august philippic

On subway platforms, he was always convinced that a maniac would push him in front of a train, and that his parents would think it was suicide.  He took various precautions — sitting down when  he could, grasping available girders, positioning himself behind solid-looking passengers.  He was often concocting homicidal scenarios in which he was victim of a reckless cab driver, a drunk college student, a cop.  Respite from these fantasies came only when he could concentrate on something very intensely, as this morning, when he sat looking at the patterns of sunshine on the brick facade of a nearby building.  Soon the brick was not brick and the city not a city, but everything was a canvas, and he felt safe, as if in a museum.

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I’m finding myself oddly attuned to space today. I think it’s because mrs. august and I spent a few hours this weekend biking though a sculpture park. Something about taking in so much art in motion, circumnavigating, weaving, braking and accelerating through sculpture. It was really exhillerating, a reminder of how art can affect our perceptions. Also: really fun!

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This American Life is a favorite radio program, although it is rare that I get a chance to devote an hour to it. Last night I was cooking dinner, and I caught the updated version of the show’s tribute to Harold Washington. It reminded me of another great novel I read recently (well, last year). Adam Langer’s pair of novels about kids growing up in a Jewish neighborhood in Chicago was even better that This American Life. Langer has a wicked sense of humor (as when a 13 year old decides she wants to hold an orgy), and even though the characters were totally outrageous, they felt like people I’d known for a long time.

Speaking of outrageous, I just finished Jim Shephard’s short story collection, Like You’d Understand, Anyway.  It’s very dark.  A man who survived a massive tidal wave in Alaska when he was three now wants to get a vasectomy.  A revolutionary executioner is has marital difficulties after he offs the king.  Nazis hunt yeti in Tibet to prove racial theories they don’t believe.  An engineer tries to find out what happened to his brothers at Chernobyl.   The stories have a poetry of isolation and estrangement.  They are perfect to read if you are feeling lost.

They are also up for a National Book Award.  We’ll see on Wednesday whether I’m still gaining on the curve.

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It is rare that I can prove that I am ahead of the curve. I can assure you, however, that I have the curve in my rear window, eating my dust. In today’s New York Times Book Review, a rave of a book that I praised in Wikifray last week.

Here it is again:

The problem with seduction is time. You have to figure out that you are attracted to somebody, plot a means of approach, work up your courage, and execute your plan in finest form before the object of your affection gets off the subway. You have to move. And when you see that special someone gathering to hand the purses, backpacks, and other accoutrement of daily life, you know that your deadline is looming. What do you do?

If you are Maynard Gogarty, you pull the emergency break cord. And if you are Rudolf Delson, author of this season’s best book, Maynard and Jennica, you give the subway its due say, along with a macaw, a scheming ex-wife, a man named Puppy Jones, scumbag lawyers, and Jennica Greene, the woman who provoked Maynard’s subway impulse. This love story is told by thirty-five narrators (befitting, I think, the way love stories should be told — in mock grandiosity, a bit like Bugs Bunny doing opera).

The New Yorker has a better write up than I can provide here. Suffice to say that the path by which Maynard and Jennica find each other extends well beyond the number 6 train, to San Jose, to avant guard film, to 9-11 scams, to really exceptionally bad poets, and to a cat whose name is a matter of some dispute. So rather than spending a cold fall rehashing yet another Philip Roth, wrap a blanket around your shoulders, pick up something new, and warm yourself up with Maynard and Jennica. Worst that can happen is you spend a few hours laughing your butt off.
Also: coolest cover of the season, by far.

Okay, so I guess that means the New Yorker was really ahead of the curve, but still…

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My job is full of interesting conversations. I am all the time meeting people I didn’t know worked here, and we are reshaping the world by making it less stupid. Every day we discover innovative ways to combat morons. We are exceptionally witty, and very well paid. We travel enough to keep things stimulating but not so much that it interferes with family life. On Thursday evenings, everybody breaks early for a drink, and the venue always has a view; the bartenders make perfect Manhattans; everybody wants my phone number. In future generations, historians collect my papers, and they reek from envy.

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New York Review of Books

Every once in a while I’ll read a review that just sticks with me. Pauline Kael’s piece on Clockwork Orange comes to mind whenever I see something in film that is dehumanizing, yet pretends otherwise. I’ve linked above to a review by Charles Taylor of a book called Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation by Jonathan Lear.

Roughly, the question the book and the review pose is: how does one act morally when one’s culture has been so shattered that existing moral codes don’t work anymore. Consider the following statement by the Crow chief, Plenty Coups:

“When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened.”

What does one do when the buffalo go away, when a city is devastated by a nuclear bomb, when all one has known disintigrates?

Well, here’s what Plenty Coups did, and why his story should speak to us:

Plenty Coups was able to help bring about this kind of redefinition for his people. He drew on the established practice of going into the wilderness to seek a revelation through a dream. The dream he reported foretold in thinly veiled terms the end of the Crow way of life, but it also promised a kind of survival for the Crow, provided they could listen “like the Chickadee,” that is, observe others, and find new ways of going on. These were, of course, at that stage wholly unknown, but the dream was the basis for the hope that somehow, beyond just biological survival, the Crow way of life might continue in a yet to be defined new form.

This is what Lear calls “radical hope.” Hope can only exist if you are uncertain about a desired outcome. If it’s really a sure thing, your anticipation of it can’t be hope. But here we have something more extreme than uncertainty: the very shape of this hope remained to be defined.

Sadly, I haven’t read the book. It’s on a long, long list of things to do.

I think a lot of us have some aspiration to immortality: the hope that what we say or write will be considered important, the idea that some value we hold might continue. It’s probably hubris. Still, I took heart from Plenty Coups, from the possible of radical hope. Not that I personally might spur such hope (obviously it isn’t a position I would want to be in), but that there are people interested in facing the world in an ethical way, and that our ethics might survive our atrocities.

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When your team really sucks, you have only one joy in your baseball life. When the Mighty O’s take a series win from the evil Yankees, thus totally knocking the pinstripes on their useless, stuck up, overpaid, self-righteous asses, well

that’s bliss.

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This post is really just a way of putting something up other than turgid medieval prose. I think the Mets will have some troubles fending off the Braves, but I like their chances.

I think Barry Bonds is bad for the game. I think the steroid probe is likely to make me feel about baseball the way I feel about bike racing.

Oh, and it will be interesting to see if the Yankees dump Giambi if he’s implicated in this latest mess. They surely want to dump his contract, but if the team is beginning to heat up, will they be willing to lose his bat as they start to climb out of this hole?

Finally — this Yankee team still doesn’t have me convinced. There just aren’t enough players I feel like you can really count on in the big spot. Their bats will win them games, sure, but it will be kind of like the baseball equivalent of the Atlanta Falcons. If they get going, maybe they have a chance to make the playoffs, but it’s more likely that they’ll be in the wildcard hunt than beat the Sox.

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To my regular readers.. (twif and Keif) — this is part of a long discussion with Geoff about The King’s Two Bodies. If anybody for some reason has the urge to catch up/join in, you can check out his blog Geoff’s Musings. Sorry this is so tedious — its just that working out ideas is often kind of ugly along the way.

What exactly is the problem in The King’s Two Bodies? It is partly a question of origins, or at least of precedents: how did the notion of a single person containing “a Body natural, and a Body politic” come about? It is also a question of effects: what were the consequences of the different manifestations of this doctrine and its antecedents?

I think following up Plowden with Shakespeare addresses the second of these questions as well as the first. It’s not simply a question of legal doctrine, it’s an examination of the interchange between legal doctrine and a wider culture. Lawyers as well as playwrights must wrestle with problems of kingship – it’s a question of royal (yet underaged) gift of the Duchy of Lancaster, and also a question of the way the dual king/King is understood, and (through the brilliance of Shakespeare) understands himself.

So far, the implications of the doctrine include law, self-image of the monarch, and the notion of sovereignty. I’m just going to go through a few more that seemed suggestive to me.

Theology

Kantorowicz also sees issues of theology; (p. 17)

…It is of great interest to note how in sixteenth-century England, by the efforts of jurists to define effectively and accurately the King’s Two Bodies, all the Christological problems of the early Church concerning the Two Natures once more were actualized and resuscitated in the early absolute monarchy.

I’ve mentioned a few times now that a classic way of generating political power is by coupling a hierarchical relationship to existing ideas of the cosmos or the body. It’s a tricky move, however, for it also means a kind of surrender to the expertise of those thought to know about the cosmos or the body. I’m not sure what level to take Kantorowicz here – is he simply creating his own metaphor, with Aryanism and Nestorianism convenient literary tropes for describing what he wishes to communicate? Or does he think that Trinitarian logic/debate helped figure the depictions of the king?
Here’s E.K. (pp. 18-19) :

The implication is not that the lawyers consciously borrowed from the acts of the early Councils, but that the fiction of the King’s Two Bodies produced interpretations and definitions which perforce would resemble those produced in view of the Two Natures of the God-man.

He goes on to say that this similarity is “unsurprising.” I do wonder, however, whether the English Civil War and its discourse of the King’s Two Bodies wasn’t closely related to its questioning of the theological edifice on which this duality rested (or at least, which allowed the duality to make sense).

One other note about the Plowden chapter: to what extent is the dual nature of the king really a “fiction”? It isn’t clear to me what Kantorowicz means by the terms. He shows that it’s a rather compelling and long lived fiction? I guess it’s not clear to me how this concept might be more or less of a fiction than, say, habeas corpus, or private property, or anything else.

Ritual

The bit of the Shakespeare chapter that particularly raised my eyebrows was on pp. 36-37. Richard II is King and king. The King will continue in a new king, but only a King can effect such a separation. So Richard as King must preside over the abdication – and none other has the power to do so.

According to Kantorowicz (p. 36) “Bit by bit he deprives himself of the symbols of his dignity,” but some of Shakespeare’s lines seem anything but symbolic (unless the medieval term “symbol” carries some reality I do not understand). It’s true Richard gives up crown and scepter, but also “The pride of kingly sway from out my heart/with mine own tears I wash away my balm.”

I think that Kantorowicz returns to a reading of the burial of a monarch. That must also be a ritually tricky moment, because one is burying king but not King. What else might fall in the same category? It’s this kind of situation I was referring to when I spoke of “kinks” earlier in the conversation.

Also on the subject of ritual – why is the Christ-centered king “liturgical”? I understand the division between a model or Christ and a model of Justice — but I don’t get the division
liturgical/juristical (for example, page 93).

Language

This is such a quick thought it hardly merits a subsection, but I found the argument about “demise” on page 40 (in which the word “convey” is particularly significant) rather compelling.

At any rate, Kantorowicz’s “problem strikes me as a far-reaching one indeed. All I really have to add to what you’ve said about the “Christ-Centered Kingship” is that the valences of the problem remain multiple in each section. Each example is of law, and of much else. That’s one reason the word “secular” bugs me (I’ve mentioned this before). It seems to cut off certain kinds of associations that strike me as significant

Curious what you made of the argument about the persona mixta on pp. 43-44. You spoke of the commonplace of dual personality in law, and this seems to be another example. There are an awful lot (see the “dual majesties” on p. 20 and the functional duality of man and office on p. 59. And of course the dual natures of Christ I mentioned above). We read that “a certain spiritual capacity was attributed to [the king] as an effluence of his consecration and unction” – again, a power of ritual. But this differs, argues E.K., from the King’s Two Bodies—except in certain cases like the Norman Anonymous? or is E.K. doubling back on his own argument, and I just haven’t followed the rhetoric?

I don’t understand what gemina persona means. But I do get the idea of the dual capacities of the Christlike king, and its expression in..

Art
The haloed Byzantine emperors, and the frontispiece of the Aachen gospels.

So those I think are the spheres we are working with (though surely there are others as well. I guess that’s what interests me so much about law (and about this book) – the way its language, symbols, structures, etc. bleed into other areas of life. It seems to me this must be a real problem for lawyers (well, maybe just for judges). The injunction to follow the word of the law seems to me kind of impossible, for the law is everywhere, and it doesn’t always make sense.

For that matter, I don’t either, and if you have it in you to push me to clarify any of that (especially the last part), let me know.

Tags: Kantorowicz, august by august
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April come she will
When the floods subsided
When streams are ripe and swelled with rain;
We sacrificed a lamb, then cooked it in a pit.
May, she will stay,
The flames reflected in the bottoms of the leaves.
Resting in my arms again.
Dancers in the glen circled the maple
June, she’ll change her tune,
Then leapt upon our altar.
In restless walks she’ll prowl the night
We ate meat with bare hands.
July, she will fly
Our priests poured wine into the stamped earth,
And give no warning to her flight.
then affixed our prayer to the leg of a finch,
August, die she must,
Who flew west, who flew
The autumn winds blow chilly and cold;
To find another finch, another glen, anywhere
September I’ll remember
But this place, where, fat with lamb,
A love once new has now grown old.
We could not sleep for the incessant rain.

“April, Come She Will”, by Simon and Garfunkel.

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When I leapt off the train, my knees squished like guavas.
In my cave I measured the wavelength of gamma rays.

The husband was Swiss, the children surfed.
She bemoaned that their lake had no waves.

When I fell from the Eiffel Tower, the guards laughed.
They reported a trespasser on their short waves.

The ocean is a concave mirror. Let’s go
to West Virginia, fish trout, snap pics. Wave!

When I drove to the beach, the dunes were black.
Why do I always dream of tidal waves?

Someday they’ll wash me. I’ll swim like a porpoise.
On my island: smell of papaya in April and august.

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Rabbit, Rabbit

Usually I’m on the can, or scrambling
eggs, when I remember being seven,
my teacher telling me to say “Rabbit, Rabbit”
on the first day of the month, before
my feet touch the floor when I get
out of bed. And of course my instep
has creaked the floorboards long since:
no luck for me in Feburary, or March, or now
April. Sometimes, when the calendar hits the twenty-
fifth (or so), I’ll think I’ll say it this time,
but I haven’t mentioned rabbits in thirty years, just wondered
why I care, now that I know that words
disappoint. Comets depart and return, meteors
shower, Fermat’s Last Theorem all pass
and still no rabbits. Why two? Perhaps the bunny
is named Rabbit, like a John Updike antihero
who understands the cosmos, who brings luck.
Indeed, why rabbits? I see the drawback
of, say, “Sloth, Sloth,” but why not “Hippo, Hippo”
or “Cheetah, Cheetah?” Is it a cultural thing?
Do Chinese kids forget to say “Panda, Panda?”
Would I understand better if I Googled?
Would I acquaint myself with that auspicious hare
who got this whole thing started, who makes
me scream “Rats” every year on the first
(or sometimes I don’t notice until the second)?
I no longer expect a good month, just discipline:
if I can’t say “Rabbit, Rabbit,” how will I ever lose
forty pounds, or climb Kilimanjaro?
It’s a small victory I wish to trumpet,
under the sheets one morning as the moon
takes another pass and the cars start
in the vast city that I inhabit. I relish
the spell I’ll cast: “Rabbit, Rabbit.”

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I’ve been reading Anthropologist on Mars by Oliver Sacks. I just finished a chapter about a blind man who had surgery removing cataracts, and was thus able to see. His sight was limited, in part because his retinas were damaged, but mainly because his brain had not since birth developed to process visual imagery. Some desultory thoughts:

I’ve been reading it while keeping in mind the criticisms of the doctor in The Echo Maker. Is Sacks invading this man’s privacy? At times the account feels quite intimate, and it is not at all clear that Sacks has helped the man. “Virgil,” the blind man who can see, descends back into blindness when he gets a terrible case of pneumonia that deprives him of oxygen. All that being said, Virgil is clearly capable of making decisions about his own life, and the account would not have been possible without Virgil’s consent. I’m seconding an earlier point by TK that this aspect of the portrayal of Weber doesn’t ring true.

The story (”To see and not see”) gave me great insight into the tendency of the deaf community to reject the hearing, especially to oppose technologies that might enable them to hear. As Sacks points out, seeing for Virgil was disorienting; the experience was one of losing blindness rather than gaining vision. In a footnote, Sacks adds for the deaf, the sense of isolation is doubled – one loses deafness and an entire community. For Virgil, who loses his vision after gaining it, the sense of isolation and rage is far more damaging than the constraints of blindness.

The tale of Mark and Karin got me thinking about our use of “blindness” as a metaphor. It means not merely “not being able to see,” but “not recognizing,” and “not understanding. Mark is blind to Karin. The reader blind to the writer of the note (I write the sentence and it sounds funny to me… why?). It’s not a semantic slippage that I had thought about prior to now, but it must affect the way we treat the blind. It also makes me wonder about Powers’ premise. Sure, the mind can come undone. But it is also remarkably resilient, and I remain not fully convinced (intellectually or emotionally) of the particular kind of undoing that transpires in The Echo Maker.

The paragraph I found most interesting (pp. 135-136) in hardcover edition:

In these episodes Virgil was treated by his family as a blind man, his seeing identity denied or undermined, and he responded, compliantly, by acting, or even becoming, blind – a massive withdrawal or regression of part of his ego to a crushing, annihilating denial of identity. Such a regression would have to be seen as motivated, albeit unconsciously – an inhibition on a “functional” basis.

Thus there seemed to be two distinct forms of “blind behavior” or “acting blind” – one a collapse of visual processing and visual identity on an organic basis (a “bottom up” or neuropsychological disturbance…), the other a collapse or inhibition of visual identity on a functional basis (a “top-down”, or psychoneurotic disturbance), though no less real for him. Given the extreme organic weakness of his vision – the instability of his visual systems and visual identity at this point – it was very difficult at times to know what was going on, to distinguish between the “physiological” and “psychological.” His vision was so marginal, so close to the border, that either neural overload or identity conflict might push him over it.

If Sacks is right, it means our very consciousness is visual. Except when it isn’t. I feel that’s a far more powerful insight into my own mind than anything I read in The Echo Maker.

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One of the things I enjoy about knowledge is that it fosters attentiveness. The words of foreign tourists are white noise unless you know their language, the patterns of sediment deposits meaningless until you walk by with a geologist. I used to play frisbee with a group of ornithologists, and if a neighborhood hawk flew over the game would halt and there would follow a discussion of its plumage, its preferred diet, its economy of movement.

I am not the first to sing the praises of the naked mole rat. Dawn Coyote pointed out that a quarter of a documentary was devoted to an expert on the species. The National Zoo has a naked mole rat cam and handy article describing their salient characteristics. The BBC has some great pictures.

These sources tell us that the naked mole rat lives underground and that it is more closely related to the porcupine than to the young-tough-Norwegian rats that lurk about the New York subways like extras from Kids. They congregate in colonies and act more like what you might expect from an ant or a bee. There is a queen with a harem of a few males, and they handle the copulating. The other members of the colony do not reproduce; and the males are sterile. They are the “workers” who dig around and look for food, helped along by two big front teeth. According to the article:

The incisors can be moved independently, spread apart, or moved together like chopsticks. …When working together to dig tunnels in the wild, naked mole rats line up nose to tail and operate like a conveyer belt. A digger mole rat at the front uses its teeth to break through the new soil. Behind the digger, sweepers use their feet and fine hairs between their toes to whisk the dirt backwards. At the back of the line a “volcanoer” kicks the dirt up onto the surface of the ground, creating a distinctive, volcano-shaped mole hill about the height of a ballpoint pen.

So one interesting thing about mole rats is their social nature, the way they work together. Apparently they roll in feces, allowing members of a colony to recognize each other by smell. The actions of the whole colony are greater than the sum of its parts, much like a beehive or an anthill.

There are good genetic reasons for this level of social cohesion. The naked mole rats are highly inbred. If I am a worker naked mole rat, it is thus likely that my brothers and sisters share the same genes as I do. My genes are thus “our” genes, and to spread them to future generations, the mole rat division of labor can make sense. Leave the actual childbearing to the experts (in a year, the queen can have four or five litters of 12 to 27 pups), and as a worker I can specialize in finding food and defending the nest. Workers have been known to attack snakes, sacrificing themselves for the good of the colony. This system will continue because the genes that create these behaviors continue to propagate.

As I understand it, any female can be queen (there is a chemical trigger for queen-like behavior). When the queen dies, the biggest females fight for the position, and to the winner belong the spoils.

To be clear, I don’t find mole rats cute or human or endowed with admirable behaviors. I just find them interesting, and take a certain delight in my interest.

I’m glad that there is pleasure in knowledge, and I think that on the whole such pleasure is a social good. I say this even though I am aware that there is also pleasure in false knowledge – at the Great Wall of China I met a guy who was enjoying himself immensely because he thought it had been built by spacemen. “Just look,” he said, “tangible evidence of aliens.”

I’m glad there’s pleasure in knowledge because it is so god-awful hard to change people’s minds. When I teach about China I’m struck by the resilience of the stereotypes that students bring to class with them. Sometimes I feel that anything I say can be assimilated and categorized by any world view. And yet there is this pleasure of knowing, which brings with it a certain hope that the man at the Great Wall will sooner or later figure out that Chinese supply lines were more robust than those of Alpha Centauri, or that my students will accumulate enough tidbits that they will sooner or later come across something that does not fit into their respective Weltanschauung.

It’s amazing when it happens – when the slow acquisition of facts forces painful revision of something you always thought to be true. As a teacher, I think I could do a better job of acquainting students with such pleasures.

At any rate, here is my encomium for the naked mole rat: it makes me happy.

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From an online exhibit sponsored by Slate and Magnum. You can find it here, although you may have to rummage through the archive.

A photograph is inherently alienating. It presents an image to a person who is removed from the source of that image, and it arrests time in such a way that the picture seems to belong to history rather than present. The invention of the photograph and the works of early masters like Adams, Evans, and Steiglitz may belong to the modern, but the enterprise as a whole is postmodern — disjointed and cracked, with images that subvert their own codes. It is these qualities, in addition to reproducibility, that make photography an ideal medium for the web.

If “Tokyo, Love, Hello” were a novel, the writer would be Murakami. If it were in a museum, I would buy tickets and take friends. It feels like performance art, like avant garde filmmaking, like art. It echoes my experience of much of the world, but does so with incredible specificity of image and place. Shinjuku montage, stuffed pandas, cigars, subways. How to photograph disjuncture, ambiguity, and confusion yet still make the images precise? Try swan paddle boats, cats in boxing rings, corporate gymnastics, stairwells, monk telephones, ritual and neon.

The piece makes both Tokyo and photography an experience shared between artist and viewers. It makes misrecognition its subject, and thus acknowledges, pays tribute to, photography’s many alienations.

Tags: visions, august by august
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I saw a movie tonight so romantic I will not tell you the title. It featured a Brancusi statue, a concert pianist, a soap opera, and a café. A thunderstorm hitting as a girl steps onto the rooftop, and the angle gets a little wider and the Eiffel Tower looms behind. Here is a woman who has slept with father and son. Here is a woman who mouths the words of French pop music as she jams to her iPod. Here is a woman who gets a job in a place that only hires men. Here are people beloved by all Paris who wish only (well, not only, and certainly not always) to be left alone.

A striptease in a concert hall. By the soloist.

And the music – music as overtly sexual as late-night cable; music that will float you out to sea like an elderly Inuit, music like lavender, like cloves, like milk and honey.

I saw a movie tonight that was a postcard to art, a comedy in the fullest sense of the word (think Balzac). It reminded me of when I used to come to New York only for movies, for popcorn and for the feel of a city and for a breath of the hope of love. Those movies, like this one, made me want to drink coffee and write, repeating endlessly until I keeled over or ossified like a Brancusi sculpture. I’m still shaken.

Tags: visions, New York, august, grooves by august
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Part I: Tagine

Praising, that’s it! Praise was his mission,
and he came the way ore comes, from silent
rock. His heart, a wine press that couldn’t last
made us an endless supply of wine.

Even in the dust his voice won’t fail him
once the godhead has him in its grip.
All things turn vineyard, all things turn grape,
in the ripening South of his feelings.

Nothing can contradict his praise,
not mold in the royal sepulchre
nor that a shadow will fall from the gods.

He’s the messenger who stays,
who carries his bowls of praiseworthy fruit
across the thresholds of the dead.

– Sonnets to Orpheus I:7, David Young, trans.

The mission of the night is praise (Praise!) and I will praise Paris, though it has been praised before, and better than I could ever praise it. My lyre makes cities reappear — hear the echoing of my feet when I landed flat footed in a square; see the twist of my face when I ate a cigar; I will walk the length of the quays and skateboard around them again; I will eat cake; I will make words from neon; I will speak in tongues; I will praise Paris.

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I have no real memory of college conversations, the words spoken or the arguments made. But I remember the topics and the people involved, and remember — “that was an awesome conversation.” I remember those moments more vividly than the times I was “having fun.” I’ve been trying to reconstruct some of this because I look at the bored faces of my students and try to convince them that there is something exciting about the life of the mind.

1. Everybody is beautiful. How are they beautiful. We sat in chairs on the lawn, drinking beer and describing as best we could the beauty of those who walked by. Blech, maybe, but it was eye-opening for me, a testament to how much of ourselves we betray just by walking.

2. Interfaith dating. It was a conversation about communication and cultural norms, about negotiating a relationship. I realized when I got married — we all believe different stuff, just sometimes we’re more upfront about it.

3. China. I talked my face blue about life in China. I was asking questions, other people told me how it was.

4. Race. Actually, the conversations were rather painful, and often stupid, but at least they were honest, and an honest conversation about race is hard to come by.

5. How are you going to die?

Tags: august by august
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Several years ago, in one of many moments of wavering between getting a doctorate or making something of myself, I signed up for a poetry class with Marie Ponsot. She spent a good part of the first session introducing us to each other through our work : she read one of each of our submissions. It was kind of excruciating, for Marie is the slowest poet I know. A line break occasions a moment of silence and reflection; a period allows one to go out and grab a cuppa. Yet in the course of ten sessions with her and some very nice fellow-travelers, I came to appreciate her velocity.

For Marie, poetry is an art of attentiveness. In part, she means fixating on detail, as in her poem “Explorers Cry out Unheard”

What I have in mind is the last wilderness.

I sweat to learn its heights of sun, scrub, ants,
its gashes full of shadows and odd plants
as inch by inch it yields to my hard press.

Marie wanted us to take in each tuft, clod, and moss-heap and turn them into bricks of language, foundations for saying the things she believed each of us had a god-given need to say.

What she had to say usually involved the ways the things of the world held not only poetry together, but also bound her to the rest of us:

And the way behind me changes as I advance.
If interdependence shapes the biomass,
though I plot my next steps by pure chance
I can’t go wrong. Even willful deviance
connects me to all the rest. The changing past
includes and can’t excerpt me…

Marie’s technique of teaching attentiveness was aural. She insisted that our first encounters with each other’s poetry come through listening. The parts of the poem that were heard most clearly – that was the heart of what we had to say to each other. And so we spent a semester reading aloud, listening, telling each other what we heard.

Marie believed in metrics, and found cadences everywhere. One evening she arrived in class late; she’d seen a dance performance. The dancers had chanted as they moved, clapping in rhythms that Marie identified in the manner of the Greeks: anapests, iambs, troches. In the way that a certain frequency of energy can destroy a bridge, she thought these collections of stress could kick you, beautiful and terrible.

Marie’s teaching seldom made individual poems better. Instead, she made us better poets. She encouraged silliness, formal bravado, improbable corralling of verbs. She could make a poem turn in on its own logical underpinnings. Take the aforementioned explorers:

… Memory grants
just the nothing it knows, and my distress
drives me toward the imagined truths I stalk,
those savages.

This interconnectedness thing may not be all it’s cracked up to be. What is it that I think I’m seeking, and how will I know when I find it?

It’s the kind of improbable yet logical reversal Marie loves, and she comes about it slowly, in due time, giving each vowel its luxuriant breath, until, sometimes abruptly, she stops:

… Warned by their haunting talk,
their gestures, I guess they mean no. Or yes.

And here is this thing undone. This aged lady, crossing the street at a geologic pace, has just shot herself and her readers with a dart poisoned with god knows what root, and that, of course, is the reason the explorers cry out unheard.

To undo what you have done, to take risks with words, to listen for the separate cadences of keyboards, city buses, elms, or Pop Rocks, to say precisely what you have to say: that slowness is what Marie taught. Or, summed up in a single sentence (mantra, motto, prophesy):

“English is more powerful than you are.”

Thanks to islandtime for reminding me.

Tags: august by august
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