divinity demitasse

I love you tonight in an
impersonal way, like I might
love someone I know even less than I
know
you, like I might love a goddess I could actually worship,
if one ever existed, 
or a figurehead, an idea of a girl.
You are at a higher order of existence,
making connections unknown
to your own race,
clarifying what we don't even know
is muddied,
dancing and writing and singing.
Invoking.
You wanted no pedestal,
but that's false modesty at work
when you know you're more alive
than whatever labors under your feet,
under your spell;
repeat yourself.
Go on.
Repeat.
You'll make it through to us one time.
That's the power of mantras spells poems,
even prayers,
at least sincere ones.
Repeat yourself til you don't have to.
Til we all see your hundred-foot shadow when you step into the light.

Jettison the Nice, Non Serviam, And Something Kinda Pretty

I began this blog a while ago and let it languish.  I came back to it because I needed one as part of a project for a class in "New Media," whatever that's really supposed to mean.  New to whom, exactly?  Exactly.  At any rate,as such, I tried to play nice, write respectfully toward my audience, not thrash or howl, use nice language; all the things my prof would expect.  I even refrained from whipping out innafuckinpropriate portmanteau words, which are an especial favorite of mine, but which almost everyone else abhors.  You jumps through the hoops when you wants the grade, and ooh yeah, Chombatta, I wants the grade.  I wants a crack at grad school and I wants a job in a university, where it smells nice, where it's quiet, where I doesn't has ta wash my hands before going to the bathroom.  And besides, there's nothing wrong with playing nice.

But I wanted to throw down a little after the class ended, get wild, jettison the nice.  Start tossing around the filthy F-word (you know the one, Father - worse than 'feck'), getting dirrty with the erotic poetry that Mrs. Disaffected hates when she reads it - whether it's about her, for her, to her, or couldn't possibly be about her, either way.  Even more ambitious, I wanted to plant a flag here in blogland for my progressive agenda and spout off about things that piss me off, like intolerance, hate, illiteracy, and the banal celebration of all three known as life in Armpitas, Indiana.

Since I am easily as lazy as I am disaffected, this has not happened.  Be warned, blogmongers, because it will.  Eventually.  Some time in the future.  Bank on it.

In the meantime, here's a poem (-ish) that I composed partly while driving and partly internetally last night.  I should have jotted it in the car, because I lost part of it and it won't come back.  Like the man says, the shit's always better when it's pouring out on you, straight from the celestial recording room, and you only have to stand there with a bucket to catch as much as you can.

On My Way Home

When Soichiro says, Come fly with me,
his emblem, Hermes' winged sandal,
shows you that he's serious.

The library
kept me too long
again,
but the power's
on at home,
and the sun is
bright,
but not
too hot
today.

My bright-smiling girl
is swimming
with her grandmother,
and I am late collecting her
for dinner and bed.

I will need Chiro-san's wings.

We might stop, after I dim
her smile, steal
some mirth from her sunred cheeks,
bring the idea of Going Home
into Grandma's house,
the opposite, the absence
of Going Home -

We might stop
at a little stand, where
brown,
round-faced boys
and girls stack their
grown
things high.
The board bows
beneath
the weight of what
they have wrought
from the ground,
these children.

They are so timid
in handing me my
crinkled
brown
bag of cucumbers,
so timid,
in taking
the few coins and bills
I offer in return.
Their black eyes, so serious,
snapping
when they smile
up,
suddenly so bold.

I wonder, driven away
by Chiro-San's wing,
if those serious children,
when they are grown, will
be
the kind of people
whose demeanor
follows a natural oscillation,
from timorous to fierce.

I love those kinds of people.

It comes easily to me
to find a way
to love
those children -
Ignorance, for one.
I don't know
anything about them
past the fact that they
are children.

It's enough.

Music Mumbles Monday

I shall endeavor to make this a semi-regular feature of my correspondence with you, my gentle readers (all 2 of you).  My music mumbles will range topically from (some) rock to traddy Scots-Irish, bluegrass & old-timey, and a little bit of classical - also, don't be shocked at the odd bit of filk, as my profile does list Michael Longcor and Leslie Fish in the favorite singers category.  I'll talk about concerts or sessions I've been to, musicians I like, new CDs I've heard or purchased, or why a certain song or tune does something special for me.  I don't really know a lot about any of the aforementioned types of music, but I know what I like, and I like a lot.  Of course, I can assure you that many times it will be late, especially if I haven't seen anything over the weekend but at least did make it to the weekly (Monday night) session at Fiddler's Hearth, one of my very favorite places to see live music.  One of these decades, I hope I'll even grow the stones to sit in.

So, this week's MMM is a pretty busy one, though I'll try to keep it short since I've already mumbled enough just describing what I'll mumble about.  Recently, I decided that I F**KING HATE JAZZ.  Here's why: on Saturday, Mrs. Disaffected and I went to the  Morris Performing Arts Center's tenth anniversary concert.  The anniversary was of the theater's renovation, not its founding (just in case you wondered), and hence they had a party.  We saw Kennedy's Kitchen play, heard Tuck Langland sing "Modern Major-General" (who knew?), even working some current-events references into the lyrics.  There were over a dozen musicians, most quite agreeable.  Then Danny Lerman [warning, the site plays music, loudly (big shock)] took the stage, and I wanted to run home right away and stuff my head in the oven.  Let me say, in all fairness, that the Morris's sound was crap most of the night.  Everything was boomy and distorted.  We heard a piano-violin duet, and if the piano was playing you couldn't hear the violin.  That sort of thing.  When Art & the Artichokes, a rock group, covered "Born to Run," I couldn't tell if they had any Glockenspiel (-en), and besides that I couldn't hear the geetars, only the bass, the drumkit, and the lead singer, screaming into an already Amplified microphone.  This brings me to Lerman and the microphone bolted into the bell of his saxonphone.  He had a great backing band, but why, WHY, would I - or anyone - want to sit through a 10-minute audio assault consisting of one guy improvising, shrilly and badly, at 120 dB?  Hello, Gitmo?  Screw waterboarding.  This'll make 'em talk if anything will.  So now, I hate jazz.  I thought I liked it.  I really did.  I found Jessy J, Nina Simone, Lady Day & even the banjo stylings of Alison Brown to be quite tasty and palatable.  I bought their records.  I listened in times of trouble and of ease.  I consumed them all and licked my chops.  Nom.  I wanted to find more jazz.  But now, If that crap I heard Saturday night was jazz, I can only approach the genre with fear, loathing, and hate.  Sorry for the negativity, but what's the sunshine without a little rain?  Next MMM, or later at any rate, I'll hold forth on the Euclid Quartet and Peter Miyamoto, who played Sunday in the Raclin auditorium and provided an entirely different experience.

Fluidity Fixed

This photo made me think, in that way that things never follow a straight line through our minds, about a quote from Terry Brooks in his book Sometimes the Magic Works.  He talked about how sometimes to get at what he needed to understand, within his "subterranean" mind, he would sort of go away for a while.  Like during a conversation about something else, or when he was driving.  This had to be a little awkward, leading to comments from his friends about how "Terry's not really all here."  In Terry's mind, though, being not all here was a very good thing, because that meant he got to be somewhere that's not here, he gets to be there.  "There" was the place where the magic happened.  It's the place Henry Miller might have called the "celestial recording room." Many people might take issue with the idea that anything from Mr. Miller's pen had any connection to the celestial realms, but his meaning is clear, and we can take it to be: inspiration is gotten from crossing boundaries, going somewhere, or getting "it" (via begging, supplication, or blackmail) to come here.  So if Terry Brooks were going to be anywhere, why would he not want to be where the magic and the words came from?  This photo put me in mind of Terry (and Henry-san) because it has subverted the fixedness of its subjects via movement, making them strings and streaks instead of points.  Is it not crossing a boundary of sorts, to make the solid mutable, and that which is fixed, mobile?  Now that we've crossed, inspiration must be near.  We only have to be ready with a bucket to catch it.

Forge Thick, Grind Thin

The Eminent Ed Fowler, ABS Master Bladesmith and senior statesman of the hand-forged knifemakers' contingent, takes this phrase as his mantra.  It's an especially good fit for people who want to be writers, and even better for writers like me, who have a neurotic tendency toward editing and proofing. 

I proof everything I read, unless I work very hard at Not Proofing, and I also proof everything I write, while I'm writing it, unless again I try not to.  Makes for a very slow first draft of anything. 

This neurosis also tends to make me hypercritical of most things I read, as if a hastily-scribbled stickynote memo from a manufacturing engineer is actually supposed to make grammatical sense.

Ed's mantra helps me move away from all that.  Very odd, since it overlays everything that writing teachers have been telling me, from junior high all the way up to the awesome Fran Sherwood.  Small wonder it hasn't sunk in yet.  This approach of his works well in bladesmithing, and can be transferred easily to writing. 

Like so:  when making the blade, Ed says, Do Not forge to final dimensions.  Leave yourself some meat on the bone for the finishing operations.  The important thing is to get the rough shape of the thing out there, existing and filling the space it was supposed to fill out. 

The time for agonizing over the placement of commas is during rewrites, when you are honing the razor’s edge of your prose.


After you bring your ..thing, your story, paper, or pattern-welded Zatoichi blade, into existence, once the you have fixed its shape in space the way it was in your imagination, you can pretty it up, take away things that are still a little rough or ugly, do some polishing & tempering. 

I have really started to like this comparison of two dissimilar occupations.  It’s helped me think about both activities in a little different way.  I think it was E.B. White who spoke of decisions made in the the heat of composition.  It might not not be quite as hot as a smith’s forge, but it’s hot enough to mold mutable ideas into new and pleasing shapes. 

And that, I’d say, is pretty hot.