Untitled

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First Love Poem

Sophia sips coffee

In Oakland irreverently.

She pushes paper while listening.

Knitting a hammock to lay in,

There’s dog-walking and

Yoga, cooking, and Coptic book binding

As explained in The Private Library.

She’s closed the chapter on the end of the world.

Says its her word against time.

She bakes her way into silver linings

Via two-steps.

She hears the Withering Spoon.

Reality is fictionalized through

Witchery and Wild Love.

Sources her ethics

Through Americans, pillows, and breakfast.

Her mouth is an art object.

Hiking with puppies

And binging on Netflix.

I am curious

Wanting to share, and

Grow together like hair.

I ride my bike to get Euphoria.

Could this be you?

I like ice cream, but my body

Abhors it.

I have photography at the Oakland Museum,

But it is locked away.

I would love to make more

With you and I don’t mind dirt.

I love hiking and conversations,

But not steep overlooks.

The Truth

 

You either recognize the truth or you deny it. The truth is always there. It always seems to implicate a decision, where making it for truth seems to go against our better judgement because we can’t seem to see the way out. It always goes against what seems to be for the better, at least on the surface. Going with truth seems to imply some faithful leap. But, often we go to the very edge and are forced to jump. There is no way to avoid the truth. It is old and willing to wait. It is your only relationship with time. It is eternal. What you are afraid of is just to push you into what you know you must do. To be good is what your spirit desires. The whisper is constant. We make beautiful things with ourselves. We have beautiful insides. We love and we care. We have this empathy for others. We are often overwhelmed with what is asked of us. But, that is all that life is, this constancy of giving and believing. The head fights the heart, everything we do sometimes is against logic. But the heart is courageous. It isn’t cold. It isn’t unkind. What is good in us lives. What is bad in us dies.

Trump and Republicans

Reporter Julia Edwards Ainsley said President Donald Trump expects to sign an executive order that includes temporary ban on most refugees and suspension of visas for Syrian and six other Middle Eastern and African countries.

Stephen Legomsky, who was chief counsel at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in the Obama administration, said “Legal arguments could claim the executive orders discriminate against a particular religion, which would be unconstitutional.”

“Another order will block visas being issued to anyone from Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen, said the aides and experts, who asked not to be identified,” according to the Reuter’s piece posted on Tuesday, Jan 24, 2017.  (See: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-immigration-exclusive-idUSKBN1582XQ)

2. Yasmeen Serhan said that President Trump signed executive actions to advance the construction of the Keystone and Dakota Access Pipelines, projects aimed at constructing pipelines from Canada tar sands to Texas and oil fields in North Dakota to southern Illinois that were once blocked by the Obama administration. (See: http://www.theatlantic.com/liveblogs/2017/01/news-today/514214/14138/?utm_source=atlfb)

3. Matthew Daly, Associated Press, December 16, 2016 said “Congressional Republicans quietly closed a year-long investigation into Flint, Michigan’s [drinking water with lead,] faulting both state officials and…Environmental Protection Agency, [where] contamination affected nearly 100,000 residents. “

Sanders had already called on Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican, to step down.” (This line taken from: http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/18/politics/flint-water-democratic-debate-clinton-sanders-snyder/index.html, whereas Daly’s article is found at: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/house-gop-quietly-closes-flint-mich-water-investigation/#.WId_LRprdsw.twitter))

4. Michael Biesecker and John Flesher, AP, Jan 24, ’17, said Trump administration instituted media blackout at Environmental Protection Agency and barred staff from awarding new contracts or grants. (See: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/trump-issues-epa-media-blackout-suspends-agencys-grants/)

All That Jazz

TRIBU CAFE

In tin and metal planters an assortment of fern and other green plants move erratically in the wind. The metal gate signifies a demarcation perhaps on sunnier days when one could imagine tables and chairs with white tablecloths aflutter in late spring and October. 

The structure that houses the cafe (Tribu) is modern with its thick cement walls and square pillars. The melody of bass and piano lightly fills my heart with a mellow magic of love. Two people (bassist and pianist) not even looking at each other meld spiritually. 

It makes me think of my life and where I can go next. It colors the bland LOW COST APPLIANCES – SALES – SERVICE sign across the street. 

Izumi stands at a distance listening and then comes over: “Writing a book?” she says.

“No, this experience,” I say. 

When you listen to music, words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and stories get shortened. Every human being takes on a glow. The women become more beautiful and the men become friends.

I can’t help but notice a woman who looks like Kristen Stewart, her thin and supple presence. Her controlling activities, her man sitting around the corner out-of-sight.

I’m going through a period of my life where I recognize that who I am attracted to is no longer attracted to me and vice-versa. I sense also that the next phase of my life will be about substance and conversation and less about sex. I will be learning about women. 

Nao looks up in the air as she plays the piano. The bassist Mark Williams plays beautifully. What does that mean, I imagine? It is as a little voice whispering eloquent phrases like T.S. Eliot‘s poetical works, pulsations of the heart. “While he took from them their ability to infuse poetry with high intellectualism while maintaining a sensuousness of language.”

“Rainy Day jazz lunch,” Izumi says.

Across the street at the light a young man kisses his girl. She seems delighted. He looks down at his cell phone and she carries a pizza box. Her delight fades to purposefulness. His, however, is like that of a happy journalist, who upon hearing about juicy news shares it with the world. She must have seen or felt me. It is all seriousness after that. I’m like an assessing presence, a killjoy, a troll.

Meanwhile, Izumi sings: “Our love is here to stay?”

(Izumi Hayakawa,  Nao Suzuki and Mark Williams at TRIBU CAFE.)

“What are you thinking? What are you going through?” She continues. Cars pass. People have destinations, responsibilities, places where they want to be. We are so consumed by the president-elect that we don’t see ourselves against the backdrop. How fragmented is our purpose? Our roles? How do we fit? The melody softens our self-criticism and loves us as we are. 

Izumi sings. Nao will eventually go back to Japan. I am alone on the side of the room with sunshine, but where everyone has left. The other side is enshadowed, but every seat is taken. Izumi is courteous and looks over at me singing to the room as a whole: “My heart serenading you… My prelude to a kiss.”

Caitlin Moran in How to be a Woman says that with puberty, her sexual interests arose. Chemical and physical property at work make this music internal-reaching. 

A dog jumps into a car with a mere suggestion of its female owner, a man at the wheel. She gets in, very little conversation, and they drive away. 

Often this is the essence of life. Familiarity and past experience. The rain has stopped. 

Another couple, he on the phone in purple running shoes, and she adjusts her shoe and looks back. 

This other woman, the one who looks like Kristen Stewart, also looks like Lauren Bacall. I’ve become suspicious to her. 

I think the instrumental leaves an open space for my voice to fit but then Izumi’s singing also conjures the desire to sing along.

“I can give you anything but love.”

Lauren Bacall and her man are outside laughing. I feel like the laughter is meant for me, but I am sure I am oblivious to them.

Such as I do not have, relationships are built on time spent, maneuverings among and between personalities. I close my eyes expecting to see someone I know. Turning away to see if they’ll sit next to me. But, I am delusional, such as I do not know myself in relation to the long line of suitors, other than me. We men pay no attention to other men, who are busy with the women we have crushes on.

Rain enshadows the mountains in the background. The girl with her dog passes. 

A woman with her boyfriend, late to the event, sits at my table, and sings to her boyfriend: “Why Not Take All of Me?” Her voice is nice. I am tempted to ask Izumi to have the band back her, but they played the last song. I say this because in the back of my mind is this poem Emily Rosen wrote that basically explains the unification of women and men’s desire which is to be acknowledged for the greatness and talent they feel they have. At the moment, the couple sitting next to me have reduced to conversation. The food arrives. They eat and she coughs toward me. She takes a sip, and then begins singing even louder: “Why not take all of me?” She reaches toward me and takes the salt shaker with a vengeance. She wants to be recognized, to be allowed to be a part of the focus of the room, which is now the bassist and the friends of Izumi (all women) in various states of departure. 

This late arrival keeps singing while the Raiders game is on. There’s a quiet to the room so she can be heard. Her wanting to be part of the melody of life, to be found in our individuality, to have something to give, and to be of value, becomes apparent to me. 

The couple talk about having freely given time without compensation. Someone got the man’s music lessons for free. So much of the soul is given away for free. I have argued for an economy based on what purposes men and women have, but I guess we would all just sit around humming to each other, and live in places like the Ghost Ship drinking coffee.

 

Writing to Strangers

You are a tiny bit taller, perhaps you could shave your callouses and I could grow a head of hair? I like that you are kind. You’ll have to be, my intelligence is all I have. I am positive about literature and art, indulge myself in reading. I wrote a story today… I take that back I published a story on my blog that I wrote a long time ago. It is amazing how close we adhere to a type of writing, how we tend to look at things in the same way. I was married. It was raining. The island of Oahu was flooded. It was New Year’s.

I read a piece that said that relationships to last need only a bit of kindness. I think you’ve hit that nail on the head. Tenderness and charm are fun to look at and feel. Being cared for, garnering affection, there’s this passion and wildness, you say.

I believe in the truth. That’s basically how a person feels. As I get older, who attracts me becomes less and less who is attracted back. I am at the stage, where I have to pretend I am not interested because if interest is made known, there might be laughter if I am lucky. Often it is discomfort and at times anger. The word “creepiness” comes up. As a Cancer, you might understand that absolute truth in this. As a Cancer, I understand it and obey it too. I am very romantic. I have to be in love to make love. Otherwise, I would rather be alone.  But, like you, I am tired. I read something recently and it said that you just know, there are no second thoughts with love. So often, I say to myself I can settle, there are parts of people I can live with, but usually not the whole, and so I do not feign attention. The last woman I was in love with was in ’99. The rest have been measured against and failed. There are so many details that have to be dealt with that the task seems impossible. Bowles in a cameo in the movie Sheltering Sky said that we only fall in love 4-5 times and then we die. I have fallen in love three times, and all of them were my opposite. Of late there was a woman, who wrote stories antithetical to my own. I tend to write about unrequited love. I reach out only to have my hand slapped. I have written and done art so many times that I am at this phase where I am only saving my money to retire. At times, I get tired reading. Currently it is Caitlin Moran’s How to Be a Woman, which gives me all the answers as to who you might be. Next is Siri Hustvedt’s A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women. I wrote a book that forgets some of this title. In Moran’s treatise, I see that women have the same drives, our bodies are both victims of chemistry and visual stimulus. I love Moran’s language. Her English phrases are halting and fun. I like the way the English abbreviate, using only “university” or “hospital,” for example. Why waste definite articles?

I too want to wake up next to some fleshy force that gets me giddy and racing. I want to hear lovely-expressed words that make me sweat and writhe. I don’t want to wake up alone. I need devotion and apparently blind love. I want the grit of life again.

Unscheduled Event (1988)

At home, I shiver while winds run into louvers, like trains through corridors in a government building. The temperature is 65, chilly for Hawaii. It requires a thick coat to keep warm and a family of friends sitting on a long couch in a damp house, where rain drops and termites work together to provide the water spotting on the black and white tiles. This is the second day of freak weather and I think it is worse than Hurricane Iwa. It rains so hard you can’t get to the East side of the island from either the North or South. In some places the water reaches five feet and furniture floats. Cars flood, and some press against landslides filling highway lanes as rain gushes across them.

Teenagers having fun in darkness, pull bicycles in waist-deep water on the Waimanalo side past the point only Mac trucks can go. We watch as water sputters from our exhaust pipe, a collection tube in this weather and flooding. We drive, my wife and I, to the Nui Valley road block where drivers sneak highway-left and find depth too deep by car, or by truck unapproachable. In the confusion we wait imagining an accident as the fire engine horns blare. Waiting for a half-hour, we steal along side streets… We are late for a New Year’s Eve party in Hawaii Kai.

Where Nuuanu Pali Road and Pali Highway meet, we ask an officer how we can get to Hawaii Kai, he says we can probably go by way of Likelike Highway. Near Kailua we drive alongside of a Mercedes as the rain rushes though our wheels in a quiet brown; after which there are the results of a landslide in my lane. The engine cools and the carburetor is flooded for twenty minutes. It is dark and unfriendly. Cars line the highway, but where are the people? I see a woman without a raincoat trying to make it to a police officer’s car; she is hesitant. She decides against it, disappearing into the darkness. Trying the car, we are along the railing. We might be comfortable except we have a party to go to. It is 12:30AM. The car starts. Driving slowly is my wife’s request. In crossing the Waimanalo Bridge, water is up to our doors.

Pulling into the 7-11 near Castle Hospital, we have dinner. Eating barbecue beef, orange juice, and an ice cream sandwich.

It is 3:30PM waiting in our apartment as the rain and wind rush outside, moving like a train against the covered windows or down the roadway between the buildings. Weathermen are nonchalant, ignorant of the devastation. Unable to get to their parties, people shiver in their homes seeking sympathy from regular-scheduled programing. – 1988

Herding Cows

Money drives the cows in this land.

A treacherous sea of willing souls

Aimless and perfunctory.

Frightened by the mill

That churns their bodies,

They have no other movement

But forward.

It is not a movement we would recognize:

To carry arms and play army.

But, it seems that most men

Have no purpose in America,

Don’t measure their actions,

Don’t take account of what they are doing.

From Mexico to Oregon,

The grass-fed cows walked.

Their loins lean and their

Flesh gamey.

What was weird was how

What fat they had was orange

And twisted.

It coated the system with

A plaque that only angioplasty

Could remove.

The doctor, if they made it that far,

Would take a simple wire

With a sharp tip and bang the insides

Of the aorta and all the plaque would

Be absorbed by the body.

Their hearts were still at risk;

Once you dislodged the truth,

It was possible that it would migrate

To the brain and cause a stroke.

A Reaction to Am I Alone Here? by Peter Orner

 

One of the most important things I noticed about Peter Orner’s book Am I Alone Here? is that he is talking about his relationship to books. He lives in a space where words are his business. The feelings you and I get looking into worlds, fictional/relative in a way take us out of the one we are in and they take us to the place I used to think represented the explanation of the phrase: Literature is the opiate of the people, which I derived from the actual one, which says that not literature, but religion does this.

Literature takes you to a place of aesthetic beauty. It is cozy, warm, tender, and truthful.

Orner describes: “Alone in the garage with all these books,” p. xi, “there’s no room on the shelves anymore.” I have this situation, except that I have moved everything in my apartment into my bedroom so that they can remove asbestos. My books and art are piled at my feet and to my sides. I have books that are dear. Everything at this point that is not dear has been discarded. I am moving toward this point of exact reflection, where things I own represent who I am at my deepest and most meaningful.

This is where Orner is coming from.

Having said that, I would like to talk about things I have underlined in the book and why. Reading is about responding to things as they relate to us.

At the very front of the book, I wrote: “A Deadman’s car in another deadman’s parking space.” It was a thought I had while sitting in my car looking across the parking lot at the car of a man, who fell down in his apartment, died, and went unfound for at least a month. I noticed the smell and the flies on the door.

Orner is documenting his thoughts in terms of the ideas/statements in books, I am documenting my thoughts, using his book as inspiration.

The first thing I underlined was, “When we die, not only will our bodies be gone, but so will the people we remember.”

The parking spot that housed the car belonged to the man who bought the car and later died in another car, where he must have had an epileptic seizure and crashed head-on with another car. I was coming home and saw his car, parked, and returned and saw a body lying on the ground. I asked the police officers if that person was my neighbor. I told them who I thought it was and they eventually agreed.

I was not gone, but to him I was. He is now gone and I don’t believe he has any memory of himself. I can say that because I have been in ICU with amnesia. I did not know who I was. I did not exist mentally or physically to myself. Also, I had a heart attack and after I passed out I was no longer aware.

This is why I tell people they don’t have to worry about death. It is the absence of memory, no matter what you will be going through before you can’t remember the pain and the pain is controlled by any memory of it.

“We live in the world, and we recall the world,” Orner said, (p. 11) “and one day we won’t do either anymore.” As you can see how relevant this line is to me.

When he talks about Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo and The Burning Plain and Other Stories, I underline: “People unburdening themselves of the stories they can’t help telling” and this is the core of what Rulfo’s work is about coupled with my knowledge of the book and Latin American books and writers. It is mandatory (in terms of my psyche) that I read it. Orner said that Gabriel García Márquez said he memorized the book for its rhythmic cadences.

I am unburdening the story of myself. I see, hear, and feel great connectivity and meaning. I have a story to tell as associative response. That process of sharing is who I am. I have found that catharsis through literature and art is the most valuable thing in life. I do not have love, consummation of food is now limited given my heart, and so the wisdom and cadence found in books is the only beauty I have.

Here too is another relevant quote: “At what point in your lives do we fall so in love with our own failures that we can’t stop talking about them?” (p. 83)

Obviously, I can’t help talking about my ritual sadness that I have fallen in love with the failure that it is. That pain gives my life meaning. Just the other day someone said that I was too old for another person, except that while I knew this and refrained, that attraction was true, but truth was not the failure of my life.

Then Orner asked: “At one point do we clam up for good?” I think so. We become irrelevant to the social hemisphere and others’ expectations or their rules. We, in effect, commit social suicide.

It is as Orner said: “The silence that follows us around [is] like a premature death.” (p. 85)

This defeat, as he says, becomes my story: “Am I Really Alone Here?” and yes, I have to say that I am.

He talks about a woman, who mattered to him: “All that mattered was Lilly Brisco.” All that matters to me is ____________________. I still think of her constantly. She was my greatest achievement, the woman most regal and mysterious. I think the only reason she took an interest in me was because I broke it off with someone else. It implied superiority, I guess. It’s that reverse psychology stuff.

I believe we stay in love and only pause when a new infatuation arrives. There have been many women who have attracted me and there have only been a few with whom I have had lucky intimacy. The ones you get together with while still in love stand no chance because they are compared to the ones that got away. Now that I am old, the opportunity for love is nearly non-existent, and even if it were not, who I am as an older man makes my attractions ridiculous. My heart still waits for love. I wish I could say the woman’s name, but she would just call me crazy and say to get on with my life. But, love is my life, unrequited love, apparently.

Orner wrote, “I fantasized about becoming a reclusive writer,” p. 113. I haven’t fantasized about being reclusive, but I have become one, who understands that what I write about — unrequited love — makes me out for a sad sack, a loser, which I guess I am. I wanted to be famous for describing that plight of men, but I am white, old, and unwanted. Nothing I say matters to anyone.

My truth is politically-incorrect. My whole life has been a waste-of-time. First, as white in Hawaii’s public schools, then in California, where mansplaining

white males are out-of-touch, like old philosophers, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason gave us the riot act. But, did we listen?

At this moment, I am sitting in the cafe that housed my work and where I spent most of my time writing. The music is playing pleasing, soft, classical piano. Cafe Milano is one of my favorite places in the world: Plywood floor, folding chairs, and marble table tops. How oft I have dreamed of potential lovers here and never was I chosen. For me, life has been the same soft, sweet hope. I am drugged by my genes to wait for words. This is the closest sense I have to who I am.

On page 119, Orner writes, “How can I express my gratitude to a poet who never sought it, who only wanted me to know his creations, not their creator?”

I can totally relate. As an introvert and believer in the persona and not the person and for whom the words come and I move on, except that I keep harping on the same theme as so perhaps I am lying to myself. My sister says to be careful, the world is full of people who will misunderstand and may even hurt you.

I don’t know anymore, my poems have not taken root, like “The Wasteland” or “Burnt Norton.” I have read most of them again, and this is true, they go in and out of beautiful and mediocre. Although a few weeks ago, a publisher said that the short story I read was hypnotic. They’ve said that about Margarite Duras and I know what they mean. Could my work have been as good?

Orner writes: “That little girl in the white dress crossing in front of the hood of the car, and I’ll know that it happened again the night before.” He harbors the thought of hitting a little girl with his car while drunk. I think of that example and how we sometimes end up in places where we never thought we would, only to realize we might have never gotten there if we were where we were supposed to be.

“Ill-washed flesh, infrequently changed underwear, chamber pots, the slop pails, the inadequately plumbed prives, rotting food, unattended teeth,” p, 129. Orner is talking about the place where Lizzie Borden lived and had to manage her life. Lizzie Borden, the household’s youngest daughter, readies herself for the day. Of course she might have whacked someone, what an environment within which to be born and run.

“While Herman Melville was toiling in the Customs House, trying to pay off his bills, J. T. Headley, Charles Briggs, and Fanny Forrester were the toast of literary America,” p. 143. I too have contemplated this. Do my works have value? And if so, will they be recognized before I die? And if they have no value, have I wasted my life?

“After the publication of the collection Women in their Beds in 1996, Berriault enjoyed a brief moment of national recognition.” But, once again, her work is hard to find. I have one person reading and writing about mine, and where she included it in her presentations, I feel it belongs to her. I have lost ownership. I have lost the point of my life and my life is non-existent to others. I will have to buy Orner’s recommendation The Infinite Passion of Expectation, because it explains my life. It is not so much a passion of expectation but a purgatory. Nothing has been decided. How many of you are in this boat? We are awash among and around a few, but, in general, we are unknown.

In effect, you could say that my life has been simply like Orner’s quote: “Love’s found, love’s lost. What’s more calamitous?” p. 155

I am only a thinker, not a doer. But, what a doer does is present in the now and visible to whoever was there, then lost.

I am a Street of Lost Footsteps.

As you read Orner’s list of books, you find yourself to wanting to experience them. Inevitably, I am alone and yes I am alone here. We long for that maudlin tapestry of the self.

Orner quotes, “Phenomenology of Responsibility…a person who doesn’t love doesn’t exist?” In the story, a woman throws herself at her professor to save him; but he realizes that sacrifice is absurd. A beautiful woman sacrifices her body to save an old man.

“There’s an audacious honest[]y in Havel’s work” (p. 192) and in my own. I think, where truth reveals the absurd, where truth reveals your own abnormality and how isolated you then feel. How do you reinvent yourself, if who you are is inherently offensive or destined to receive the same response? You are stuck, I think. If you reach out to others, your hand will get slapped. At some point, you want to live completely separate, but trouble still finds you.

“Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, the first Czech president, was also a philosopher, a man who wrote many books, including a ground-breaking study of suicide,” Orner wrote, p. 192.

“Havel,” Orner said, “needed to be with his own in order to create. He remained in prison for almost four years.” I think too I am a man out of my element, a permanent amateur, someone who has lost his way, but is there such a way for someone like myself or even Orner, who eschews money and who wishes to tell the maudlin truth of the artist, who constantly wishes to express himself, although that self is inherently flawed amid a world governed by more practical spirits.

“I am still a fool,” p. 199, “as my losses pile up,” and so at 56, I am destined to ultimately fail. I am not a coder, a doctor, some financier, or someone for whom the way to success is apparently more pragmatic. I write inevitably, about myself; a recipe for disaster. And so there you are.

This is my status: “The story is less about insatiable ambition than about what a writer does when he’s simply got nothing left to say.” When I hear myself complain, I see that I have caused it all. I think we retire, when we see we are no longer relevant or when we keep repeating ourselves. I never found love because there was nothing left to love. I was only the complainant and no longer the person. You could hear it in everything I said.

“Writing poetry is the exploitation of a substrata of memory that is imperfectly understood.” I have never satisfied the need for sex and thus sex, according to Maslow, is all I will ever think about.

“What happens when you’ve got no substrata left to understand? On top of all this, the only thing the old widower can think about, aside from the Nobel prize, is sex,” p. 207

In response to pages, 207-208, I write in the margins: She writes all day and the editor looks over her work and says, “Why don’t we throw this away?” And she looks at him. He tosses it in the trash and says: “It doesn’t matter that it was lost to the world, all that will happen is that those will be a few seconds of peace.” “Lugging his lust,” Orner said, p. 210

At least there is hope for me when Orner quotes Gallant, who wrote: “The French refusal to accept poverty as a sign of failure in an artist.” My books have sold few copies. I am as obscure as the day I started writing and perhaps even more availed where the truth of who I am was the opposite of who I thought. Against the back drop of others, I am either misunderstood or correctly unmarketable or even liked as a person.

Have I been “Daydreaming?”

Have I self-reflected and yet not seen who I was?

What does the character of who I am want?

“Fiction writers must…create lasting characters…who are as inconsistent, as foolish, as rash as we are…beyond the page. But, the truth of me is even more than I can take. Am I the manifestation of the phrase: “Truth is stranger than fiction?”

“What should have happened?” I do not know. I am blind to anything else but to who I truly am.

“Maybe it is the welcome darkness of this morning.”

Orner said: “For me writing has always been about holding a mirror to life and then smashing it…” I don’t understand this. When you hold a mirror to life you are standing behind the mirror, unless the creature before it is sentient, the mirror may reflect it, and if it is a woodpecker, it may attack its reflection as an intruder, but otherwise it remains indifferent. I believe and in the case of the bird it doesn’t recognize itself. It doesn’t see itself but something that reminds itself of danger.

When Orner holds the mirror to life, he is showing us what life is; art imitates life. But, then he destroys this communication of the truth, what is real. It is just Orner and the subject in front, the two looking at each other. How does he tell us what he thinks or is there? The mirror is down in the dust. Again, it is just the two of them and me/us looking over his shoulder.

“Isn’t there just something about our past words that is comforting,” p. 278. Recently, someone asked a question about poetry and I was demonstrating my ability over a long time, say 25 years and I read a poem I had written about my ex-wife in the year we met and married. I said,  that I knew she didn’t love me. I married her anyway. We got divorced five years later. That poem, although straight-forward, documented my knowledge and the clarity of it.

“The reflection of a thing, not the thing itself, has become the source of all mystery,” p. 281.

I made a coffee table photography book entitled Urban Reflections. About it, I argue that I am trying to capture the catharsis of art, that weepy interconnection between the work and the viewer. The reflections in urban windows that I take in a number of cities looks behind the glass, the reflection on the glass, which is inevitable, what is captured in the reflection in front or behind and around me. The reflection becomes the consciousness of the viewer and thus yes it is mysterious. Do we really know who we are even while we are staring at ourselves? As we look out of our eyes, we think about the things in front in terms of us and what we need. We think about the world in our terms. Contemplation is the mystery.

“Crowded Loneliness of Bohumil Hrabal,” Orner said. In a crowded loneliness, the loneliness is crowded. There is a lonely person amidst a crowd. Even in the coffee shop full of people, he felt alone. He could open his mouth, write on a piece of paper, but he knew without having to do anything that the woman, who held his interest could feel his contemplating her, and he also knew that in time, she would be collecting her things because, he felt, that his feelings for her were communicated and uncomfortable. On the trail, he passed a smiling woman who was running with a friend, he liked her from behind and from the side as he passed. He told himself that when he passed her coming back on the trail, if she stopped him he would know if she liked him. As they passed, she looked from a distance and when he got close enough to see her eyes, she looked down. He passed her.

“Loopy cadence,” p. 283. When Orner writes this I understand his love of how writers, who I love  to write with loopy cadence, like Joan Didion in Play it as it Lays or After Henry, Margarite Duras’ The Lover, any number of hypnotic writers, who cast their spells, see also: Too Loud a Solitude by Boumil Hrabal.

“Only individual memory has the unique power to redeem us,” p. 284. What is individual memory, my memory vs. yours that has the power to redeem you? Unless I communicate it, how will you know? My memory causes me both pain and whimsy. I think about the women I have loved as I know I can never go back. I wait for one but I know the futility in that. My absolute love is as meaningless to me as is the absolute love I have received from others. This is the saddest thing on earth and I don’t know why our world is made of so much loss. What a waste.

Yet, Orner quotes the Talmud, p. 285, “For we are like olives: only when we are crushed do we yield what is best in us.” Singing like a Thorn Bird, I am not sure when we take ourselves out of this, I think the other person can relate on his/her own terms.

Bolinas

 

Today, while on HWY 1 on the way to Bolinas, just before Stinson, I was coming around the corner, a sharp corner, and there was a man in a bright red robe and leather boots, the hood of the robe over his head, back packs on his back. He stuck out his thumb and I stopped. He said he was on his way to the North Pole to help Santa. He called me Sir. He seemed like he was in his twenties. His cheeks were full. I drove him to Bolinas and we went our separate ways.