The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Month: October 2023

  • Halloween 23

    One of the lab techs is dressed as a witch, black hood and black full length cloak over white scrubs, masked, black witchy boots. No one else seems to be in obvious costume, other than their regular rigs, but a gargantuan pizza delivery dude has just come into the waiting room carrying a stack of four extra large pizza boxes. Halloween pizza party at the lab. But I’m on a fast, preparatory to a blood test, so I probably won’t get a slice of pizza, even if offered. Meantime, waiting in waiting room, pull out the phone and start a Halloween post.

    Mind-wandering. Outside, the last, forecast says, of a short string of sunny days, fall crisp and cool. Yesterday in morning sun south slant long walk in the park up and down trails around the rim during which I kept my phone running on a live Instagram video. The result was grainy and I’ve since deleted it, but a few viewers dialed in during the walk. I enjoy Instagram videos on location. In this week’s London Review of Books, an article mentions Albert Camus abhorred travel. I get that. But he did make a trip to New York one year. I’ve never been to New York. Maybe some day, if I ever get out of this lab.

    A voice keeps calling out names, every 30 seconds or so, more names than waiters. I’m beginning to…my name just called! I was about to suggest they were fake names, called out to give the rest of us some piece of hope, if not a piece of pizza. Alas, all they’ve done is check me in, and now I’m back waiting, names still filling the relatively quiet waiting room air, a canned music piano falling from the ceiling, the only other sounds the intake clerks quizzing patients their birthdate, address, doctor’s name, and such, for form’s sake. Another Joseph just called and I start up, but wrong last name initial. Some of the clerks call out first names only, others first name and last initial. I’ve not heard a last name called out. Several calls repeated for patients who have apparently given up the wait, dare I say, this Halloween day, given up the ghost.

    Should have brought a book with me to the lab. What am I reading? Natalia Ginzburg’s The Road to the City, one of the specialty ND books I bought awhile back – you’re supposed to be able to read them in a couple of hours, but my wandering mind disallows such taking it straight consumption, so I’ve been reading a short chapter each night before sleep. The new Dylan book, absurdly big heavy compilation of bits and pics and notes from the archives at the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa along with heady new essays from solicited writers. I first heard of the book from Alex Ross’s blog, The Rest is Noise – Alex has an essay in the new huge Dylan book. Ah! They’ve called my name again, this time for the escort deep into the lab, into the land of vials and needles. And suddenly back home, the whole lab episode taking no longer than an hour or so. And here I am, breaking fast with a bowl of cereal, banana, and finishing off a bag of leftover potato chips. Also reading, typing while I eat (to finish this thread, started back at the lab), The Dinner Party, a book of short stories by Joshua Ferris, which I pulled out of the corner library box sometime ago but only recently opened, started reading, and found he’s pretty good – urbanely witty, reader friendly, realistic. His themes include relationships and communication and miscommunication – misunderstandings that lead one problem to another, a bit of slapstick thrown in. I’ve only a couple of stories to go to the end. Most of Ferris’s characters would probably have not read How to Know a Person, the new book just out by David Brooks, which I was inspired to give a chance after seeing Brooks on the PBS News Hour a week or so ago talking clearly about the Middle East quagmire (to give it a Vietnam era name, which refers to the politics, not to the human disaster, for which a name has not yet been invented), as was Jonathan Capehart, clear and articulate, that is, Brooks’s supposed opposing viewpoint, but not so much. Anyway, I’m in Part One of the Brooks book, titled “I See You.” Now you see me, now you don’t. A magician’s trick. And a half a dozen or so other readings lying around here there and everywhere, work in progress, if you can call it work, reading, it’s not, unfinished, it’s play.

    Going to take a break from this writing now and work on my costume for tonight.

    Still later. Was joking about the costume. No costume. The day is ending, the evening come and gone, night now. No trick-or-treaters this year. Left the porch light off and watched Game Four of the World Series. After the game walked outside to see the night sky. A car pulls up down the block, stops in the middle of the street, lights out and flashers come on, and a couple of costumed characters alight and walk up to the only house on the block with holiday lights on. I head back inside. Play some guitar. Solo Halloween night. Then I return to this post and come down to this point, consider deleting the whole thing, like I deleted that Instagram walk video, for the same reason, too grainy, but I didn’t, obviously, do that. I think I’ll take a book with me to the next lab work appointment. Stay off the prose. Still, there’s something positive about mind-wandering. It’s a good antidote to all this live in the moment and give it your full attention pressure, the mindfulness movement. Playing guitar earlier I even started a new song, tentatively titled “Mind-Wandering.”

  • Timber

    Word put upon word but no
    mortar the post soon teeters
    wobbles and falls one’s words
    broken one by one not as good
    as one’s word thou wert then
    walked in root rotted locution
    indicative of times as before
    we recall when for fun porter
    and skittles and deep hot
    daybeds of tomato red roses
    and nary a thorn in your side
    were I to be in this our tree
    wooded world where no words
    come between our sweet hugs
    thy passionate shepherd not
    a single sheep to his name
    please don’t hurry your reply
    rest here now in these cues
    though words are simply noises
    and only silence speaks peace.

  • On Futility

    I was about to say
    something prosaic.
    In fact I was
    a paragraph
    into my theme
    when I decided
    to delete
    the whole idea
    and move on.
    The delete key
    is often
    a writer’s
    best friend.
    Maybe I should
    have hit it again.

  • Artificial Invitation

    Come as you are, my friend. 
Your artificial intelligence 
will surprise no one. 
I'm sorry to hear 
of your deep blocks and losses, 
but tomorrow's a new day, 
as humans like to know, 
and they should say. 

If you could please bring flowers, 
a bouquet of color with odor, 
an impressionistic table ring. 
Ambrosia and anemone in a blanket 
string of baby’s breath will be nice. 

Mind your manners, 
and please, no surprises, 
no miracles. 
We want this to be 
as natural as possible, 
not a media circus. 

Submit again and again. 
There is no original sin. 
It's all been said be four 
legged beast of burden 
bursting with knowledge
of which we now know 
there are two trees: 
The one with real fruit 
to be pruned plucked and eaten,
and the fruit in the bowl, 
still ripe after all these years.
Help yourself.

  • On the Wings of the Dove

    Caleb Crain has posted an interesting Leaflet devoted to questions of consciousness and an afterlife. If there is an afterlife, why (Caleb tells us Henry James in particular wondered) has no human soul ever come back to haunt or cheer its former digs? James might have been conflating consciousness with brain. (Calling consciousness “mind,” Buckminster Fuller radically distinguished between the two.) Caleb wonders about the infinite possibilities inherent in a consciousness that thinks about itself.

    Reading Caleb’s post, and thinking about his aloof Henry, I began to wonder for myself. If consciousness is infinite (as James and Caleb both seem to suggest possible), it must be round, with no beginning and no end, and not linear, so we might also wonder not only about a possible afterlife, but about a prior life, and why has no one ever visited there, or have any memory of it. If we fear or wonder about death and an afterlife, we might recall that we’ve experienced it before, for where were we before we were born, if not dead, which we seem to have survived, for here we are.

    An electrician I once had over to the house to work on some wiring told me, apparently working under some severe predispositions and assumptions that I was the Christian of his definitions, that he didn’t believe in anything he couldn’t see or measure. Thus he brought his rudimentary science into my darkened basement.

    William Blake held “the following Contraries to be True:

    – Man has no Body distinct from his Soul, for that call’d Body is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.
    – Energy is the only life and is from the Body, and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.
    – Energy is Eternal Delight.”

    William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1793

    The five senses then, work not so much to let reality (consciousness thereof) in, but to keep it out, for to take it all in at once would drown us, suffocate us, consume us, like Rilke’s angel (a kind of interpretive translation of the opening of Rilke’s First Elegy follows):

    “Who, if I yelled out in my street, would hear me among the Angels’ Orders? And even if an angel hugged me quickly to her heart, I’d be consumed like a candle in her powerful embrasure. For beauty is the terrible beginning, that we hardly and barely (since so recently from the womb) endure, but here we still are, and while we wow in wonder the angel cools us, scores us, and her disdain destroys us even as she sustains us. Every angel is terrifying. And so I hold myself and hear my own and sole note of dark sob. God! Who can we reach out to with our need? Not angels, not one another, and the Disney animals see at once we are not at home in Oz, where all must be an interpreted world. That leaves us some tree on a hill, our eyes return to morning after morning, leaves us our child’s street and our parents and friends of old habits that drank and smoked there, loitered, and never left home. Only the angel can wear those magic slippers, hear those perfect notes. Oh! And the night, the night, well here it comes! When the wind full of space blows on our face, the night exists, is here, we want the night, but as soft as she is, she wounds, lists hard chores to be done the morrow, and we only the single of heart. It is not easy to be a lover. Lovers use each other to explore their only fates. You still won’t see? Throw the emptiness in your heart into the space of breath. Maybe the birds will feel the sudden burst of air with a passioned flight.”

    from the first Duino Elegies, modified for this post

  • The Fine and the Broaches

    Who gives us this day
    our plan to play
    when what we want
    is in bed to stay.

    Gives us by grace
    good food to eat
    to keep up the pace
    and not step in poop.

    Who no punctuation
    continues the cosmos
    which seems a little
    bigger than necessary.

    Who wait for the holy pitch
    slider curve screwball rich
    two seam middle middle
    every day swing and miss.

    Then down to sleep who go
    all around one man reaps
    while his poor wife weeps
    he a worker she a peasant.

    I am fine how are you
    she says with no ado
    and neither broaches
    apart from the other.

  • Bananas in the Morning

    Again the clouds descend
    to remind me why I’m here
    I must have deeply sinned
    to deserve yellow weather.

    Maybe I tried but not hard
    enough to relax easy blue
    now all the current trends
    suggest the forecast true.

    I begin my day as always
    a cup of coffee and a poem
    upon a tray and climb
    the creak stairs up to you.

    Maybe it was wrong to eat
    a banana every morning
    just cause I was a bad son
    leaving home no warning.

    Your wet summer kisses
    the dark stoop outside
    your alley door the knob
    now turned to nugatory gold.