apr. 8) has been tabled. Now, I'm all about the one-to-one correspondence when it comes to personal betterment. So what to replace it with? Something reading, something soul-driven, something delving into a/the masters.

The answer has been presenting itself all of 2012, but especially yesterday morning. Monday. Driving to work. Listening for the first time, in full, to Duke Ellington's "Money Jungle," where the Duke composed for and played with Charles Mingus and Max Roach. I can't recall be so moved by an entire album on first listen as I was on the road yesterday. My soul was lifted up.

And I looked at what I was reading, instead of Ulysses, and it was Nat Hentoff's "The Jazz Life," and Ted Gioia's, "The History of Jazz," and amped for Geoff Dyer's "But Beautiful," and I'm not well-read, or read at all about jazz, which by virtue of listening to and thinking about has profoundly changed my life over the last decade. I count Mingus, Miles and Monk in the same aesthetic company as Mark Twain and Robert Hass and Whitman and William Carlos Williams.

So my revised, my improvised goal for 2012, is to get read on jazz. Well read. To better know what I'm listening to. Not for the sake of analyzing really, but for the sake of context and curiosity. It feels like what I should be doing. It's what I am doing, where I'm led.

And while I'm at it, I'll add an experiential component: to attend a jazz show or festival to see a musician I really want to see. I have not attended a jazz concert, proper. A lot of jazz inspired, a lot of improvisation, but to find an Ambrose Akinmusire, a Robert Glasper, a Jason Moran, etc. show.

So that's my revision. Revision by gut method. Also known as improvisation.

Response to Sunday

It's the same shelf at Newscenter, full of random books at the end of the aisle. The first time it was Merwin's The Shadow of Sirius. It didn't belong there and I've never seen another copy in the store since.

This time the shelf coughed up Jules Renard's Nature Stories.

It's Sunday evening. Rain swirls outside, but it is quiet in here, which amplifies the dervish out the windows. Three girls are sleeping. I've got my second evening coffee and am dwelling somewhere between the couch and Renard's animated countryside.

The evening caps a day that started with a 10-mile mudfest of a trail run, where Shaun and I scared up a half-dozen deer darting ahead of us across Little Florida Trail at Tuckahoe State Park.

As I ran until and through my legs hurting from climbing; as I ran short of breath and ski-sliding down muddy hills, I was at times part of the trail, at times my lungs, heart and breath, at times thinking about Renard and what he would see in the woods, on the trail, through the rain. Both what he would see and how he would say it.

It's something of a three-part process: observation, interpretation, expression. Being mindful and receptive to what is there, having it resonate and work through, and reordering it into a personal/universal form of expression.

For people, the possibilities of self-expression are staggering. For a bullfrog, less so. This morning they drank in the rain, the creek, the footsteps of runners passing by and sang it out in one bellowing, continuous note. To our ears, the bullfrog has one note, one word, one song in response to the world.

Tonight, the house is still quiet. In the kitchen, the oven is pre-heated and I've got a mind for baking flounder. This morning's run started with talk of the backwards notes of the mandolin, and with a looking forward to spring and summer fishing. My response tonight, it seems is preparing flounder and cueing up Blues for Allah.

Reading Merwin & Small Towns

I have to read Merwin in the mornings
when my mind is clear and there are no noises.

Reading him is like driving through a small town:
blink and you'll miss the universe.
No pressure.

I know from small towns, growing up in one
sans stoplights. Bike or skateboard could traverse
the town we knew by land and water.

What I learned about art came from
a fast-talking black man in the park
while we sat eating a box of Pop Tarts.

He expounded on photography and frames
and perspective. He poured himself into
a garage sale guitar, but had no business
or time for cars.

There was no school in the town where
I learned everything (not that I know anything).

Small towns and Merwin are maybe the same.
They contain everything. They hold the universe.
Blink at your own risk.