Reflections: Hitting the Wall

X
I have come to understand this: You imagine, when things aren't going too badly, that one day, when you are really down in the dumps, this book and that book can be pulled off the shelf and the wisdom therein will help you pull through to better times. But when you get there, and your world has no meaning, you find that you can no more read those books than you can spin straw into gold.
X

Readings: A Writer Satirizes Writers

X

Very early this morning, as I was sipping my first cup of coffee, I was reading the final story in George Saunders’ fine collection, Pastoralia. The title of that story is “The Falls.”  The story’s protagonist is a sorry creature named Morse, who lives in a tiny rented home near an unimportant river, resentful of those living in the larger homes past which he is walking on his way home from work. The following paragraph introduces another character, whose interior dialogue has actually inspired this post:

From behind him on the path came a series of arrhythmic whacking steps. He glanced back to find Aldo Cummings, an odd duck who, though nearly forty, still lived with his mother. Cummings didn’t work and had his bangs cut straight across and wore gym shorts even in the dead of winter. Morse hoped Cummings wouldn’t collar him.

We see that Morse, a small, struggling, conventional man, fears the possibility of having to interact with this weird character, Cummings. Cummings, for his part, as we shall see below, feels superior to Morse, despite the fact that the Morses of this world would unanimously consider Cummings to be a pathetic loser.

George Saunders masterfully allows Cummings to present himself through the device of the following stream of consciousness paragraphs.  In so doing, Saunders also brilliantly satirizes that which makes bad writing bad, even while pretentious “writers” imagine their adjective-burdened, esoteric-noun-laced  “purple prose” to be brilliant :

Cummings bobbed past the restored gristmill, pleased at having so decisively snubbed Morse, a smug member of the power elite in this conspiratorial Village, one of the league of oppressive oppressors who wouldn’t know the lot of the struggling artist if the lot of the struggling artist came up with great and beleaguered dignity and bit him on the polyester ass. Over the Pine Street bridge was a fat cloud. To an interviewer in his head, Cummings said he felt the possible rain made the fine bright day even finer and brighter because of the possibility of its loss. The possibility of its ephemeral loss. The ephemeral loss of the day to the fleeting passages of time. Preening time. Preening nascent time, the blackguard. Time made wastrels of us all, did it not, with its gaunt cheeks and its tombly reverberations and its admonishing glances with bony fingers. Bony fingers pointed as if in admonishment, as if to say, “I admonish you to recall your own eventual nascent death, which, being on its way, human, is forthcoming. Forthcoming, mortal coil, and don’t think its ghastly pass won’t settle on your furrowed brow, pronto, once I select your fated number from my very dusty book with this selfsame bony finger with which I’m pointing at you now, you vanity of vanities, you luster, you shirker of duties, as you shuffle after your worldly pleasure centers.”

            That was some good stuff, if only he could remember it through the rest of his stroll and the coming storm, to scrawl in a passionate hand on his yellow pad. He thought with longing ardor of his blank yellow pad, he thought. He thought with longing ardor of his blank yellow pad, on which, this selfsame day, the first meager scrawlings which would presage his nascent burgeoning fame would be wrought, or rather writ, and someday someone would dig up his yellow pad and virtually cry eureka when they realized what a teeming fragment of minutia, and yet crucial minutia, had been found, and wouldn’t all kinds of literary women in short black jackets want to meet him then!

            In the future he must always remember to bring his pad everywhere.

There are not a few among those publishing their efforts on the various writers’ group pages of Facebook who would profit from the reexamination of their own writing—not to say their own mode of living--in the light of George Saunders’ high satire. 

X

Rodak's Writings: An Inadequate Poem

 
X
A Refusal to Mourn the Deaths, by Gunfire, of Twenty Children in Newtown

Others will write
grave syllables
of grief and horror
in stanzas heavy
as granite angels.

Mine is the silence
of the deus absconditus;
the silence of a doll
left waiting
on the pillow of an empty bed.
X

Reflections: Horror and Its Promptings

X
Yesterday, the morning of December 14, 2012, a young man in Connecticut murdered his mother. He then drove her car to the elementary school where she had been a kindergarten teacher. There, he murdered the principal and five other adults. He also murdered twenty children. Most of them had been in his mother’s class. It was horror, and the wanton TV Eye of this brutal nation had one more crashing, collective orgasm, teased to new heights of ecstasy as, bit by tongue-tipped bit, the story was breathlessly delivered, retracted, revised and salaciously licked onto the camera’s lens by ranks of comely stringers; for, if it bleeds, it leads. The president performed our public penance with a becoming degree of difficulty. I gave him 8.5 out of ten. A governor spoke. Ranks of cops were implored to deliver just one unit more of their arcane syntax. Preachers and priests were interviewed, and psychologists in the hire of media outlets solemnly offered professional wisdom, for free, to a gasping nation, now grieving in the afterglow.

Yesterday also, I discovered a poet, new to me; a Welshman named R. S. Thomas. Here, from the collection, Later Poems 1972-1982, is the second piece:

PETITION

And I standing in the shade
Have seen it a thousand times
Happen: first theft, then murder,
Rape; the rueful acts
Of the blind hand. I have said
New prayers, or said the old
In a new way. Seeking the poem
In the pain, I have learned
Silence is best, paying for it
With my conscience. I am eyes
Merely, witnessing virtue’s
Defeat; seeing the young born
Fair, knowing the cancer
Awaits them. One thing I have asked
Of the disposer of the issues
Of life: that truth should defer
To beauty. It was not granted.

It was a long, sad day in what has so very suddenly been revealed as a long, sad life. The third poem in the Thomas collection is:

THIS ONE

Oh, I know it: the long story,
The ecstasies, the mutilations;
Crazed, pitiable creatures
Imagining themselves a Napoleon,
A Jesus; letting their hair grow,
Shaving it off; gorging themselves
On a dream; kindling
A new truth, withering by it.

While patiently this poor farmer
Purged himself in his strong sweat,
Ploughing under the tall boughs
Of the tree of the knowledge of
Good and evil, watching its fruit
Ripen, abstaining from it.

###

[ insert ‘What a long, strange trip…’ here ]
_____________________________________________________________________________
UPDATE: It is now being reported that the murdered mother was not a teacher at the school where the shootings took place, and may have had no formal connection to the school at all. It is also reported that the guns used in the massacre, or at least some of them, were purchased by the mother. All of this does damage to the symmetry of the story, as it was being reported last night; but it is what it is.

Rodak's Writings: Linnaeus

x

Trying now to recall the seldom-taken arboreal tours of my neighborhood-happy little boy being. Delivered by V8 woody wagon to tramp beneath that broad green supported by tall brown-to-black pillars that even in rising seemed crushingly stone-like despite the carefree flitting of the birds, the squirrels and one guessed the bats come sundown. Sure. Trees. And I hardly knowing the names of a few. Leaf shape a Cub Scout sort of wisdom that did not grab me for brain branding. An elm: there was one in our yard on Linden Street. Linden a tree too I would later learn. And that one was a maple. But maples come in tribes. Like Canada. Or Vermont. Pancakes. Butter. Canada. Ice-skates. Maple Leafs a plural with the “v” gone missing. Butter not in tribes but brands. To which no loyalty from me to this day. I will have the generic. Or everything Kroger. Would Kount out Kash for Kroger Kondoms if I Kould. So tree tours remembered but names still not known. Elm for sure. Maple, generally. Oak quite the same. From little acorns. Apple? Known only by the fruits. Jesus said that. Cherry? Ha-ha-ha. Dirty jokes come marching in like a company of WWI vets. Of which not a one remains standing. Unless in some Black Forest cave still cluelessly looking for a Kraut to kill at one-hundred-and-something. Forest for the trees. Africa for the Africans. What’s-his-name grouped them. Not Audubon. That was birds. And years later when Rip Van Winkled. Bowling dwarves. With a goddamned “v” -- fucking Canucks! Kerouac. California. Howl. Anal sex. Why knowing back then more birds than trees? Sparrow. Check. Robin. Check. Blue Jay, pigeon, cardinal, pheasant. Easy. Duck, goose, swan. Sure. Parrot and parakeet. Canary. You could buy them at Woolworth’s. Elm, maple, oak. And don’t squeeze the Charmin. Don’t let the doorknob hit you in the ass. Memory becomes time lost to the present. Linnaeus that’s it. Linnaeus not Adam named the trees in all their tribes. He probably earned himself a merit badge. The elms like the WWI vets all gone. The name and its learning has so soon come to naught. …Goddamn but I’m lonely...
X

Rodak's Writings: an Etheree

 X

The poem below is my initial attempt to compose an “etheree,” a form to which I was introduced a couple of days ago in the group “Poetry, Poetry, Poetry” by the poet, Jane Lynahan Karklin. The form gets its name from the given name of an obscure poet from Arkansas who invented and developed the form, Etheree Taylor Armstrong, about whom more here:

The form is simple: line one has one syllable; line two has two, and so on, for a total of ten lines.

The Hangnail

A

hangnail

can kill you

if it invites

the right kind of bug

to play trout up your blood-

stream. I want to live forever;

but, please God, not as an old man.

The flesh grows soft as the years mount up.

The hangnail's pain: your path to salvation.

X

Rodak's Writings: Basic Black - a poem

X
X
Basic Black


At my old home

the one I lost

my clothes closet

had a light in it

that came on

when you opened the door.

In my new place

the one that I haunt

a damned soul

you need to flip a switch

to light the closet.

So I stand every morning

looking into a dark place

not able to tell

if the shirt is black

or blue or green.

Do you understand

what this means?

Do you?
X
X