Reflections: Reading Mirabai on a Cold Winter Morning

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The temperature has risen, from the 1* F. that I enjoyed in taking out the week's trash, to 3*. The radar map discloses that we rest on the edge of another large field of snow, moving to the east. Relentless winter marches on. I read Mirabai in a warm room, while faithful Feather sleeps nearby.

Friend, I see only the Dark One --
a dark swelling,
dark luster,
I'm fixed in trances of darkness.
Wherever my feet
touch soil I am dancing --
Oh Mira sees into the darkness,
she ambles the back
country roads.

~ Mirabai (Tr. Robert Bly)
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Rodak's Writings: Winterscape

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Winterscape

No majestic mountains here,

only tiers of rocky hills, hackled up

with scragged pine and deciduous bristle.

A low growling signifies first to the eye.

A high sky bathes the plentiful roadkill

on the salty brown shoulder in useless light.

I am an ancient, brittled by sedimentary regret,

my mossy soul intractably tuned to the icy north.

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Readings: from Breakfast of Champions - a meta-strategy of fiction

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On page 209 (a little more than 2/3 of the way through) of the first hardback edition of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Breakfast of Champions, he reveals, while speaking as the author--presumably as Kurt Vonnegut--via the ongoing meta-narrative threaded amongst the various subplots, his vision of the connections between fiction, social culture, and history:

            As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I had become more and more enraged and mystified by the idiot decisions made by my countrymen. And then I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave so abominably, and with such abominable results: They were doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books.

            Why were so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as paper facial tissues? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales.

            And so on.

            Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would also be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done.

            If all writers would do that, then perhaps citizens not in the literary trades will understand that there is no order in the world around us, that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead.

            It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: It can be done.

It is hard to determine just how embedded was the authorial tongue in the narrative cheek when “the writer” (Vonnegut?) chose those words to describe the technique used in the composition of Breakfast of Champions. It is easier today to see the effects of story-telling on actual behavior through the media of TV, film, and now, especially, in video games. But these are all the offspring of the story book, so Vonnegut’s subjective viewpoint, even if over-simplified, has a certain plausibility, I think.  

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Readings: from Slaughterhouse-Five

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Howard W. Campbell, Jr., the central character of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Mother Night, is an American, raised in Germany, who during WWII worked for the Nazis as a propagandist, delivering radio messages which also contained coded messages (undetected by the Germans)  which gave valuable information to the allied forces. Below is an excerpt from a Campbell monograph, quoted in Vonnegut’s subsequent WWII novel, Slaughterhouse-Five:

            “America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, “It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.” It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: “If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?” There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand—glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register.

            “Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say, Napoleonic times.

            “Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves. Once this is understood, the disagreeable behavior of American enlisted men in German [prisoner of war] prisons ceases to be a mystery.”

Vonnegut presents Howard W. Campbell, Jr. as a highly intelligent man. We might do well, therefore, to consider the plausibility of his words.

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Readings: from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

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The following is an excerpt from a letter, written by Eliot Rosewater, President, Rosewater Foundation, and meant for his successor in that privileged position. The letter was triple-sealed and locked in a safe. Eliot is the novel's protagonist, and the Rosewater named in the title:

     "When the United State of America, which was meant to be a Utopia for all, was less than a century old, Noah Rosewater and a few men like him demonstrated the folly of the Founding Fathers in one respect: those sadly recent ancestors had not made it the law of the Utopia that the wealth of each citizen should be limited. This oversight was engendered by a weak-kneed sympathy for those who love expensive things, and by the feeling that the continent was so vast and valuable, and the population so thin and enterprising, that no thief, no matter how fast he stole, could more than mildly inconvenience anyone.
     "Noah and a few like perceived that the continent was in fact finite, and that venal office-holders, legislators in particular, could be persuaded to toss up great hunks of it for grabs, and to toss them in such a way as to have them land where Noah and his kind were standing.
     Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America.  Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, and bang in the noonday sun.
     "E pluribus unum is surely an ironic motto to inscribe on the currency of this Utopia gone bust, for every grotesquely rich American represents property, privileges, and pleasures that have been denied the many. An even more instructive motto, in the light of history made by the Noah Rosewaters, might be: Grab much too much, or you'll get nothing at all."

So we see, dear readers, that Kurt Vonnegut understood America, and that he was warning us, decades ago, about what many of us are only now coming to realize as our sordid fate. 
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Rodak's Writings: Black Light Blues

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Black Light Blues

Willingness edges

into the room

sideways through

a door that never

fully opens

shies away

like a feral cat

when I tentatively

extend my hand

So I sit and wait

And missing

that which made me

suicidal makes me

suicidal

We are being fried

by our cell phones

ubiquitous wifi

slowly roasted

inside-out

by Nipponized

hard rain

But we worry

about premature

hair loss sagging

breasts erectile

dysfunction

our team’s loss

to their team

quarterly reports

As the world burns

down to dust

in a redacted holocaust

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Readings: A New Poetry Enthusiasm

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Below is the final section of a four-part poem entitled "Night Unfixes the World" by my new Facebook friend and latest poetry enthusiasm, Aliki Barnstone:

INK

Drawing without a lamp as Twin Peaks darkens.
The cat coughs on its own hair.
You take pleasure in ink blots
leaking through the page like a thunderstorm
flashing over torn paper mountains. Ink tells you nothing,
is only other nights when traffic ticked
in your insomniac ear while your lover slept.
In another period of argument.
And here you hiss the cat off the table,
shape this apartment, your face, headlight eyes
outside the window. Here traffic goes by
casting lights while blots of ink angels
silently travel the walls.

***
 This piece is from a collection entitled Madly in Love.  Give it a look, poetry lovers.
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