A Notebook – Since 2007
Behind this wall of paper lives a poem no subscription will reveal. The poem is invisible. No journal can hold this poem. There is no log-in, no fee, no access, yet the poem is free. The words spill into the paper like seawater over a levee. This poem must be imagined. Later, after the reader leaves this book-less library, a pinch of dry salt will be enough to recall this poem.
Moonishnessly
We were children then, when we settled on the moon, amid drifts of silver shadows. Our parents were still alive, down on Earth. We had no fear of flying, outside of airplanes, no fear of flying on the wings of birds, daily flights to the moon, one-way flights. We walked on the moon all night long, moonishnessly. And in the morning, covered with moondust, we climbed down to the blue ocean for a salt-water bath.
Today is International Women’s Day. A few of the books pictured above go back to high school days and were given me by my two older sisters (I grew up in a family of six girls). “The River,” by Rumer Godden, was required reading at SBHS; the copy in the stack has my sister Shirley’s name in the inside cover. Shirley passed away a few years ago.
Susan and I lived near the beach in some courtyard apartments across from the writer Sylvia Wilkinson. I was in my first two years of teaching, in Venice. I showed Sylvia something I had written, and she said to Susan, “Tell Joe not to quit his day job.” But I never gave up on the idea of the novel and reading and literature and the whole idea of being a writer, whatever that was to come to mean. I got a corporate job, cementing the idea of a day job, but I don’t think one’s occupation necessarily prevents one from writing. What is writing? In any case, 30 years later I finally did quit my day job and finished the novel, having reworked it several times in different formats over the years. Interested readers can find a link to excerpts in the sidebar.
Sylvia had given us a copy of her 1977 novel, “Shadow of the Mountain,” thanking Susan for proofreading and the title. If I were to suggest books by women for International Women’s Day, I might suggest any of Sylvia’s books (I think she may have thought “Cale” was her best), and also “The Solitary Self,” by Mary Midgley. Both Sylvia and Mary warrant wider reading.
– I said a little prayer for you.
– Where did you send it?
– I tied it to the leg of a bird.
– Not how did you send it. Where did you send it? To whom did you send it?
– Oh, I leave that up to the birds.
What is prayer? When I was a kid, I learned the Catholic prayers, and believed Sister Mary Annette, who liked to quote Shakespeare, when she said, “Words without thought never to heaven go.” King Claudius is trying to pray, looks like he is praying, to Hamlet, anyway, and so Hamlet decides to put off killing him, for fear that if the king is killed while praying, he’ll go to heaven, while Hamlet wants full revenge, not to send his uncle to an unjust reward. What Hamlet doesn’t realize is that while Claudius’s “words fly up, [his] thoughts remain below.” Annette waxed literary, incomparable to none.
Impossible to know with certainty if the thoughts of others are wedded to their words, so I don’t know if I alone among Annette’s 8th grade class had this problem, but my rote prayers were recited much like Malachy McCourt explains in his book “A Monk Swimming.” He had misheard “amongst women” in the prayer known as the “Hail Mary.” But if his thoughts were behind his words, applying Claudius’s rule, I suppose Malachy’s monk swimming would have made it into heaven. If I had said “a monk swimming,” my thoughts would have been about the surf down the road from our church.
Salinger’s Franny gets caught up with prayer, and one day, her brother Zooey explains the alleged benefits of the pilgrim’s prayer to his mother, who has expressed some concern for what Franny’s getting into: “And the main idea is that it’s not supposed to be just for pious bastards and breast-beaters,” Zooey says. “You can be busy robbing the goddam poor box, but you’re to say the prayer while you rob it.” The argument of the pilgrim’s prayer, in Zooey’s explanation, seems to run counter to the “words without thought” school of prayer.
Hemingway’s characters are often caught in prayer, or anti-prayer. Consider the waiter’s version of the Lord’s Prayer, for example, in the short story “A Clean Well-Lighted Place”: “Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name….” And, “I don’t love anybody,” Krebs tells his mother in “Soldier’s Home.” “Now you pray,” his mother tells him. “I can’t,” he says. In the short piece titled “Chapter VII” in “The First Forty-Nine Stories,” a soldier caught in battle prays, “Dear jesus please get me out.” He makes promises to Jesus, bargains for his life, and “The shelling moved further up the line,” but “The next night back at Mestre he did not tell the girl he went upstairs with at the Villa Rossa about Jesus. And he never told anybody.”
What happens when Jesus gets prayers at odds, opposing viewpoints? Athletes often pray. A ballplayer will make the sign of the cross at the plate just before a pitch. Does this give the batter a kind of steroid-prayer advantage? But couldn’t the pitcher simply counter with a prayer of his own, just before delivery? Do the prayers then cancel out? But something has to happen to the pitch: call strike, ball, foul ball, base hit. But is this what prayer is supposed to be about? On the other hand, given the pilgrim’s prayer premise, why not position oneself in constant prayer? Baseball is a game of inches.
I pray you, is the idea of prayer to be always asking for something? But prayers are often made for the benefit of others. Praying for peace would seem to benefit everyone. We might pray for rain, or for a dry spell, for sun or shade, for our horse to finish first. If we have everything we need or want, should we then stop praying? But we might pray we don’t lose something, or that someone else gets everything they need or want. Is there ever enough prayer?
We pray for peace, health, safety, security. We pray for stuff. We pray that there be more stuff, and less stuff. Different kinds of stuff. Not everyone prays, of course, but if prayer is a question, surely everyone has a prayer at some point. What is gambling but a prayer, a prayer to the god of luck. John Cage said “…nothing is accomplished by writing, hearing, playing a piece of music } our ears are now in excellent condition.” Probably the same might be said of poetry. Not much accomplished there, either, and the most accomplished poets seem to know this, which improves the condition of their voice. Can the same be said of prayer?
Last year, New Directions published a small book collecting selections of Thomas Merton’s writing, titled “On Christian Contemplation.” For Merton, prayer seems to be a kind of poetry, but only after acknowledging a marketplace uselessness of both; and prayer, like poetry, might also transcend doctrine: “…ascending the slopes in darkness, feeling more and more keenly his own emptiness, and with the winter wind blowing cruelly through his now tattered garments, he meets at times other travelers on the way, poor pilgrim as he is, and as solitary as he, belonging perhaps to other lands and other traditions. There are of course great differences between them, and yet they have much in common.” Merton felt “much closer to the Zen monks of ancient Japan than to the busy and impatient men of the West.” He characterized these men as thinking “in terms of money, power, publicity, machines, business, political advantage, military strategy – who seek, in a word, the triumphant affirmation of their own will, their own power, considered as the end for which they exist.”
This does not mean that in prayer one escapes one’s responsibilities for putting bread on the table. This is a problem for poets, of course, too: “Simply to evade modern life would be a futile attempt to abdicate from its responsibilities [while clinging to its advantages. The way of contemplation is a way of higher and more permanent responsibilities] and a renunciation of advantages – and illusions,” Merton says.
The modern world presents problems for the poet and the prayer: “Can contemplation still find a place in the world of technology and conflict which is ours?” Peace, and wholeness, Merton argues, are not “the most salient characteristics of modern society.” No kidding. Yet, “What is keeping us back from living lives of prayer? Perhaps we really don’t want to pray. This is the thing we have to face.” But, if we do want to consider prayer, or contemplation, or poetry, how do we go about it? “If you want a life of prayer, the way to get it is by praying,” Merton says.
How does one pray? Merton says, “The best thing beginners…can do…is to acquire the agility and freedom of mind that will help them to find light and warmth and ideas and love for God everywhere they go and in all that they do. People who only know how to think about God during fixed periods of the day will never get very far in the spiritual life. In fact, they will not even think of Him in the moments they have religiously marked off for ‘mental prayer.’” And “mental prayer” is an awkward term, because we don’t pray with our minds, Merton explains.
But to return to the idea of uselessness, of prayer and of poetry, commercial uselessness, worldly uselessness: Merton says, “Christ does not control by power; further He does not control by law. This is one of the most important and neglected features of the New Testament.” Not everyone feels the need to enter into contemplation, prayer, or poetry, but that does not mean the need is not there, seeded within the individual soul. While at the same time one’s personal anguish might be so intense or one’s perspective so hurt as to call forth a dismissal of God and Christ and all the baggage one feels associated with the church and its people and prayer and what one sees to be the hypocrisy and futility of it all. So, “How does the theology of prayer approach this problem?” Merton asks. “Not by reasoning but by symbol, by poetic insight, leading directly to those depths of the heart where these matters are experienced and where such conflicts are resolved.”
On the other hand, one might want for something simple, a simple prayer, a simple poem. One shouldn’t have to google a prayer or a poem to enjoy the moment. To google literature, in a search for meaning, is to ruin a good meal. The same might be said for church prayer, church being the place where we google our souls, but any book might work, Merton says, and reading prayers out of a book, or reading a book as a prayer “is a good thing to do and very easy and simple.”
Why pray? “The real purpose of meditation is this,” Merton says: “To teach a man how to work himself free of created things and temporal concerns, in which he finds only confusion and sorrow.” Still, we might find ourselves bored with all of this, with the idea we are going to spend any time away from our busy schedules on something as trivial as prayer or poetry. We want to feel productive. We want to help others. We’ll go to church, appear to be part of some community, put some bills in the basket, sprinkle some holy water on our face, just in case there really is something to all the hocus-pocus. For the bored or busy, Merton seems to advise to not only get it while we can but where we can: “Learn how to meditate on paper. Drawing and writing are forms of meditation. Learn how to contemplate works of art. Learn how to pray in the streets or in the country. Know how to meditate not only when you have a book in your hand but when you are waiting for a bus or riding in a train.” One can pray “with few words or none…half-hopeless.” There are poems like this, or there should be.
There’s a chapter in the little Merton book titled “Silence.” Did Merton read John Cage? Merton says, “Whether the house be empty or full of children, whether the men go off to town or work with tractors in the fields, whether the liner enters the harbor full of tourists or full of soldiers, the almond tree brings forth her fruit in silence.” Another chapter is titled “Difficulties & Distractions.” One can’t escape all of one’s difficulties or distractions, even in prayer. Hamlet said he could bound himself in a nutshell and count himself a king of infinite space – were it not that he has bad dreams. Of this kind of tension, Merton says, “Do not strain yourself trying to get ideas or feel fervor. Do not upset yourself with useless efforts to realize the elaborate prospects suggested by a conventional book on meditation.”
“Everything good that comes to us and happens in prayer is a grace and a gift of God,” Merton says. “Even the desire to pray at all, and the attempt to pray, is itself a great grace.” Does this mean that God has ignored many of us, who may not feel this call to pray? Ah, but what is prayer? This claim of Merton’s rings true, pray or not: “The mere fact of having an opportunity to pray is something for which we should be deeply grateful.” Grateful, too, for the opportunity to contemplate poetry, to read, or even to try to write a poem.
There’s a wonderful poem included in the Merton book, called “Song for Nobody.” It seems to embody some of Merton’s idea of prayer:
A yellow flower
(Light and spirit)
Sings by itself
For nobody.
A golden spirit
(Light and emptiness)
Sings without a word
By itself.
Let no one touch this gentle sun
In whose dark eye
Someone is awake.
(No light, no gold, no name, no color
And no thought:
O, wide awake!)
A golden heaven
Sings by itself
A song to nobody.
Merton advocated contemplation in an age of distraction, where we might become free of anxiety and anguish magnified by the reckoning and wreckage surrounding us. And John Cage said nothing is accomplished with music, thus freeing our ears to all sounds. Cage said, “I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry as I need it.” Maybe Shakespeare’s King Claudius should not be trusted when he says “words without thought never to heaven go.” Words without thought may indeed be the lingua franca of heaven, thoughts without words the mother tongue of heaven.
I confess I do not know how to pray, not in Merton’s view, where one prays with every breath one takes. And I have typically prayed only with reason, and with words, and this seems the wrong approach. One should pray without reason, and without words. Prayer occurs in the act of contemplation, then it disappears. Poetry occurs in the act of writing, then it disappears. “A poem should be wordless,” Archibald MacLeish said, “As the flight of birds.” Relax, Merton says. Make a poem a prayer. If no one reads it, if no one wants it, maybe God will accept it. For readers who have read to the bottom of this post, consider it a poem; for those who have ignored it, it’s a prayer, one with far too many words.
1. Tell that boy to give me back my glass eye!
2. Oh, Flannery! Such a perfectly purply bleak tale of this sad potato sack of a young woman taken every advantage of as she struggles with her permanent defects physical and mental to walk in a world where we may engage and intercourse authentically with others.
3. A hoot and a holler in a hay loft!
4. Kisses sourer than vinegar.
5. I wonst knowd a woman just like that busy body Mrs. Freeman and she warnt free atall but was so cot up in everybody elses bizness but I will say she was probably free of her man but that woman wood knot bee welcome on in my kitchen, no sir we.
6. Poor Joy, I shall pray for you, that you got home safe and sound without your you know what. I do wonder, though, how did you ever get down that ladder? But you are such a strong girl. Keep it up, and you go, girl!
7. It’s about sin and redemption and people who wear their hearts on their sleeves.
8. Who’s Flannery tryin’ to kid here she ain’t never been up in no hay barn.
9. It sounds like Flannery is going to give us some pornography. Well, she does, in a way, with those playing cards of the bible salesman. But it’s all turned around. He’s the one who says she must say how she loves him. That’s backwards from what we are used to. It’s usually the girl must say this, and ask, will you still love me tomorrow? But this is no normal sex scene. What does the leg represent?
10. Yes, the kisses. First like a truck, then like tiny fishes sucking. It’s an absurd view, a distorted view, but the girl does lose it up in that barn.
11. You all missin’ the point here. It is tragic to have such a big nose, so he takes her nose and off he goes. So the tragic becomes comic. We must learn to laugh, even if we must cry to get there.
12. Yes, kind of. Sanctifying grace has fallen, and Joy has received a gift, the gift of grace. But we must be careful what we pray for. She was obsessed with her leg. Her leg was inseparable from her. It was her identity, her self-image, her poor but large and strong picture of herself that no one else saw, and so the gift she got was to be rid at long last of the leg.
13. She is her own antagonist, struggling against her self, but dynamic, for she changes from beginning to end, and all the others in relief remain static.
14. Look at the words, people! Mrs. Freeman’s “neutral” expression as she barrels down the road like a trash truck, Joy Hulga “lumbered” about like bats falling in a dugout, her leg made of wood. This is irony: textual and situational, and the one gives way to the other.
15. I think it’s about how Joy turns so sour on account of the hunting accident. That’s real. But then it becomes unreal, like a bad dream, like a nightmare, when Manley Pointer, the fake bible salesman, comes along. At first he seems real, though obnoxious, but then it’s obvious that he is there to do the devil’s work. He’s a cad.
16. No, no, no! He’s there to do the Lord’s work! For the Lord does work in strange ways in a Flannery O’Connor short story. Don’t you see? He frees Joy from her obsession with her leg.
17. I just want to say that I think Flannery is so courageous to try and write something like this.
18. Tell that boy to give me my glass eye back!
19. We all have our faults, but who would have thought a person can hope too much, and though ever hoping well, come to such ruin.
20. It was a very colorful story. I counted over 30 colors, and then lost count.
21. I’m reminded of the time my great uncle Leroy, this was when we was all still living down in Gulleytown, over the creek bridge and on out Smithy Road, up past the Gilclumps place, before it got so runned down after Olaf passed, and around the sharp curve where the railroad tracks veer off down toward the river where Charlene Apple lost control of her Mustang that year it rained so hard people said it must be the end of the world coming, and Leroy, suddenly one Sunday appears in church, though he had not stepped a foot near it in 40 years, and him with a tie around his big fat neck his face so red and bumpy like a fat spoiled strawberry and he’s holding one crimson red rose on a long stem and he walks up the aisle and you could hear a feather twist in the air as a mosquito flew near it and Leroy he stops at the third row on the left where of course in the aisle spot Mrs. Flanmph always sat, had sat every Sunday for the past 40 years, and Leroy genuflects and pauses and old Mrs. Flanmph won’t look nor budge, but Leroy gently insists his leg into the row and old Mrs. Flanmph she don’t move down but moves back twisting her legs sideways like a body does when someone wants by and Leroy steps over her and plops down and everything is still as a summer creek in the country and then Leroy hands Mrs. Flanmph his crimson rose and she looks at it for a good country moment and then takes the rose, and the uproar in that church like to wake the dead out in their graves and pretty soon people was dancing in the aisles and Preacher Justin he declared a good country pot luck supper later that afternoon back in the church backyard where Leroy cooked up his ribs for the first time in 40 years and all kinds of folks showed up to see what all the commotion was about and were told that Uncle Leroy and old Mrs. Flanmph were finally going to tie the knot. Thank you all for reading and commenting. Comments are now closed.
Related: Flannery’s Joy
Friedrich Durrenmatt’s short story “The Tunnel” concerns a young man, a student, on a train, commuting to school. The train enters a long tunnel, longer than the student recalls from previous trips along the same route. The student smokes cigars, stuffs his ears with cotton, his head in a book, and he’s wearing double glasses, clear and dark. He’s dimmed his senses, all but closed his doors of perception (26). The train is crowded. There is no light at the end of the tunnel, no end to the tunnel.
I had walked down to Tabor Space Saturday afternoon, but it was closed for a memorial service, so I continued over to Hawthorne, where hangouts are plentiful. I bought a coffee and sat at the rear of the shop, under a window through which I could see the clouds drifting east. I had my copy of John Cage’s “Silence” with me, and I had a small notebook, two pencils and a pen. I had my cell phone, and I had not forgotten my reading glasses. I did not have my laptop with me.
The coffee shop was crowded and noisy. But it was the kind of noise that drowns out my tinnitus. Somewhere, there was music. I sat at the end of a comfortable couch. There was a coffee table, and across the table from me was a young man, perhaps a student, with a laptop and small, white earplugs in his ears. He wore glasses. To my right, at the end of the couch, two more young men sat at a small table, both with laptops, both with earplugs. At the end of the coffee table, a woman sat alone with a laptop at a small table with her back to me, her plush black hair piled on top of her head in a twisted bun. And there were charcoal drawings on the walls, of bees, and one of a rooster. From my view at the end of the couch, the woman’s bun seemed to flair up and blend into the rooster tail drawing pinned to the wall.
I drank my coffee, read some in “Silence,” made some notes, checked my cell phone to see if Susan had texted or called. A guy with a laptop and earplugs across from the woman with her hair in a bun got up and left, and another guy with a laptop and earplugs quickly took his place. That’s when I began to think about Durrenmatt’s short story “The Tunnel.” Then the woman with the hair bun got up, packed her things, and left, but another woman quickly took her place. And this new woman also had a hair bun, identical to the first woman’s, and she sat in the same chair in the same position, her back to me, her hair bun mixing with the rooster’s tail in the drawing pinned to the wall.
That’s all. I read, drank coffee, gazed out the window at the clouds continually changing shape. I made some notes for a blog post with a few doodles. I drew a beehive hairdo that spiraled into clouds above a tunnel.
Count up 12 books from the bottom in the pic to the left (a stack of books mostly from the mid-60s) and you’ll find “The Fall of the House of Usher,” a book of short stories by Edgar Allan Poe. I spent a 9th grade weekend copying out longhand Poe’s tale “The Pit and the Pendulum.” Never mind why, but it was a punishment I rather enjoyed.
Six books from the bottom is “The Time Machine,” H. G. Wells’s forecast for long term care for the human race.
Eight books up you’ll find Jerzy Kosinski’s “The Painted Bird.” I was in 10th grade Home Room class sitting behind a friend who was reading furtively in a paperback I didn’t recognize. I asked him what he was reading. He gave me the book, but asked that if caught with it I would not tell where I got it. We didn’t know one another that well, though later we became good friends. He had substantially more stock with the authorities, was a genius. But he seemed concerned that I might be traumatized by the reading experience. Some critics now suspect that Kosinski was traumatized by the writing experience.
I wrote a paper in 10th grade arguing that Melville’s “Pierre, Or the Ambiguities” contained more social insight than “Moby Dick.” Unfortunately, I can’t fine my 10th grade copy of “Moby Dick”; fortunately, though, I can’t find the 10th grade paper I wrote, either. I still have the Rhinehart edition of “Moby Dick” we used at Dominguez Hills.
That Sherlock Holmes “Memoirs” used to have a partner, “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.” It’s a mystery what happened to it.
I remember first reading “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” in high school, but I can’t remember what grade. But I remember wondering about a scene where Leamas is shaken by a near miss on the highway. Is he less shaken by the near miss than by the recognition that the near miss has shaken him?
I can’t find my 9th grade copy of “Two Years Before the Mast.” I can’t imagine anyone wanting to borrow it. In fact, a couple of weeks ago, we were moving some things around, sort of spring cleaning, impatient for spring, and we wound up with a couple of bags of used books we decided to take down to Powell’s. They took about half of them, but I was surprised they took as many as they did. Do literary influences wane over time? What else can’t I find? All the Steinbeck books gone, but I know where they went. All four original Salinger books not to be found, though three have been replaced. The early “Walden,” “On the Road,” but also replaced.
I don’t suppose anyone reads Asimov’s “The Human Body: Its Structure and Operation” anymore. If we want to know something about the human body, we google it. But who thinks of the body as an operating system? It’s like talking about books as physical objects, and as if their mere presence might have an effect on us, like a gravity, the experience of influence.
Related Posts: Reading influences and Henry Miller: more on reading influences.
silent quicksand was a poetry and art magazine at El Camino College in the early 70s. I don’t know how many issues came out before folks moved on and it folded, but I don’t think many. I have copies of issues # 2 and # 3. I had three poems appear in the Fall 1973 issue (# 3). When I told my old high school friend Tim at the time about it, he said there was no quicker way to obscurity than appearing in a college literary magazine. That was of course before blogging came along. In any case, I thought it was cool then, and I still do, that two of my poems shared a page with Stephen Jama, one of the ECC English instructors, who became for a time a friend and mentor.
Below is an image of issue # 3 and below that an image of issue # 2:
I was reading, at the time, the Beat poets, Corso, Ferlinghetti, Philip Lamantia, and of course Ginsberg, and King of the Road Kerouac, and Gary Snyder, and I remember reading Diane Di Prima, and I read Henry Miller and Anais Nin and all along John Cage, and Whitman and William Carlos Williams, and, having started with folk music, I was now getting deeper into jazz, and I read “Blues People,” by LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka). Still other influences included the Rexroth translations, Hugh Kenner’s “The Pound Era,” Donald Hall’s “Contemporary American Poetry,” McLuhan and Norman O. Brown, and de Beauvoir and Sartre, and Camus. In seminars we still read Dos Passos, Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Joyce and Beckett.
One night, I went with Jama up into Santa Monica to see a live production of Beckett’s “Endgame” at a small theatre, and another time we saw Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape” at a small troupe theatre in Hermosa Beach. I saw the humor in Beckett. I had a sense of humor about it all, the literary quicksand. That was all before my foray into what Han Shan called the red dust. It’s not easy keeping one’s sense of humor where the quicksand is so quiet and deep, but I had my sense of humor there, too, and I hope I still do:
“jazzskin” is an old, handmade chapbook (1973, 17 pages – click on photos):
The “poetry occurs” idea is a riff off John Cage, whose book “Silence” (1961) begins with “The Future of Music: Credo”: “Wherever we are,” Cage says, “what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating.” In his essay “Experimental Music,” Cage underscores the idea that noise is everywhere and attempts to control it create other hazards, but, he says, “One need not fear about the future of music. But this fearlessness only follows if, at the parting of the ways, where it is realized that sounds occur whether intended or not, one turns in the direction of those he does not intend.” When I was working on “jazzskin,” I felt, as I do now, the same about poetry that Cage felt about music. But Cage was not a jazz fan. He apparently thought jazz was about having a conversation, for which he preferred words.
Related: Jazzskin, a post, and “JAZZSKIN” a poem (follow link or see “About” page).
The Coming of the Toads 
