The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Tag: Writing

  • Notes on “How to Know a Person” by David Brooks

    David Brooks’s latest book, “How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen,” in the tradition of how-to books, suggests a panacea – it’s about how to cure social ills caused by failures toward wisdom, wisdom being the ability to know and see others. Of course everyone knows and sees others. But deeply is a metaphor that Brooks uses to mean wisely. This is where the wise guy gets wise and sheds the skin of the old self. Brooks suggests if one examines one’s life, as Socrates explained is the ticket to a life worth living, a good place to start is to examine the life of someone else. To know oneself means to cut through the fog of one’s birth situation and predicament, and, in the existential meaning of existence precedes essence, define for oneself what one’s existence amounts to, while simultaneously to know oneself means to understand the limitations and privileges handed down by the many hands of one’s cultural birth and upbringing and accept that view as true and unassailable. The ability to handle this apparent contradiction is necessary if one wants to be wise. The symbiotic relationship between one’s self and others is necessary for those who would wise up. You can’t be wise alone. You can’t know yourself without knowing another, and you can’t know another without knowing yourself.

    The Brooks book is a compilation of research in the fields of biography, psychology, philosophy, sociology, as well as neuroscience and field work, with ample anecdotal evidence and life experience examples that add support for claims and provide for reading enjoyment. There are seeming contradictions. Brooks eschews stereotypes, for example, but spends significant time categorizing personality types and other shorthand ways of talking about and seeing people. But at the same time he discards old ways of thinking and suggests better ways to experience one’s self and others. The naming of others and things is problematic. For example, we call a person an extrovert or introvert. What does this tell us about that person? There is a chapter titled “How Not to See a Person.” Brooks introduces new terms: Illuminator and accompaniment. He suggests there are wrong questions to ask – not, for example, what do you do (for a living), but, “What crossroads are you at?” Brooks acknowledges discouragement, but his book is positive and optimistic. He wants to be an illuminator, one who is wise, who knows others, sees and is seen. The book is not all that hard to understand. The challenge is to grow away from either the torment of self-doubt, of self-criticism, or the curmudgeonly habit of naming people to put them in their place, of holding people to rules that you yourself are not required to follow. Are you at peace or have you regrets that make you despair?

    “Despair involves bitterness, ruminating over past mistakes, feeling unproductive. People often evade and externalize their regret. They become mad at the world, intent on displacing their disappointment about themselves into anger about how everything is going to hell.”

    207

    Brooks distinguishes between smart and wise. And what is wisdom?

    “Wisdom at this stage of life [at the crossroads of peace, integrity, and despair] is the ability to see the connections between things. It’s the ability to hold opposite truths – contradictions and paradoxes – in the mind at the same time, without wrestling to impose some linear order. It’s the ability to see things from multiple perspectives.”

    207

    The wise don’t impose or regulate and tell you what to do. They listen. They are experts at listening:

    “Wisdom isn’t knowing about physics or geography. Wisdom is knowing about people. Wisdom is the ability to see deeply into who people are and how they should move in the complex situations of life. That’s the great gift illuminators share with those around them.”

    248

    There are identities we create, names we name ourselves, and narratives we stick to (or revise, as circumstances evolve), even as the plots don’t make any sense, one event not rationally leading to the next, like a walk through a circus. Like clowns, we “prepare a face to meet the faces,” as Eliot’s Prufrock said. Whereas, we might say simply, as Brooks summarizes:

    “I had some early blessing. I saw the suffering of others. I realized my moral purpose. I endured periods of suffering. I grew from my pain. I’m looking toward a beautiful future. If you’re talking with an American and you want to get a sense of who they are, find out if their life story falls into this pattern, and if not, why not.”

    223

    Or we could sing a simple song. This is not in the Brooks book; I just thought it might be a fun way to end these notes:

    “Getting to know you,
    Getting to feel free and easy
    When I am with you,
    Getting to know what to say

    Haven’t you noticed
    Suddenly I’m bright and breezy?
    Because of all the beautiful and new
    Things I’m learning about you
    Day by day.”

    “Getting to Know You” is a song from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The King and I (1951). The song itself is “free and easy” and “bright and breezy.” That there is an underlying irony in the history behind the play it’s from may or may not say something about getting to know people:

    “In 1861, Mongkut wrote to his Singapore agent, Tan Kim Ching, asking him to find a British lady to be governess to the royal children. At the time, the British community in Singapore was small, and the choice fell on a recent arrival there, Anna Leonowens (1831–1915), who was running a small nursery school in the colony. Leonowens was the Anglo-Indian daughter of an Indian Army soldier and the widow of Thomas Owens, a clerk and hotel keeper. She had arrived in Singapore two years previously, claiming to be the genteel widow of an officer and explaining her dark complexion by stating that she was Welsh by birth. Her deception was not detected until long after her death, and had still not come to light when The King and I was written.”

    Wikipedia, The King and I, Retrieved 11 Nov 23
    Persons

  • The Psychology of Leaves

    We got a weekend leave from the fort and the five of us squeezed into Private Olivegreen’s brown bug and bugged out for the nearest big city, about 80 miles away: population 280,000. We were trainees in an occupational specialty school: MOS 63B20 – Wheeled and Track Vehicle Mechanic. There wasn’t much to do off hours around the fort, and with weekend leave you escaped extra details, kitchen police, or the bad boredom of the Post Exchange and its watery 3.2 beer. There was no movie theatre, no library, no gym, no swimming pool. There were no girls. The barracks were large two-story open wood walls and waxed linoleum floors and the latrines were not for holding privy. I was the only teenager still of the five. The others had already finished college before being inducted, and they treated me like a kid brother. In the small town just outside the fort there was one bar with one pool table. I went there one night with Mississippi, the hustler from Alabama, who cleaned up on a few locals. The guys from the southern states were run-on talkers with long drawn out tales and jokes told like we were not in the middle of hysterical winter. I was the only surfer of the five. In our Basic Combat Training weeks they had been somewhat envious of the ease with which I completed the calisthenics and confidence courses. We were all cut on the same orders, Basic through the AIT (Advanced Individual Training) schools, and presumably beyond (rumor said stay in schools as long as you could), and we hung loosely together throughout.

    The weekend leave plan drafted by Ward was to land at the University downtown and stay at his fraternity’s house nearby off campus. But the house folks weren’t comfortably receptive to five GI Joes invading their space, and on top of that the individual rooms were taken and the common area wasn’t very big and the facilities were sparse. It was just a house, not a mansion. So we canned the frat house idea and got a motel room. The Army paid you in cash monthly. We had no credit cards and anyway there were no ATM machines, no card swipe machines. Maybe a couple of the guys had bank accounts somewhere. I did not. This was an era prior to cell phones, personal computers, social media. Radio and TV – that was it. And mail call.

    The motel room had two double beds. It was quickly decided who would sleep where and I got the floor. We got pizza somewhere, and we then broke up and went out on the town, and Hunter and I hitchhiked our way up and down the local bright lights big city dubious drag strip, drifting and delving into dive bars where I might or might not have been asked for ID for a glass of beer. At some point Hunter and I got separated. Some time later I found myself in the backseat of a car full of high locals cruising one of the outlying highways. I got hit with a jolt of paranoia and told them to pull over and let me out. They were incredulous, we were now miles outside of town, going where there seemed no inkling, and they didn’t want to just let me out on the side of the road, but I insisted. They pulled over and I hopped out and they drove off laughing and yelling. The road was empty. I jogged along the shoulder back into the big city, illuminated on the highway every few hundred yards or so by the overhanging streetlamps.

    I made my way back to the motel. It was now very late, or very early. I knocked on the motel room door. I hadn’t been given a key. No one answered my knock. Olivegreen’s VW was in the parking lot. I knocked and knocked but no one opened the door. The motel was two linear stories, doors opened to the outside, the second story rooms onto a narrow balcony with metal railing hanging over the parked cars. I bedded down outside on the balcony concrete floor, curling up like an alley cat against the door to the room, not even a doormat for warmth, and fell asleep. I woke up shivering cold and banged hard on the door and Hunter suddenly opened it stupefied and I stumbled in and fell back to sleep on the floor, no pillow, no blanket, still in my street clothes.

    The next day we crammed back into the bug and crawled back to the fort and I was glad to get back to barracks and a hot shower and the cotton cot with wool blanket and fell asleep listening to Baton Rouge tell all about how much work he’d completed this weekend on his correspondence course toward becoming a cub reporter when he got out of the Army.

  • 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.”

  • 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.

  • 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

  • Apple’s Tale

    I could have been applesauce. Or a French apple tart. Or a Viennese strudel, dessert following an outdoor Oktoberfest Mozart concert. Something fit for a queen. Instead, some two-bit squirrel is eyeing me for a quick bite of fodder. I could have been a hard cider. I suppose I still might be.

    They say we don’t fall far from our tree, but if your tree is on a steep hill and you get squeezed out early by self-thinning siblings and you hit the ground bouncing and spinning, you might end up, as I did, in a patch of dry grass on the edge of a grade school playground.

    We live to be eaten. And it’s what we want. It’s complicated, and I don’t pretend to understand it all, but ever since I was awoken by the bees, those giant furry honey bees, and the little masons, the breeze also stirring my imagination – anything seemed possible on that early Spring morning when we got our first taste of sunshine and our petals felt like wings and we thought we might fly with the bees through the trees.

    My tree was planted as part of an orchard up on the hillside sometime in the late 1800’s. There are not too many of those early trees still around. They watched the city grow slowly from across the river and up the Eastside slope – growth that took out a lot of trees.

    Funny how things grow and move around and live off one another. It takes cooperation for life to thrive.

    I was hoping to be part of a bushel full of my siblings that might make its way to some outdoor market. That was fantasy. My old tree is lucky to produce a single peck these days. And it’s been a hard go since that day awhile back the temperature reached 117 degrees. We prefer the chill side, but still, we’re not all that picky. We start off cold, slumber in the warm shade of summer, and finish cool. Life is not bad being an apple. And there are, contrary to idiom, no bad apples, just poor storage.

    But a crop of boys one decade used the apples for their backyard baseball games. Wooden hardball bats. Talk about applesauce. The old tree was happy to see the boys grow up and move on. Another family took exceptional care of the tree. Every year careful pruning, watering, thinning, picking – and storage in their cool, dry basement. They made applesauces, cobblers and crisps, and prize ribbon-winning pies. But that family also moved on. An older couple that spent most of their time travelling abroad moved in and let my tree grow wild, apples falling and rotting, fermenting, covered with wasps in the fall. Those years the yard was full of birds. One year there were skunks. Raccoons were common. And a family of possums took up residence under the back porch, though they mainly fed off the slugs and bugs and tiny rodents attracted by the fallen apples.

    All this and more my tree passes on to its apples, how to open to the coming of the bees, the loss of petals, the June drops, our capricious caretakers – the humans who covet us. We know our past, and fancy we know something of the present, but guessing our future is tricky.

    One day, hidden in the schoolyard grass, I was found by a dog chasing a ball, and I was picked up by a boy and put in his jacket pocket, and I went for a walk with the boy and his dog around the playground. Over a fence I was tossed, into the back of a nursery, in among the rose bushes potted for sale.

    I got picked up again, looked at closely and felt all over, and put in a paper sack with an assortment of other apples. We were weighed and paid for and carried out of the nursery and walked off, winding our way up the side streets of the hillside.

    An old woman received us at the door and carried us through the house, out a kitchen door, and onto a back porch where she took us out of the bag and placed us one by one upon a table. A murmur of softening filled the air. 

    And there I saw my tree, out in the yard, looking as old, no – much older – than the old woman standing on the porch next to us, picking us up one by one, smelling, feeling, softly rubbing, looking closely. I don’t know what she’s going to do with us. She looks like she could be a fritter type. I’m hoping for a good old-fashioned apple pie. A la mode.

  • Theory of Meaning

    What is mental may mislead us,
    the physical, on the other hand,
    for example, in a cloud you see
    an elephant, but that elephant
    is mental, not physical, while a
    physical animal in a living room
    could be mentally misconstrued
    as a ceiling cloud; the mental
    is also physical, and vice versa.

    We might call, in this discussion,
    what is physical, the denotative
    meaning, and what is mental,
    the connotative meaning. They
    are both meanings, both valid
    experience, and one plays off
    the other. Denotative meanings
    describe, while connotative
    meanings suggest. Further,

    we may easily and without
    argument agree on clouds,
    but to say a cloud is an
    elephant is a statement
    about which there may be
    some disagreement. Either
    way, rain begins to fall and
    the farmer is happy while
    the weekend golfer pissed.

    Let’s make sense together, you and me:
    Our needs are simple:
    water and food, shelter, one another.

    We think we are thinking beings
    but that’s not to say
    this rock and paper don’t exist.
    The rock quivers to its icy core
    when the voice speaks its thunder
    and the elephant walks
    through the room.

    All thought is substantive, bears
    out, vindicates the light of all
    we see and miss which absolves
    the darkness. The rock too thinks,
    thinks, “I am a rock; I have it easy.”
    Don’t worry about meaning. We
    play hide and seek, turn sounds
    into music, shelter in rocks,
    plant tomatoes under elephants.

    By meaning we mean passing
    a baton in a conversational relay.
    Ask the easy questions first:
    who, what, when, where, why,
    and how – the architect built
    on nothing, why then should
    nothing distract you?

    Meantime, last night I slept
    on my guitar, while the blinds
    blew in the breeze of the open
    window, and night birds flew
    in and out, around the room,
    each with its own song.

  • Field Notes 28 Aug 23

    Walked a mile last night with Eric, curlycue around the neighborhood streets late in the evening, the blue moon rising over the houses and over the firs up on the dark volcano, first cool evening in awhile, feeling the ocean air arrive like an old steamship foreshadowed by tugboats pushing and pulling against a tide. Earlier had sat out in the drive with the guitar, disturbing the universe, though no one seemed to mind, a few passersby walking dogs giving me a nod, the International Play Music on the Porch Day passing locally like any other day.

    The neighbor’s Brobdingnagian apple tree, high up above the border wall, half of which hangs out and over our grape pergola, too high to pick, seems to have come close to finishing its self-harvest drop, around a dozen or more bushels falling on our side of the wall this year, a bumper crop, peck after peck after peck we’ve picked up and bagged.

    Meanwhile, peaches are in season. Fresh peaches, juicy and tender, slightly fuzzy, plump, pink and red and yellow and orange. Nectarines are also peaches, but without the fuzz, smooth, and the pit of the peach is akin to an almond. This is what comes from looking things up, a new pastime. Of the numerous poets who have tried to get their hands around a peach, perhaps none have squeezed as close yet stayed afar as Andrew Marvel, in his poem titled simply “The Garden” (circa 1650), where he seems to prefer the actual peach to any metaphor that might point elsewhere for one’s fuzzy orbs:

    “What wond’rous life in this I lead!
    Ripe apples drop about my head;
    The luscious clusters of the vine
    Upon my mouth do crush their wine;
    The nectarine and curious peach
    Into my hands themselves do reach;
    Stumbling on melons as I pass,
    Ensnar’d with flow’rs, I fall on grass.”

    Andrew Marvel

    Why “curious”?

    “I grow old … I grow old …
    I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

    Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
    I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
    I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

    I do not think that they will sing to me.”

    from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” T. S. Eliot, 1911

    One of these days, I’ll compose my own poem to the peach, maybe “Portrait of a Peach,” which is to say, one you cannot eat, dare or not. Lately, Susan’s been offering ripe peaches on a plate to nibble through the slow afternoon, so soft, so cool, so sweet, so refreshing. Love peaches, love to see two, side by side, each to each, within easy reach.

    Speaking of growing old and wearing trousers rolled, yesterday, lightly working outside, I came close to falling twice. The first time, I caught my pant cuff on a hook under the outdoor couch. I nearly fell into a cluster of flower pots. The second time, the foot whose turn it was to move forward on the porch somehow stuck in place, and the pot I was carrying was tossed so I could stop my fall with the arm that was holding it. The pot fell and broke in two, splattering the walk with potting soil. And somehow I found myself sitting on the porch step. Not quite a fall, then, a sit?

  • River Town

    I live in a river town, know
    my way around, walk
    here and there and won’t
    be nobbled, neither bounder
    nor leaper, foot after foot
    forge forward, as need be.

    Someone offers me a lift,
    and forgetful I get in,
    but befogged where
    this drifter gets his
    directions, mindful then
    I alight and walk home.

    I’ve yet to learn to keep
    quiet, tho no longer tip
    the cup, and what books
    I wrote won’t remain,
    my purpose no longer
    easily to entertain.

    Moonlight spills on streets
    silent rivers of summer heat
    cool night but rivers don’t
    sleep and walkers walk
    to avoid being driven
    to despair with no air.

    This is not a myth I am
    with you all the way,
    each stream wiggles
    down to the big rivers,
    the sound of the water
    breezes thru dry brush.

  • Get Real

    To make art, to make things
    out of other things, to engage
    in artifice, a confidence game:
    “Get real,” your critics say.
    The earth is a rug
    constantly being pulled
    out from under you.

    The artificial is real: the bread
    and wine camouflage the need
    to sacrifice the poor lost lamb,
    not to mention the virgin,
    created by man made
    design critics to avoid
    her real predicament:

    “Poor and rich belonged to the same world and placed themselves on a common, even sliding scale, but beggars could not. The ptochos was someone who had lost many or all of his family and social ties. He was a wanderer, therefore a foreigner for others, unable to tax for any length of time the resources of a group to which he could contribute very little or nothing at all…a ptochos was a shocking reality for the Greco-Roman world” (272). 1

    “The beatitude of Jesus declared blessed, then, not the poor but the destitute, not poverty but beggary…Jesus spoke of a Kingdom not of the Peasant or Artisan classes but of the Unclean, Degraded, and Expendable classes” (273). 2

    1. Gildas Hamas quoted in John Dominic Crossan’s “The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant” (272). 2. Crossan gloss of Gerhard Lenski (273).

    Who then or now could write
    a poem who is not at least poor
    real poor or in spirit or metaphor?
    Yet the beggars make their signs
    and hold up their poems
    along the roadsides,
    the least of publications,
    the yeast of city life.

    “What is needed, then, is not insight into the Kingdom as future but a recognition of the Kingdom as present. For Jesus, a Kingdom of beggars and weeds is a Kingdom of here and now” (Crossan, 283).

    What is real
    will not be
    found staring
    at the universe
    through artificial eyes
    to catch a glimpse
    of dawn’s first light,
    nor descending
    to the bottom
    of the sea
    in rich pods
    to study ancient
    shipwrecks,
    nor in any travel
    nor in any poem.

    But surely we must
    avoid the real
    at all cost
    and become more
    artificial.

  • Leaving Nature

    Let’s go, then, you and AI,
    evenings lined up streaming
    across the screen held upon
    a tablet, let’s go where comma
    dose takes a back seat rigged
    to getting there, being there.
    Let’s take a trip, swishing
    rhyme in time, north by
    northwest, and go climb
    those frabjous rock sculpted
    heads: Granite, Art Stew,
    Gillian Fish holding a glass
    of Golden Wine. Don’t ask,
    don’t ask, let’s just go.

    In the room the crawdads come and go
    singing of a fellow follow afterglow.

    My fall was not sudden chance,
    still crush accident, the collapse
    of dawn cultivation nightly forecast.
    Unlikely I’ll keep track losing
    the harvest, but no turning back
    to nature I did not let go of.
    Nature creeps thru the city where
    cats carry rats into living rooms,
    and not only that but just try
    to find a place to park out at
    the ball-field – let’s go, take me
    out to the brand new ballgame.

    This mural robot painted going
    upcountry where nature seems
    suspect, a solo sober primitive
    guitar in the Valley of the Moon
    played pizzicato inharmonicity.
    An audience of two at a corner
    table in a tavern near the wharf,
    waitress telling her cat proudly
    prancing whiskers wished clean
    a blue-belly lizard into her lucky
    little studio apartment couched
    under the jets along the highway.

    Another trip, a different time
    and place, all the same, still,
    let’s go, not to get it over with –
    we’re out of coffee, and let’s
    pick up some more ice cream
    raspberry and mango sorbet.
    I can’t remember the last time
    I had a box of Cracker Jack,
    but I’m sure the surprise is
    nature’s leaving us alone
    hiding out in the mangrove
    adapting to our own changes
    what we’ve called man made
    night plastic light glowing
    these imitation mermaids
    singing to one another
    while we walk along the beach
    listening and combing one
    another’s hair, nature’s leaves,
    playing games and having fun,
    and we stay leaving nature.