the word

“A little boy… sent me a charming card with a little drawing. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters — sometimes very hastily — but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, ‘Dear Jim: I loved your card.’ Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, ‘Jim loved your card so much he ate it.’ That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.”

Constructing a sentence is the equivalent of taking a Polaroid snapshot: pressing the button, and watching something emerge.  To write one is to document and to evelop at the same time.  Not all sentecnces end up in novels or stories.  But novels and stories consist of nothing but.  Sentences are the bricks as well as the mortar, the motor as well as teh feul.  they are the cells, the individual stiches. Their nature is at once solitary and social.  Sentences establish tone, and set the pace.  One in front of the other marks the way.

[ from The New York Times; image by Jeffrey Fisher]

Being alone increased the volume of information bombarding him.  There was no one around to distract him from it.  As Leonard strode along, thoughts stacked up n his head like air traffic over Logan Airport to the northwest.  There were one or two jumbo jets full of Big Ideas, a fleet of 707’s laden with the cargo of sensual impressions (the color of the sky, the smell of the sea), as well as Learjets carrying rich solitary impulses that wished to travel incognito.  All these planes requested permission to land simultaneously.  From the control tower in his head Leonard radioed the aircraft, telling some to keep circling while ordering others to divert to another location entirely.  The stream of traffic was never-ending; the task of coordinating their arrivals constant from the minute Leonard woke up to the minute he went to sleep.  But he was an old pro by now, after two weeks at Sweet Spot International.  Tracking developments on his radar screen, Leonard could bring each plane in on schedule while trading a salty remark with the controller in the next seat and eating a sandwich, making everything look easy.  All part of the job.

…When confronted by an armed individual, assume that this person is the police. As such, begin by placing your hands behind your head, fingers interlaced. This will assure that in the eventuality that you are shot and executed, there will be minimum opportunity for analysts and pundits to later ponder if you were the aggressor. Keeping your fingers behind your head is key as it prevents your fingerprints from ending up on your assailant or his weapon. If at all possible, turn your back on the person (whom we will assume always to be the police). In this manner, you will be shot in the back, another telltale sign that you were the victim.

You will not survive your encounter, so it is important to remember to show investigators, the courts, and critics alike that you were in fact the victim. This will be difficult as the assumption is ever-present that somehow, in some way, you did something wrong. That perhaps there was something different you could have, should have done. Perhaps you should have worn something different or walked in a less suspicious manner. I assure you, my son, this is not the case. Regardless of your actions, you were not meant to survive. All you can hope for is an easier postmortem investigation. This will be of some comfort to your mother and I as we cope through your loss, and so I ask you to follow these directions carefully.

Be clear and concise in your cries for help. This will not in any way add to the chance that you will survive the encounter. Instead, it serves to ensure that bystanders and anyone recording just the audio of the encounter will have a clearer depiction of what is happening. Phrases such as “help me!” are not enough. You must be clear. “Please do not shoot me! I am just a kid!” will alert others to the fact that it is you that is about to be shot, rather than your assailant. “I do NOT have a weapon! Please don’t shoot me!” further emphasizes that you are unarmed (for after your death, no one is ever certain)…            

A raindrop, dripping form a cloud,

Was ashamed when it saw the sea.

“Who am I where there is a sea?” it said.

When it saw itself with the eye of humility,

A shell nurtured it in its embrace.

Relatively speaking, there are right view and there are wrong views.  But if we look more deeply, we see that all views are wrong views.  No view can ever be the truth.  It is just from one point; that is why it is called a “point of view.”  If we go to another point, we will see things differently and realize that our first view was not entirely right.  Buddhism is not a collection of views.  It is a practice to help us eliminate wrong views.  The quality of our views can always be improved. 

                                    “…thy love afar is spite at home…” (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

You took my light, faith

that the heavens right

the earth.  I am a brute,
but you are not a god.  I seek

neither women nor treasure—home
is woven into my being like a story.

Neighbors warm themselves
at your hearth, your wife’s loom

full of grief.  I prefer
my meadows, sheep,

sheltered cave, the beach—
the open seas frighten me.

You court terrors like lovers,
treat love like fear.

I wanted a family one day—
kin to call my own, to place

me, affix my strangeness to the earth.
Home is your rock, wandering

your hard place—why do you run
from those whose arms embrace you?

I am alone, yet I stay, rely
on my strength, my singular

vision—but now that has been taken,
I mewl in the dark like a child.  I’ve never had

the wit to dissemble, as you do,
nor the gall to call upon

gods as if they were servants
of mine summoned by a bell,

no Athena to roll out onto the stage,
set things right before the curtain

falls.  Only my father came
to lick my wound, primal and paralyzing.

I am cruel because the world
has set me apart.  When they think

you monstrous and shut
you out, bar the door,

decline bread and water, bed
and roof, trust

nobody.  Your bed this very moment
sought after like a mirage

in a desert, an island in an open sea.
Take care—women

are as changeable as the tides,
as valuable as blood on a battlefield.

You will soon know what it is
to protect your way of life,

to set the world on fire
to do so, to have nothing

but your mind
to pick through the ruins.

One day you will be unmasted
as I am, struggling to see in the firelight,

telling the old stories, incantations
against oblivion.

But now—you leave me here still
freakish, even more solitary,  

terrorized by the feel of shadows,
a word on no one’s lips.

[from Borderline]

Her father would say years later that she had dreamed that part of it, that she had never gone out through the kitchen window at two or three in the morning to visit the birds.  By that time in his life he would have so many notions about himself set in concrete.  And having always believed that he slept lightly, he would not want to think that a girl of nine or ten could walk by him at such an hour in the night without his waking and asking of the dark Who is it?  What’s the matter?

But the night visits were not dreams, and they remained forever as vivid to her as the memory of the way pigeons iridescent necklaces flirted with light.  The visits would begin not with any compulsion in her sleeping mind to visit, but with the simple need to pee or to get a drink of water.  In the dark, she went barefoot out of her room, past her father in the front room conversing in his sleep, across the kitchen and through the kitchen window, out over the roof a few steps to the coop.  It could be winter, it could be summer, but the most she ever got was something she called pigeon silence.  Sometimes she had the urge to unlatch the door and go into the coop, or, at the very least, to try to reach through the wire and the wooden slats to stroke a wing or a breast, to share whatever it the silence seemed to conceal.  But she always keep her hands to herself, and after a few minutes, as if relieved, she would go back to her bed and visit the birds again in sleep.

Now, I have a voice.  Entered, I am lit.

Remember me for this sprouting fire,

For the lash of flaming tongues that lick

But do not swallow my leaves, my flimsy

Branches.  No ash behind, I burn to bloom,

I am not consumed.  I am not consumed.

…..

I will never understand the spirit of my ancestors, but I know it.  I know it lives in me.  And though fear insists on itself, I intend to acknowledge this spirit as one that overcomes us.  I write because my writing mind is the only chance I have of becoming the manifestation of their hope.  I write because my writing mind is the only chance I have of becoming what the living dead are for me.  I exist because I was impossible for someone else to be before me.

He trotted down the driveway, wondering how much ore was caught in his knuckles, fingerprints, palm lines.  It would be interesting to measure it, to know how much dust you carried away with you, the exact quantity.  Dust that, because of you, will remain dust instead of turning into something of value.

 …..

She couldn’t sleep…Whenever she lay on the mattress she felt the vibrations of the Darracq below her, then she’d be wide-awake, clenching and unclenching her toes.  That Darracq.  She thought of it more often than she thought of James.  She thought of it whenever she got frustrated with the Stanley Steamer, its immense power, the air in her face, the steering wheel vibrating, the trees a blur.  Or stationary, its elegant curves, its creamy, haughty whiteness, the mechanical reality of its insides.  That night outside Benjamin and Clara’s with the engine gleaming wetly under the misty streetlamps.  But that wasn’t solely a Darracq recollection—James was there too, handing her tools as she struggled to keep the stole wrapped around her. Chain.  Jack.  Vulcanizer.  The blessed car fading, and James’s face coming closer, his eyes bright in the mist.  The tools kept coming.  They’d paused at teach moment of transfer, their flesh pressed to jointly grasped metal.  Oil squirt can.  Grease gun.  A moment of what she imagined seasickness to feel like.  A stab of guilt.  And pleasure, pleasure, pleasure everywhere.

….. 

Your teeth are going to fall out eating that stuff.  She didn’t know what to do with her.  They should have been at the zoo.  “Walk around the room,” she said.  “Pretend to be an elephant.”

 …..

Better to watch a parade than stare at a blank writing tablet thinking you gave up your life for a girl who knew the right way to balance a bucket of water on her head.