Love In The Open Hand

MAKE THAT A TREE HOUSE
WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS!

"Is love rice in a jar, no need to give back an egg?"
I really liked The Joy Luck Club; then I liked The Kitchen God's Wife even more; and The Hundred Secret Senses even more than that. Good Better Best. (The Bonesetter's Daughter, not so much; but that's okay.) In all these novels, Amy Tan has created so many moments of pure magic, you might find it difficult to choose a favorite, but for me it's easy: Chapter 12 in The Hundred Secret Senses: "The Best Time To Eat Duck Eggs."

In this chapter, Kwan tells Libby about the thousand-year duck eggs, buried years before in her previous life as Miss Moo, when she shared an understated romance with the peddler, Zeng who provided her with empty canning jars for storing the lime-cured eggs. Each week they exchange these tokens: a jar for Miss Moo and an egg for Zeng, until times get hard and food of any kind, including eggs, has become scarce. Even though Miss Moo no longer has any pickled eggs to share, kindly Zeng proffers the jar, this time not empty but filled with rice to see her through the lean stretch. She is overwhelmed by his generosity: "So heavy with feelings! Was this love? Is love rice in a jar, no need to give back an egg?" (181).

To answer Kwan's question: Yes! That's love, pure and simple, no strings attached, no angle, no need to give back an egg. Love in the open hand, wishing to help, wishing not to hurt. The same love described by Edna St. Vincent Millay in her tender sonnet:

Sonnet XI
Not in a silver casket cool with pearls
Or rich with red corundum or with blue,
Locked, and the key withheld, as other girls
Have given their loves, I give my love to you;
Not in a lovers'-knot, not in a ring
Worked in such fashion, and the legend plain—
Semper fidelis, where a secret spring
Kennels a drop of mischief for the brain:



"Down in
the meadow
where the
cowslips grow"

by Kate Greenaway
(1846 - 1901)
English children's
book illustrator





Love in the open hand, no thing but that,
Ungemmed, unhidden, wishing not to hurt,
As one should bring you cowslips in a hat
Swung from the hand, or apples in her skirt,
I bring you, calling out as children do:
"Look what I have!—And these are all for you."
~from the sonnet sequence Fatal Interview
A few months ago, when I mentioned this sonnet on my daily blog, I knew that it deserved another, longer look. Millay is undoubtedly one of the the most-mentioned writers in my literary discussions, and always one of my top choices for desert island reading. I know you're supposed to say The Bible or Shakespeare, but I'd be more inclined to pack the sonnets of Edna St. Vincent Millay.

What I admire about "Sonnet XI" is its innocence and optimism, a poem to read when you fear that what you have to offer, the things that you hold out are not being accepted, not even when you say, "these are all for you." And what are those things? Not diamond rings so much as thoughts, ideas, values, dreams, favorite poems, past experiences, rice in a jar, cowslips in a hat -- all the things that add to up to your own particular way of being in the world. How sad the thought of offering honest companionship and getting the message, "Oh, no, you should be a different way than what you are."

This sonnet says that you deserve someone who offers you "Love in the open hand / no thing but that." However lovely the gifts and delightful the tokens, they should always be offered freely out of tenderness and a desire for your company -- just the way you are -- never as a way to control or "improve." And better yet, when you offer your affection and your deepest hopes and dreams, "ungemmed, unhidden, wishing not to hurt," they should be accepted freely -- not scrutinized or analyzed or held up against the light or laughed at or brushed aside or put on hold. Kwan's story says to avoid the selfish lovers who give "only enough to take back what they wanted from me" (181). Not all are as trustworthy and pure of heart as dear Mr. Zeng.

Take care of your heart.

Knowing, as I'm sure you do by now, that one of the imperatives for this blog is a poem for every poem, here are a few others to go along with Millay's sonnet.

First, this song by Donovan:

Turquoise
Your smile - beams like sunlight - on a gull's wing
and the leaves - dance and play - after you
Take my hand - and hold it - as you would a flower
take care with my heart - oh darling - she's made of glass

Your eyes - feel like silence - resting on me
and the birds - cease to sing - when you rise
Ride easy - your fairy stallion - you have mounted
take care how you fly - my precious - you might fall down

In the pastel skies - the sunset - I have wandered
with my eyes and ears and heart - strained to the full
I know I tasted the essence - in the few days
take care who you love - my precious - he might not know

words and music by Donovan Leitch (b. 1946)
British singer, songwriter, guitarist

sung by Joan Baez (b. 1941)
American folk singer, songwriter, activist.

Second, this childhood reverie:

I Shall Come Back
I shall be coming back to you
From seas, rivers, sunny meadows,
Glens that hold secrets:
I shall come back with my hands full
Of light and flowers....
I shall bring back things I have picked up,
Traveling this road or the other,
Things found by the sea or in the pinewood.
There will be a pine-cone in my pocket,
Grains of pink sand between my fingers.
I shall tell you of a golden pheasant’s
Feather....
Will you know me?

composed at age 10 - 12, by Hilda Conkling (1910 - 86)
American child poet

And third, this long poem:

THE PICNIC (click on poem to enlarge text for reading)
John Logan (1923 - 87)
American poet and teacher

The Picnic
It is the picnic with Ruth in the spring.
Ruth was third on my list of seven girls
But the first two were gone (Betty) or else
Had someone (Ellen had accepted Doug).
Indian Gully the last day of school;
Girls make the lunches for the boys too.
I wrote a note to Ruth in algebra class
Day before the test. She smiled, and nodded.
We left the cars and walked through the young corn
The shoots green as paint and the leaves like tongues
Trembling. Beyond the fence where we stood
Some wild strawberry flowered by an elm tree
And Jack in the pulpit was olive ripe.
A blackbird fled as I crossed, and showed
A spot of gold or red under its quick wing.
I held the wire for Ruth and watched the whip
Of her long, striped skirt as she followed.
Three freckles blossomed on her thin, white back
Underneath the loop where the blouse buttoned.
We went for our lunch away from the rest,
Stretched in the new grass, our heads close
Over unknown things wrapped up in wax papers.
Ruth tried for the same, I forget what it was,
And our hands were together. She laughed,
And a breeze caught the edge of her little
Collar and the edge of her brown close hair
That touched my cheek. I turned my face in-
to the gentle fall. I saw how sweet it smelled.
She didn’t move her head or take her hand.
I felt a soft caving in my stomach
As at the top of the highest slide,
When I had been a child, but was not afraid,
And did not know why my eyes moved with wet
As I brushed her cheek with my lips and brushed
Her lips with my own lips. She said to me
Jack, Jack, different than I had ever heard,
Because she wasn’t calling me, I think,
Or telling me. She used my name to
Talk in another way I wanted to know.
She laughed again and then she took her hand;
I gave her what we both had touched; can’t
Remember what it was, and we ate the lunch.
Afterward we walked in the small, cool creek
Our shoes off, her skirt hitched, and she smiling,
My pants rolled, and then we climbed up the high
Side of Indian Gully and looked
Where we had been, our hands together again.
It was then some bright thing came in my eyes,
Starting at the back of them and flowing
Suddenly through my head and down my arms
And stomach and my bare legs that seemed not
To stop in feet, not to feel the red earth
Of the Gully, as though we hung in a
Touch of birds. There was a word in my throat
With the feeling and I said, It’s beautiful.
Yes, she said, and I felt the sound and word
In my hand join the sound and word in hers
As in one name said, or in one cupped hand.
We put back on our shoes and socks and we
Sat in the grass awhile, crosslegged, under
A blowing tree, not saying anything.
And Ruth played with shells she found in the creek,
As I watched. Her small wrist which was so sweet
To me turned by her breast and the shells dropped
Green, white, blue, easily into her lap,
Passing light through themselves. She gave the pale
Shells to me, and got up and touched her hips
With her light hands, and we walked down slowly
To play the school games with the others.

I discovered "The Picnic" my Senior year in high school, in the anthology I have mentioned a few times before: Some Haystacks Don't Even Have Any Needle. I suppose it is the "apples in her skirt" in Millay's poem that brings to mind "the long, striped skirt" worn by the girl Ruth in Logan's poem, and "the loop where the blouse buttoned." Ruth is the poet's date for the school picnic; and although he admits that she was only "third on my list of seven girls," he is pleased to spend the day with her and finds himself falling in love for the very first time:

We went for our lunch away from the rest,
Stretched in the new grass, our heads close . . .
And our hands were together. She laughed,
And a breeze caught the edge of her little
Collar and the edge of her brown, loose hair . . .
I felt a soft caving in my stomach
As at the top of the highest slide
When I had been a child, but was not afraid . . .

Similar to the "cowslips in a hat," described in Millay's sonnet, Logan portrays Ruth sifting sea shells and offering them as a souvenir of the special day:

And Ruth played with some shells from the creek,
As I watched. Her small wrist which was so sweet
To me turned by her breast and the shells dropped
Green, white, blue, easily into her lap,
Passing light through themselves. She gave the pale
Shells to me, and got up and touched her hips
With her light hands, and we walked down slowly
To play the school games with the others.















Hanging Out in the Tree House Before the Prom


COME BACK FOR
Next Fortnightly Post
Monday, June 14, 2010

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

Play With This!

A HOUSE WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

Take the scenic route: St. Peter's Way
A Pedestrian Friendly Greenway in the Middle of a Busy City
Looking for the perfect childhood?
You can almost find it here,
on this beautiful street in Philadelphia

*************************
"Wow . . . When did this happen?
You're like a little gnome to me now."


You may have seen this picture
last month, when I devoted my
book blog to
"Catching Up On Anne Lamott."
Here it is one more time,
a current photo of my sons
towering over with me,
captioned with Sam Lamott's
sweet "little gnome" remark.




And this long ago picture:
[Porch at left can be
found on street above]
Back When They
Were the Gnomes.

Not forgetting, of course,
that back when they were
the Gnomes, I was the Ogre!


Actually, I kind of had forgotten that, but was reminded of it the other day when looking through a collection of Anna Quindlen's Newsweek columns. In one of her many essays on child rearing, she says that "Raising children is presented at first as a true-false test, then becomes multiple choice, until finally, far along, you realize that it is an endless essay." Looks like this is going to be one of those essays! I was touched by Quindlen's truthfulness about trying to be the perfect parent, and accidentally focusing on all the wrong things:

"Every part of raising children is humbling, too. Believe me, mistakes were made. They have all been enshrined in the 'Remember-When-Mom-Did' Hall of Fame. The outbursts, the temper tantrums, the bad language, mine, not theirs. The times the baby fell off the bed. The times I arrived late for preschool pickup. The nightmare sleepover. The horrible summer camp. The day when the youngest came barreling out of the classroom with a 98 on her geography test, and I responded, "What did you get wrong?" (She insisted I include that.) The time I ordered food at the McDonald's drive-through speaker and then drove away without picking it up from the window. (They all insisted I include that.) I did not allow them to watch the Simpsons for the first two seasons. What was I thinking?"(Anna Quindlen, "Raising Children," Newsweek, March 2006).

I showed this to Ben and Sam and had them read it, so that they could see some things from my angle. They still love to punish me for not letting them watch the movie Billy Elliot when it first came out and for the time when I refused to play hide & seek with them at bedtime, and for the time when I got mad and took all their toys off the shelf and threw them into a big pile on the bed, shouting "play with this; play with this; play with this" -- after they had complained to me that they had nothing to play with. These are the embarrassing things they said they'd make me include if I ever decided to write an essay about the parenting errors I made during their childhood. Well, now I've confessed voluntarily, so no one has to make me. Ha! (See also: "Perfect Parent? Not!")

Rereading Quindlen's essay makes me feel less like an ogre or a hopelessly flawed parenting figure and more just like a normal ol' mom out there learning by trial and error. It allows me to forgive myself a little bit, just like when I read Anne Lamott. Because -- guess what? You can't promise to be perfect; and you're not really an ogre, after all.

Her example of driving off without the food at McDonald's reminded me of something that the boys don't even remember. Sam wasn't born yet; Ben was just six months old, and I had taken him with me to pick up a package at the post office. The obvious thing to do was make a request for re-delivery to the house, especially since it was a large package (full of gifts and toys that my sister had sent from Germany). But I suppose to make the trip worthwhile, I was determined to complete the task myself.

Somehow or other -- I don't even remember how -- I managed to get the big box and Baby Ben back out to the car, tuck Ben properly into his car seat, put the car in reverse: crunch! What? It was the package, still sitting on the parking lot behind the car! Luckily this small-scale collision caused no damage to the Christmas presents, and no one saw me do such a stupid thing! But now you know, and obviously I haven't forgotten. Even now, every time I pull into that post office parking lot, I am reminded of those days when getting the child in and out of the car, and getting myself in and out of the building seemed like such a mission accomplished that I completely overlooked my reason for being there in the first place. Well, raising children does require focus! And, indeed, the baby is more important than the toys! So maybe I wasn't too far off track, just not fully functioning.

Quindlen's essay closes with the heartwarming prospect of our kids growing up into our favorite human beings:

"Even today I'm not sure what worked and what didn't . . . I suspect they simply grew into their true selves because they demanded in a thousand ways that I back off and let them be. The books said to be relaxed and I was often tense, matter-of-fact and I was sometimes over the top.

"And look how it all turned out. I wound up with the three people I like best in the world who have done more than anyone to excavate my essential humanity.

"That's what the books never told me. I was bound and determined to learn from the experts. It just took me awhile to figure out who the experts were." (Quindlen, "Raising Children")


Here are a few related ideas about "quality time"
from some of my favorite writers:

Peggy Jones and Pam Young (aka The Slob Sisters): "I had never agreed with the idea that it was 'quality time' that was important when raising children. I think it's quantity time that counts. A child can't be expected to concentrate all the important things he or see feels and thinks into some arbitrary hour or day that a parent designates as 'quality time.' . . . In the end, the person who is there all the time is the one who gives quality time" (Get Your Act Together, 133 - 34).

Al Franken: "Quantity time is quality time. My dad never took me horseback riding. We never went white-water rafting. He never gave me the seven-thousand-dollar fully functional scale model of a Ferrari that I coveted when I was twelve. But he did spend time with me. Not necessarily quality time, but quantity time, hours and hours and hours of nonproductive, aimless quantity time.

"What did we do with this quantity time? Mainly, we watched television, hours and hours and hours of television. My fondest memories of childhood are of sitting on the couch watching comedians on TV with my parents. . ."

Funny Franken goes on the describe his father's laughing fits, pipe-smoking habit, and eventual death of lung cancer at age eighty-five, concluding that "it was this quantity time spent with my father, laughing and coughing up phlegm, that inspired me in choosing my life's' work: making people laugh and raising money for the American Lung Association" (Oh, the Things I Know! A Guide to Success, or, Failing That, Happiness, xiv - xv).

Barbara Ehrenreich: "Forget 'quality time.' I tried it once on May 15, 1978. I know because it is still penciled into my 1978 appointment book. 'Kids,' I announced, 'I have forty-five minutes. Let's have some quality time!' They looked at me dully in the manner of rural retirees confronting a visitor from the Census Bureau. Finally, one of them said, in a soothing tone, 'Sure, Mom, but could it be after Gilligan's Island?'

" . . . The only thing that works is low-quality time: time in which you -- and they -- are ostensibly doing something else . . . "

Ehrenreich's essay draws to a conclusion with this amusing yet truthful advice: "Do not be afraid they will turn on you, someday, for being a lousy parent. They will turn on you. They will also turn on the full-time parents, the cookie-making parents, the Little League parents, and the all-sacrificing parents. If you are at work every day when they get home from school, they will turn on you, eventually, for being a selfish, neglectful careerist. If you are at home every day, eagerly awaiting their return, they will turn on you for being a useless, unproductive layabout. This is all part of the normal process of 'individuation,' in which one adult ego must be trampled into the dust in order for one fully formed teenage ego to emerge. Accept it."

Like Quindlen, Ehrenreich points out that one day, just on the other side of those teenage ego years, our children will relate to us as adults. They may start out as Little Gnomes, but that doesn't last long. As children they are just smaller versions of that bigger person who is soon to come. "Your job is to help them . . . get on with being that larger person, and in a form that you might like to know."

All Ehrenreich passages are from
the essay "Stop Ironing the Diapers,"
found in her book The Worst Years of Our Lives
(see pp 146 - 48)

STAY TUNED FOR
Next Fortnightly Post
Friday, May 28th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Take a look at
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

Happy Batday

A STATION WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

"Flash your Batsign over Lime Street" ~Adrian Henri
Elephants at Lime Street Station, Liverpool
"Holy Historical Circus Parade, Batman!"

Everywhere I went the other day, I kept hearing "We all live in a yellow submarine." It was playing on the IPOD as we were driving to the Sunrise Diner for breakfast; and a few minutes later, it was playing on the restaurant sound system as we placed our order. Maybe not all that much of coincidence, except that the night before I had added Yellow Submarine to my netflix list, and I had been up early that morning, re-reading The Mersey Sound (1967), a collection of Beatles Era poems by the three contemporary British writers known as the Liverpool poets: Adrian Henri (1932 - 2000) Roger McGough (b. 1937), and Brian Patten (b. 1946). These three poets emerged in the 1960's from the cultural explosion described by Edward Lucie-Smith as "The Liverpool Scene," which included most prominently the advent of The Beatles and the success of their performances.

Of all their poems, the most endearing (to me, anyway) are the Bat Poems, part of "an affectionate, half-frivolous, half-serious cult of Batman and Superman." Henri's "Batpoem," McGough's "Goodbat Nightman," and Patten's "Where are you now, Superman?" (an alternate version of which is entitled "Where Are You Now, Batman?") further mythologize these "folk heroes of pop" who are already admired precisely because of the ease and skill with which they cross the boundaries between the real and the fantastic. For more background on the Liverpool Poets, check out Lucie-Smith's book, The Liverpool Scene (1968), a blog-style collection of "poetry . . . with photographs of the poets and their surroundings . . . direct quotations taken from tape-recordings with the three poets . . . quotations from other sources . . . rambling conversations." In this way, Lucie-Smith conveys not only the poetry, but also the "scene," surrounding the poets and their work (see pp 5, 8, 9).

In the Bat Poems, Henri, McGough, and Patten present an authentic populist political agenda, pondering issues such as street crime, the war in Vietnam -- and the ability of Batman and Robin to heroically "clean up the town," "smash the Vietcong," and "attract the attention of passing solutions." McGough's poem is the bedtime prayer of a hopeful narrator who numbers Batman and Robin among those friendly neighborhood law enforcement officials in whom he places an innocent trust. This same sense of innocence and security appears in his whimsical description of their bedtime routine.

Goodbat Nightman
God bless all policemen
and fighters of crime,
May thieves go to jail
for a very long time.

They've had a hard day
helping clean up the town,
Now they hang from the mantelpiece
both upside down.

A glass of warm blood
and then straight up the stairs,
Batman and Robin
are saying their prayers.

They've locked all the doors
and they've put out the bat,
Put on their batjamas
(They like doing that)

They've filled their batwater-bottles
made their batbeds,
With two springy battresses
for sleepy batheads.

They're closing red eyes
and they're counting black sheep,
Batman and Robin
are falling asleep.

~Roger McGough

Henri's "Batpoem" is an imperative call to action, somewhat more forceful than McGough's nighttime reverie but equally sentimental. The speaker, who longs to be just like Batman, has pinned all his hopes on the arrival of the great crime fighter. He requests Batman's assistance not only in matters of local crime and foreign wars (satirizing the solipsistic nature of imperialism) but also in his love life. Gotham City is a romantic never-never-land of dreams come true and twentieth-century damsels in distress (confident and sexually sophisticated, they are kind of the inverse of Bill and Ted's "Chaste Medieval Babes"). Growing up in post-industrial Liverpool proved to be a rich resource for Henri, McGough, and Patten, ideal for the Gotham-like environment of their poetry. In the Bat Poems, mythical Gotham City and contemporary Liverpool have merged to provide a setting that is crime-ridden yet arcadian.

Batpoem
Take me back to Gotham City
Batman
Take me where the girls are pretty
Batman

All those damsels in distress
Half-undressed or even less
The Batpill makes 'em all say Yes
Batman

Help us out in Vietnam
Batman
Help us drop that Batnapalm
Batman

Help us bomb those jungle towns
Spreading pain and death around
Coke 'n candy wins 'em round
Batman

Help us smash the Vietcong
Batman
Help us show them that they're wrong
Batman

Help us spread democracy
Get them high on LSD
Make them just like you and me
Batman

Show me what I have to do
Batman
'Cause I want to be like you
Batman

Flash your Batsign over Lime Street
Batmobiles down every crime street
Happy Batday that's when I'll meet
Batman

~Adrian Henri

Patten's vision is the least hopeful, an "amalgam of innocence, bizarre situation, childhood daydreaming, pathos and tenderness" (British Poetry 1964 to 1984: Driving Through the Barricades, Martin Booth 136). He revives the ubi sunt lyric in his nostalgic, cynical poem of lost innocence and childhood heroics, making an ambiguous comment upon the superhero concept. In his poem, Captain Marvel, the Purple Monster Sir Galahad, Zorro, Clark Kent -- all are missing, dead, or worse. The popular heroes, now that their audience has grown up to embrace "Real Life," have been rendered powerless. The daring escapades they once performed were made possible, it seems, only by the simple faith, the pocket money, and the "celluloid imaginations" of the narrator and his childhood peers. Nowadays, their faded belief in the triumph of good over evil resurfaces only occasionally. Instead, a resigned world weariness has replaced the naive, implicit trust of McGough's "Goodbat Nightman" and the adventurous hope of Henri's "Batpoem."

Where are you now, Superman?
The serials are all wound up now,
Put away in small black boxes
For a decade or so. Superman's asleep
In the sixpenny childhood seats.
Batman and Robin are elsewhere
And can't see the Batsign thrown out
By kids with toffee-smeared mouths.
Captain Marvel's SHAZAM! echoes round the auditorium,
But the magicians don't hear him,
Must all be dead . . .

The purple Monster who came down from the Purple Planet,
Disguised as a man, is wandering aimlessly about the streets
With no way of getting back
Sir Galahad's been strangled by the Incredible Living Trees,
Zorro killed by his own sword.
Blackhawk's buried his companions
In the disused hangers of innocence
And Flash Gordon likewise wanders lonely,
Weeping over the girl he loved 7 universes ago.

We killed them all simply because we grew up;
Who made them possible with our uneducated minds
And with our pocket money
And the sixpences we received
For pretending to be Good.
We think we are too old to cheer and boo now,
But let's not kids ourselves.
We still cheer and boo
But do it quietly or at General Elections
Where it is still possible to find a goodie
Now and then.

Clark Kent (alias Superman)
Committed suicide because he failed to find new parts.
The bullets that bounced off him on the screen
Wormed their way in to Real Life.
But who cared then for real life?

We had our own world with our own celluloid imaginations
And now we have a different world,
One that's a little more cynical
And that we are convinced is more real.

Our batsignals now questions flung into space
To attract the attention of passing solutions . . .

~Brian Patten
[nothing omitted, all ellipses appear in original]

The Liverpool poets are famous for combining high-brow and low-brow. They wrote in reaction to conventional form and content, favoring a more inclusive style to accurately express the evolving social / cultural consciousness of their contemporaries. According to Henri, they brought "the domain of the marvellous within the confines of everyday life." In his theoretical work, Henri observes that "Art could go into the streets, be a political act, take away the barrier between fantasy and reality, affect the quality of daily life, seek inspiration from humble and despised objects, create an environment of its own" (Total Art: Environments, Happenings, and Performance, 27). Their poetry relies on a complex, intertextual network of literary traditions and popular culture, including comic books, television shows, movies, children's games, songs, graphic novels, advertisements, slogans, and folk motifs. The Bat Poems exemplify this democratic intertextuality, eliminating cultural hierarchies, bridging social gaps, assimilating literary and popular traditions, and extending the conventional boundaries of poetry.

Contemporary writer, reviewer, and artist of many kinds, Curtis Cotrell (also my old friend from James Joyce ~ Quarterly days), has done something similar in his cleverly titled poetry sequence, "Comics Trip," an alphabetical ode to an entire generation of cartoon characters and superheroes. What a nostalgic trip it was just to sit down and read through the wealth of cartoon imagery he has organized in these poems! I also like the way that, like the Liverpool poets, Cottrell weaves in serious current events:

The Great Pumpkin
Good grief! A pumpkin
Has taken root in my yard:
Washed up by the flood
From Hurricane Katrina
Just in time for Halloween.

& social commentary:

Nancy
Nancy and Sluggo,
Quite an unlikely couple.
Right way and wrong way
Or is it a class conflict
Culture assimilation?

& creative existentialism:

Green Lantern
Imagination
Focused through alien lens
Brings the ring power.
You are only limited
By the freedom of your will.

Not to mention
an aesthetics of common decency
(in manner of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.)
and startling imagery:

from Plainclothesmen
Hawk nose and square jaw,
A grotesque hieroglyphic
Of law and order:
Law of commercial design;
Art of sequential order.

Icon of action:
Car curves around a corner;
Tracy dodges past,
Swasticated arms and legs,
Coattail signifying speed.

A reader complains,
"Your villains are so ugly!"
Popular phrenology
Characterizing affects.
There's nothing cute about crime.

& retro recollections:

Beany and Cecil
The big seasick sea serpent
Had buttons for eyes.
They began as hand puppets
Before they became cartoons.

& last but never least -- my favorite! -- the intertextual pun:

"Et tu, Bluto?" exclaims Popeye!

My Heroes: Pirate & Batman, Halloween 1997

STAY TUNED FOR
Next Fortnightly Post
Wednesday, April 28th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Take a look at
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

Taste & See

The Garden of the Hesperides
painting by Lord Frederick Leighton (1830 - 96)
O Taste and See
by Denise Levertov (1923 - 1997)
British-born American Poet

The world is
not with us enough
O taste and see

the subway Bible poster said,
meaning The Lord, meaning
if anything all that lives
to the imagination’s tongue,

grief, mercy, language,
tangerine, weather, to
breathe them, bite,
savor, chew, swallow, transform

into our flesh our
deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince,
living in the orchard and being

hungry, and plucking
the fruit.


I never thought much about this particular Psalm until I read Levertov's poem about the "subway Bible poster." (Or Bible button, as seen above!) Nor was Wordsworth's sonnet among my favorites. I could agree with Wordsworth that the demeaning daily barter of the soul is too much with us, displacing Nature and threatening our sense of belonging to each other, to the Earth. But Proteus? Triton? Odd choices! As much as I love Greek mythology, I'm afraid these two gods don't speak to my heart any more than the commercial world of getting and spending. Shops or the Sea? Was that the choice?

The World Is Too Much With Us; Late and Soon
by William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
English Romantic Poet

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. -Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

Levertov's poem, however, caused me to take another look at Wordsworth's sonnet. I like the way she contradicts his opening line while asserting essentially the same observation. The world is too much with us? The world is not with us enough? Which is it? It's both. The busywork world is too much with us; the sensuous world is not with us enough, even though it is right in front of us for the taking, in plain sight, within our grasp.

We are separated from Nature: "tangerine, weather . . . plum, quince." And also from Imagination: "grief, mercy, language." But we needn't be. We can open our senses, take the time to taste and see, cross that busy street, visit the orchard, retrieve our hearts. Wordsworth's striking diction -- "a sordid boon" -- vividly conveys what a bad bargain it is to live out of touch with Nature, out of sync with the moon; and Levertov suggests an alternative version of communion and Paradise: "living in the orchard and being hungry and plucking the fruit." It seems so straightforward, yet we have so often been warned against it that we must retrain our senses in order to embrace the world enough.

Levertov's way of being in the garden and her list of verbs -- "To breathe them, "bite, savor, chew, swallow, transform" -- seem to exemplify what Terry Tempest Williams calls a "faith of verbs":

"This is my living faith, an active faith, a faith of verbs: to question, explore, experiment, experience, walk, run, dance, play, eat, love, learn, dare, taste, touch, smell, listen, argue, speak, write, read, draw, provoke, emote, scream, sin, repent, cry, kneel, pray, bow, rise, stand, look, laugh, cajole, create, confront, confound, walk back, walk forward, circle, hide, and seek. To seek: to embrace the questions, be wary of answers."
Terry Tempest Williams (b 1955)
American author, naturalist and environmentalist
Paintings Above: The Garden of the Hesperides is the Goddess Hera's orchard, in the distant western corner of the mythical world, where was said to grow a grove of immortality-giving golden apple trees, with golden leaves, golden branches, and golden apples. The apples had been planted from the fruited branches that the Great Earth Mother Gaia gave as a wedding gift to Hera and Zeus.

As the blissful garden is near Mt. Atlas, it is the three daughters of Atlas, also called "The Hesperides" who receive the task of tending to the primary tree in the blissful grove. As an additional safeguard, and perhaps to prevent the nymphs from plucking gold apples for themselves, Hera also placed in the garden a serpent-like dragon named Ladon who twines about the tree and never sleeps.

The beautiful Hesperides -- sometimes referred to as The Western Maidens, The Daughters of Evening, or The Daughters of Night -- also serve as the Goddesses of Evening and the Golden Light of Sunset.

STAY TUNED FOR
Next Fortnightly Post
Wednesday, April 28th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Take a look at
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

Lost & Found

ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

"I've got this little thing I've learned to do just lately . . . When it's so hard I think I shan't go on. I try to make it worse. I make myself think about Berkeley [a friend who died]. Our camp on the river. How good it was. When I'm certain I won't stand it, I go a moment more. Then I know I can bear anything." [ellipses in original]

Karen Blixen, from the screenplay Out of Africa

*******************

"Stand on the edge of the abyss of despair and
when you feel that it is beyond your strength,
break off and have a cup of tea."

Sophrony (Sakharov)

*******************

One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop (1911 – 1979)
Poet Laureate of the United States, 1949 to 1950
Pulitzer Prize Winner, 1956

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Last Spring, my friend Jan (www.jandonley.com) sent me this poem, sure that I would love it. What a fine poem! It was new to me, I did love it, and how timely! Because what Jan didn't know was that at my house around that time we were all going a little crazy looking for Gerry's watch (misplaced somewhere within the house and still unfound) and three tiny watch / calculator batteries that I had bought and promptly misplaced upon returning home from the store! I had just celebrated the one - week anniversary of the missing batteries by going out and purchasing a new batch, begrudging the wasted time and effort of the first trip, the fruitless search, the second trip. Even so, I was still obsessively determined to waste even more time by continuing my manic search for the originals.

Isn't that always the hard part? All that time down the drain and just not knowing when to stop? Reading Bishop's poem, I have to admire the way that she recommends letting go even of that "hour badly spent." Plus it helped me at the time to consider that the batteries themselves were "filled with the intent / to be lost." What chance did I stand against them?

Reading Bishop's poem reminded me of another that I have known since my earliest teaching days: "No Loser, No Weeper," by Maya Angelou. I used to carry around a low-tech cassette player so that my students could listen to a scratchy recording I had of Angelou reading this poem. The two poems follow a similar pattern, starting with a concrete list of trinkets lost and found, ending with love, the greatest of all loss.

Bishop mentions a watch, keys, time, places, names, houses, cities, rivers, continents -- all lost. Perhaps her reference to such a vast geography is intended as a metaphor for something more intimate, closer to the heart. On the other hand, maybe not; maybe she really did lose all those big things. In the final stanza, she acquiesces bravely to lost love, not entirely convincing the reader that the art of losing is as easy to master as she claims. Not disaster? More likely the opposite is true. She may know how to "Write it!" yet is, in fact, devastated.

Angelou provides a very straightforward list -- a dime, a doll, a watch; and, in the end, her "lover - boy" -- and a straightforward tone to go with it. She hates to lose something and doesn't mind saying so:

No Loser, No Weeper
by Maya Angelou (b 1928)
American Autobiographer, Poet, and Shero
Pulitzer Prize Nominee, 1971

"I hate to lose something,"
then she bent her head
"even a dime, I wish I was dead.
I can't explain it. No more to be said.
Cept I hate to lose something."

"I lost a doll once and cried for a week.
She could open her eyes, and do all but speak.
I believe she was took, by some doll-snatching-sneak
I tell you, I hate to lose something."

"A watch of mine once, got up and walked away.
It had twelve numbers on it and for the time of day.
I'll never forget it and all I can say
Is I really hate to lose something."

"Now if I felt that way bout a watch and a toy,
What you think I feel bout my lover-boy?
I ain't threatening you madam, but he is my evening's joy.
And I mean I really hate to lose something."

A lost watch in both poems? A literary motif? A metaphor for lost time? Or merely one of your more commonly lost items, along with sunglasses and umbrellas? I like the way that Angelou's watch just "got up and walked away," motivated, apparently, by "the intent to be lost" described by Bishop. I pointed out to Gerry that perhaps he could take some comfort in knowing that his predicament was none other than the human condition! Well, he resorted to wearing his second - best watch but was not resigned.

Nor was all lost! Not only did his watch show up; but, a few days later, the missing batteries re-appeared as well. As for the watch, we could all agree that it had last been seen on the kitchen counter, and Sam remembered playing with it while sitting there reading the paper. So it was not a big surprise when the watch turned out to have been on Sam's dresser top the entire time. He must have absentmindedly been twisting it around in his hand, walked up to his room for something, set it down, and completely forgotten about doing so.

Of course, he'd been in and out of his room a hundred times since then but just never spied the watch amidst the other dresser-top items. He didn't want to admit his oversight to Gerry, so I came up with the idea to put the watch around our cat Beaumont's neck and call out, "Hey, does anyone recall that old Disney movie about the cat [Thomasina? No, it was That Darn Cat!] who wore a wristwatch for a collar?" As per usual, no one else laughed at my joke, but Beaumont cooperated with my prank, and I thought I was pretty funny. Haha.
[Beaumont: Puss in Box, Shopping For Boots]
More good news! A few days later, I went to the freezer for a package of frozen vegetables (lets say something classy like edamame), and there were the three little batteries! I had simply twisted the plastic grocery bag around the veggies before storing them, without ever noticing that the batteries were in the same bag. At the onset of my extended search, when I realized that I had never unpacked the batteries, I did shake out every single grocery bag -- without ever remembering that one had already been stuck away in the freezer. Ah ha! Who knew?

To conclude this narrative of the ridiculous, just a day or so after I finally went out and replaced the lost batteries, I received the following in a list of "thoughts for the day" from my brother Aaron, who knew nothing about our lost and found issues: "The easiest way to find something lost around the house is to buy a replacement."

It certainly worked for the batteries; and, if Gerry had purchased a new watch, it would have worked in that case too!

STAY TUNED FOR
Next Fortnightly Post
Wednesday, April 14th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT ~ More Lost & Found
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Take a look at
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

Faith Kept Me Back Awhile

The fresco, "Zachariah in the Temple" (1486 - 1490)
by Domenico Ghirlandaio (1486-1490)
Italian Renaissance painter
Detail: Marsilio Ficino, Cristoforo Landino,
Angelo Poliziano, Demetrios Chalkondyles
Location of fresco: The Tornabuoni Chapel
in Santa Maria Novella Church, Florence, Italy

Back when I was an undergrad in a class called Major Trends, I was given the assignment to pick a significant historical event before 1550 and provide examples of its effect on literature up to the present day. I seem to recall taking a stair-step approach, starting with

Italian Renaissance (1400 - 1550)
produced humanist philosopher Marsilio Ficino
(Italian, 1433 - 1499)
who wrote Theologia Platonica (1474)

Fun Fact: Ficino coined the phrase "Platonic Love" [to be misquoted several centuries later by one of my Freshman Comp students as "Plutonic Love"]

Ficino's Neoplatonism influenced Edmund Spenser
(English, 1552 - 1599)
who wrote The Faerie Queene (1590)

Fun Fact: Spenser is believed to have crafted the phrase "neither rhyme nor reason"

Spenser's allegorical poem influenced Nathaniel Hawthorne
(American, 1804 - 64)
who wrote Mosses From an Old Manse (1835)
and Twice-Told Tales (1837)

Fun Fact: Hawthorne named his first child Una, after a character from Spenser's "Faerie Queene"

In "Young Goodman Brown," one of Hawthorne's allegorical tales, Young Goodman Brown leaves his young wife Faith for a visit to the Dark Side. As he hurries away to keep his appointment with Fate, he sees Faith's sad face, framed on either side by the pink ribbons of her cap. He is torn between his faith and the insistent call of cynicism. Arriving late for his assignation, he explains his tardiness, "Faith kept me back awhile."

Throughout the story, Young Goodman Brown's spiritual faith, his faith in goodness and humankind, and the person of his wife Faith become one. Should he leave his "dear Faith" to pursue the Knowledge of Good and Evil? He longs to sleep "in the arms of Faith!" Yet he feels compelled to enter the dark wood where he is startled to hear Faith's voice echoing through the trees. When he finds one of her pink ribbons caught on a branch, he seizes it, crying, "My Faith is gone!"

"But where is Faith?" he asks. It appears that Faith has become as jaded as he, and by the end of the evening their mutual disillusion is complete: " . . . ye had still hoped that virtue were not all a dream. Now are ye undeceived."

When I first read this story in 1977, in a unit of literature concerning the theme of Initiation, I attempted to write a poem on the same topic (as a student of Andrew Grossbardt, Jim Thomas, and Jim Barnes):

INITIATION
So,
I have finally told you about the dot and the line.

The dot, a hard knot, a hurt fist between my breasts.
The crying fingers clinch in painful safety
all that I have loved and lived with and believed in for so long.

The line, a right margin the length of my body.
A fence allowing no escape for the dot,
guarding, keeping it right beside my heart.

In time,
when with a wiser hand I force the tear-stained fingers open
I will find, preserved in brine, Faith's pink ribbon.

I hadn't thought about this poem for ages, until driving in the car the other day, I caught the words from Green Day's "Boulevard of Broken Dreams." The lyrics brought to mind the imagery of my old poem -- the dot and the line, the knotted heart and the fist. I couldn't help wondering if the shallow beating heart, the divided mind, and the border line in their song are similar to those I was writing about so long ago:

"On the Boulevard of Broken Dreams . . .

My shadow's the only one that walks beside me
My shallow heart's the only thing that's beating . . .

I'm walking down the line
That divides me somewhere in my mind
On the border line
Of the edge and where I walk alone . . . ."