Henry’s Protégé

I go down to Henry’s shack fairly often, but he never comes up to see me. I live on a hill with a good view for a workingman. I can see an expanse of that great river that has traveled all the way from Canada just to be here, as well as a tiny glimpse of the ocean far enough away to the West that no breakers or birds can be distinguished. Yet I can legitimately say, “the ocean is there,” and point toward a distant, hazy spot.

Henry could walk up here—he’s fit enough. He and his dog Hilda ramble over every beach, dune, and trail, and up every old logging road. Yet when I run into him somewhere, and I haven’t seen him for a while, he acts real hurt.

“Where the hell have you been,” he says, “You don’t want to become a worse recluse than me.” That way, apparently, madness lies.

In reality, Henry’s probably not that much of a recluse. The last time I was over there I found a young woman with Henry. After she had departed, Henry referred to her as his “protégé.” I can’t imagine what a protégé of Henry’s could be a protégé about, unless she aspires to be some kind of proto-curmudgeonette.

Her name is Andrea and just today I ran into her downtown. I really don’t want to make the mistake of describing her physical appearance without any previous preamble, but we could say the she might represent one of the few, but important, things that make an old man lament his lost youth.

But that’s a silly thing to say. I realized it as soon as I said it. There is a real pretense of delicacy in it, as well as a pretense of insouciance. Andrea is hot, okay? But that’s not a situation I can do anything about.

She produced a glorious smile without any effort, and said to me, “Don’t you think that Henry is brilliant?” Then, for what seemed like the longest time, I remained ridiculously unable to speak. Her smile began to change slowly into a look of curiosity. Finally, in order to help me out, she tried again: “How long have you known Henry?”


I had at last come to my senses. “The first time we met we fought over a trike.” And she laughed most merrily.

______________________________________

When I got home I had plenty of things to ruminate about while I looked out at the river and that distant patch of ocean nobody would know is ocean unless I pointed it out. First and foremost, why was I unable to speak?

I think I know why, and it’s pretty shameful: There was some book, or essay, or something, by a British writer that I must have read years ago. I can’t remember who the author was. I’ve tried, but I can’t. He was going on about his lust for American girls back in the days before Britain had the National Health Service. It seems that thoughts about American girls with their perfect teeth, expressed with gleaming smiles, and (he supposed) their easy willingness to give blowjobs, drove him to distraction and near-madness on pretty much a daily or even hourly basis. Let’s hope he recovered from this obsession with the end of WWII rationing and the beginning of NHS dental-care-for-all.

It was this tawdry literary reference I was searching for in the floodlight of Andrea’s smile. Was she sleeping with Henry? He’s about a million years older than her, but when a young woman thinks a man is “brilliant,” who knows what she will do? I’m about as knowledgeable about young women as I am about Latvian folk music.

Is Henry brilliant? I don’t know—how do you define it? Who can say? He knows a lot about some things, I guess, and is no doubt smart enough to keep to those subjects. As long as he keeps his wheels in the ruts, he won’t run off the road.

Henry has all those binders. I’ve watched the volumes grow year after year. The first says “Henry’s Logbook,” and on the other ones are written Book 2, Book 3, etc. Is that where Henry’s brilliance is hiding, the brilliance he’s been able to hide so successfully from me all these years? Does he open the binders for Andrea, and then she sleeps with him?

I’m fed up with my view of an indistinct ocean, so I’m going to drive out there. I want to listen to the breakers and see the seabirds, especially the pelicans. It will clear my head—it always does. While I am walking down the beach I will probably wonder why I bother to think about all these questions, to weigh the pros and cons, to sift through the evidence, to consider the possible alternates, when in the end I’ll only know nothing at all.

The Pipsqueak Syndrome

Last evening, I walked down to Henry’s shack—I’m not quite sure how I should refer to the derelict place he calls home.

Nevertheless, there was a fire going in the wood stove and a computer screen gleamed in the corner. Henry was angry, which is normal, and finding him so, I registered no surprise.

“I call it the ‘Pipsqueak Syndrome’,” he shouted.

I was clearing books off the spare chair so I could sit down. “Do you?” I said. “Do you now?”

“Don’t sit down yet. Come over here, I want you to read something.”

Actually—I was already beginning to sit down by then, and, with my knees, I didn’t have much choice but to complete the act. But then I dutifully got back up, went to the computer and leaned over to read:


    I do find it perplexing that a bar would be named after Hemingway, a notorious alcoholic whose drinking hastened the slow burn of depression and led to his suicide. What’s next, the Hannibal Lecter Organic Café?

“Hmm,” I said, “the writer compares a real person to a fictional character. Do you think he knows the difference?”

“That’s not the point,” Henry said. “This is a blogger—in the New York Times, no less—sneering down on Hemingway from his pompous perch!”

“I like that,” I said. “Pompous perch—that’s pretty good.”

“And a few days ago there was another blogger—in the Guardian—saying that the writings of John Updike were ‘insipid’!”

“I can see why you’re upset. We need to stop these pipsqueaks before the pipsqueak squeaks again.”

Henry paced back and forth in the small room. His dog Hilda lay on her bed in the corner, gently snoring and twitching, lulled to sleep by the warmth of the soporific stove.

Henry moved back to the computer. “And here is something else he says about Hemingway. He refers to ‘the uncompromising machismo of his characters’.”

“That might be the worst kind of machismo,” I said.

Henry stared at me for a moment and then held out his arm and pointed at the computer. “Have you ever googled the words “Hemingway” and “Macho” together? Have you ever googled the phrase ‘the Hemingway Myth’?”

“No,” I said.

“Well then you’ve missed out on 14,000 smart-asses who think they have exposed the fly in the Hemingway ointment—that he was macho and yet he drank. How macho is it to be a drunk, right? And then they all pat themselves on the back for their brilliant afflatus.”

“What the hell is an afflatus? I said. “Is it like being flatulent?”

“It damn well is in this case. They completely miss the sensitivity in the writing. They miss what Hemingway is all about.”

“Well, I’m afraid I might just have to agree with you,” I said. “It’s like going to the beach and never noticing the ocean. But we’re old. We have a different beach and a different ocean from these young ones. And they naturally want to rise by slaying their elders.”

I thought back to growing up with a WW II father, in a neighborhood of WW II fathers, and I remembered how much they liked the image of the hard-drinking hero who could hold his liquor. They reserved their scorn for the drinker who supposedly couldn’t “hold it,” while conveniently forgetting their own occasional, or not so occasional, failings. And, yes, they liked to hunt and they liked to fish, and they liked boxing. Boxing was about the most popular sport in America at the time, and the names of Dempsey and Joe Louis were famous names. Hemingway didn’t invent this sort of character—they were all around him; machismo in no way distinguished Hemingway from the rest of them. What set him apart was that he found a way to turn his wounds into art.


It was time for me get on home. As I was leaving I said to Henry: “Here’s a little something for your Hemingway defense. Did you know that Hemingway and Marlene Dietrich were friends for decades and he never slept with her? That doesn’t exactly sound like uncompromising machismo, now does it?”

Later that night, I took down a book from my bookshelf, and thumbing through it, found this passage. The writing was not all that bad for a writer who at that time was at the height of his notorious-alcoholic-uncompromising-machismo stage:

    There was no more true elephant, only the gray wrinkled swelling     dead body and the huge great mottled brown and yellow tusks that     they had killed him for. The tusks were stained with the dry blood     and he scraped some of it off with his thumbnail like a dried piece     of sealing wax and put it in the pocket of his shirt. That was all he     took from the elephant except the beginning of the knowledge of     loneliness.
    After the butchery his father tried to talk to him that night by the     fire.
    “He was a murderer you know, Davey,” he had said. “Juma says     nobody knows how many people he has killed.”
    “They were all trying to kill him weren’t they?”
    “Naturally,” his father had said, “with that pair of tusks.”
    “How could he be a murderer then?”
    “Just as you like,” his father had said. “I’m sorry you got so mixed     up about him.”
    “I wish he’d killed Juma,” David had said.
    “I think that is carrying it a little far,” his father said. “Juma’s     your friend you know.”
    “Not anymore”
    “No need to tell him so.”

It’s morning now, and I’ve decided just to let Henry fight his own battles. In fact it’s Saturday, thank God, and I plan to drive up into the Palousie creek drainage. On an old map I found a symbol for a logging camp that would have long ago disappeared, and I’ve marked the spot on my topo map and drawn compass bearings from the nearest road junction. I believe I’ll take along my metal detector, and if the brush isn’t too thick, push through and try to locate the site. If I’m lucky, maybe I’ll find something old and interesting.

Henry’s Favorite Word is Dog

I guess I might think Henry’s favorite word would be something like parsimonious or flugelhorn, or, if he had any serious artistic pretensions, maybe a word like lithe or luminous. But the word is Dog.

To Henry, this word has the weight and substantiality of its rhyme-mate log, and sinks into his consciousness as if his consciousness were a receptive bog. Henry looks intently at his dog, Hilda, (who gets nervous being stared at) and pronounces the word Dog, his voice full and filled with significance.

They are on the beach, and Hilda looks wild from running and sand-excavation. The wind creates chaos in her wet, bedraggled fur.

I encountered them as I was walking the other way, returning from the jetty with the wind at my back and the rain coming steadily. I stopped for a moment to talk.

Henry had to show me Hilda, who stood there in her dishevelment and patiently accepted (as much as could be expected) this sacrifice to the Human-Dog relationship.

“Look,” said Henry, “the slenderness of these legs of Dog, the incredible tendons with such power to leap and run! Somewhere in the sinews of Dog is the discovery that will free us from our dependency on foreign oil!"

"Look at this nose, this masterful instrument, the very nerve center of enlightened Dog! Look at these teeth (pulling back Hilda’s lips), their white efficiency—for sometimes we have to show our teeth in this world, and when we do, they should gleam! Look at all this loose skin around her neck (grabbing a handful), so she might slip the grasp of an attacker!”

I could see the usefulness of that. For me, a substantial bank account would be my surplus neck skin. Then if people persisted in wanting me to work a 40-hour week until I’m old and gray, I would pull loose from their grasp and escape.

Henry summed it up, holding out an open-palmed hand toward Hilda. “Dog,” said Henry.

By this time, Hilda was trotting up the beach, sniffing every kelp and shell. She even put her nose into one of my big shoe prints and recorded its existence—and perhaps a whiff of my existence too.

We parted ways, and I walked on. The rain front was supposed to keep coming in for several more days. I could kind of sense the weight of it, stretching for miles out across the Pacific.

The Great Crow Roost

None of the guidebooks to Portland direct us to go, just at dawn while it is still dark, to NE 9th Ave between the streets of Hancock and Schuyler. This is a shame, because an astonishing scene takes place here each morning, or at least in winter and spring.

There is a great roost of crows in the trees thereabouts—crows in the hundreds, perhaps at times in the thousands. They blacken every tree in that one block area, and at the time I pass by there, around 6am, they are making a terrible din, a vast chorus of Caw.

Even if I drive through there in my car I will begin to hear them a block away—with the motor running and all the windows rolled up. A little research tells me that crows have been doing roosting like this for thousand of years.

So they all gather together to spend the night, coming from who knows how far away, and then return to their preferred territory in the morning—although not before the most raucous socializing.

When I pass by again in the afternoon, I often do not see a single crow. This would be a good time for a real estate agent who might have a property in the area to bring through clients—hoping they don’t notice the crow-splattered sidewalks and car windows.

Crowded Dreams

My dreams have a population-density that would make Hong Kong look like a ghost town. Cue the lone tumbleweed to roll down the street.

Why all these dream-people coming at me, and getting in the way of everything I want to do? Why do they ask me questions that would baffle Hume and reduce Spinoza to tears?

In dreams, I’m always trying to get somewhere via some mode of transportation: dream planes, dream trains, dream buses, dream John Deere tractors— you name it.

There is never anywhere to sit. All the seats are either taken, or being jealously guarded by large and sweltering dream-people.

It’s a wonder that I don’t wake up each morning more exhausted than when I went to sleep.

I’m not exactly asking for empty, verdant meadows filled with sunflowers, where downy, gentle fawns sniff noses with bunny rabbits.

Let me just dream-walk down a muddy road through an Oregon clearcut in peace. Or I’ll hang out in a vacant lot dreaming with the dandelions, if that’s all that is available. I need to get some rest.

I Miss Winter!

What if all the people who are presently rushing into parks or playgrounds to play baseball or soccer, on this fine sunny morning, would instead assemble to demand affordable health care for all Americans?

Sounds simple, but will it ever happen? We Americans are so docile, and so accepting of our decline. The parking lots of the ball fields are filling up with our great gas-guzzling behemoths. Batter up!

In winter, I can walk nearly alone through the parks. The ducks recognize me (I believe they actually do) and come rushing over. I have been known to carry cracked corn in my pockets.

And I have admired the recent weather-- the unpredictability of it: Slashing hailstorms giving way to glorious skies. I miss the quiet of winter.

If only the noise of summer were that of America trying to reclaim its ancient promise, not just sound and fury, signifying nothing.

A Counterbalance, Perhaps. to Nostalgia

There are the horrors of dropsy, consumption, cholera, and Bright’s disease. Bowels are being distinctly treasonous: Death by Inflammation of the bowels, Obstruction of the bowels, Paralysis of the bowels, Constriction of the bowels, Inaction of the bowels, and Strangulation of the bowels. Then, the deadly fevers arrive to extract their pound of flesh— scarlet, malarial, typhoid.

It seems God is on quite a recruiting drive for little Angels, and sends down Croup, diphtheria, measles, and plenty of Whooping Cough to enlist the little children, at 5 years old, 1 year and 3 months, seven days.

     1 year old girl congestion of lungs. whooping cough.
     dead before I got there.

Well, all this is from a database of Causes of Death in the 1880s, in a rural farming region of the Midwest. It is a beautiful place (I’ve been there) with rolling hills, and when perched on those hills, you look out on the quilted farms, grain silos, and church steeples. At every road junction is another Grover’s Corner.

La Grippe was there, and took the young and the old, without displaying any noticeable preference. And there is evidence of Despair in paradise: Suicide by hanging, suicide by gunshot, suicide by strychnia. Countless suicides.

     The contents of a loaded shotgun fired by his own hand.
     blowing out his brains. suicide.
     Body given to his wife and family.

Nostalgia is seductive, the irresistible dream of a better time and place.

     Too much whisky & froze to death
     some time between the hours of 7pm & 7 am
     on the night of the 20th Jan 1885

     uncertain & complicated. He took a heavy chill & died
     in it lasting 2 or 3 hr. He had only the one chill.
     It might be called congestive chill He had been
     drinking alcohol freely for 5 weeks

Maybe after a few drinks, folks could just not stay away from the railroad tracks, and the excitement that the train might bring in.

     Struck by engine. Thrown 80 ft. Picked up dead.
     Bones of legs, arms & shoulders all broken.

     Run over by the cars and cut into by the pelvis,
     both legs being cut off

And into this agricultural, Jeffersonian utopia, lots of good, traditional American violence:

     Drunk & killed by injuries inflicted by party or parties
     unknown. (Husband in pen.) brains beat out with
     a hammer & part of a nail murdered

     murder by being knocked down and jumped on

     some blunt instrument piercing his brain by one
     in the hands of Gerard Specht & Johnny Newman

In the march forward of highly dubious “progress,” for everything gained something is lost. And, let’s face it, vice versa:

  dysentery morphine habit of 40 years standing.
  blow on head from hay fork. kicked by a horse.
  run over by RR train No. 4 or struck by Engine & killed.
  suicide, shot himself with pistol.
  poison administered by his own hand.
  decay of nature from age.
  shot himself with a gun (& he died).
  tonsillitis tetanus coma & convulsions.
  Cut his throat When I found him with a razor.
  stuck with a club on right eye by hand of unknown person.
  poison, vegetable narcotic accidentally taken & name unknown.
  fell from flat car inside of track & run over by the cars.
  poison Took corrosive sublimate by mistake.
  burned by accidental explosion of blasting powder.
  Enteric peritonitis cause by violence. Gored by a cow.

  fell from flat car inside of track & run over by the car body

            given to her father & friends.

To a Blank Page

Ah, Blank Page! Let’s have a couple of drinks,
   Old foe, just you and I! The amber shade
Of whiskey might suit your pleasure (methinks)
   And ease your awful whiteness, or persuade
A sound or two from out your void? Dear Sphinx,
   Why love this field of silence you have made?
But I see your point: we think ourselves clever,
And few of us are apt to shut up ever.

Blank Page, let’s have some laughs and lighter hues!
   Relax— that’s laughs, not laughable contentions.
Not arguments, not principles, not news--
   But comic words might slip through your preventions?
Or would you care to climb and see the views?
   The mountains here are vast in their dimensions.
We’ll clamber over rocks, and sticks, and clods,
And ne’er attempt to claim we know the Gods.

True, there is scarce to tempt you in our time.
   Page, you would retire, then nothing more?
You knew Milton, and Wordsworth in his prime--
   No wonder when I come you slam the door!
You glance suspiciously, as if a crime
   I‘ve committed. Then Page, what if I swore
To write only of life’s eddying surface
Without meaning, or some befuddled purpose?

Grant me then this space, provisionally?
   Page, you eye me blankly, wanting me gone,
Plan my destruction by setting me free,
   And so consent, all objections withdrawn!
Clever joke, Page! (with a hint of cruelty)--
   You give me a world to scratch upon
With my antique poetry, pale and wan,
In my suspect Spring and dubious dawn.

Damn, it’s lonely out here! Hello? Hello?
   It seems Blank Page pack’t up, then disappeared
As I made ruts and tracks in his pure snow,
   Clumsily, exactly what he disdained and feared!
And now You, Reader, gaping there to know
   What the hell I’m about--don’t stand so near!
You make me want to run from you, and hide
From this emptiness without--and inside.

The emptiness is inescapable.
   Yet rain seems to recite, wind to write music,
And the ocean is so seascapeable
   To the painter! Storms seem to howl in Gaelic
Or some tongue, lost, and yet unbreakable--
   Or is that of the mind, kill’t by a pinprick?
Over and over I feel hope, and then
My hope fails, and the page goes blank again.

Glaswegians on a Train

A couple of years ago, on a trip to England, I was riding a British Rail train north from London to Penrith, where I intended to catch a bus to Keswick in the English Lake District. It was a simple itinerary, and therefore, unlikely to play itself out smoothly.

We had made it most of the way to Penrith when the train came to a stop—and there we sat, silent upon the rails. The local passengers rolled their eyes and shook their heads in a show of resigned, philosophic disgust. Eventually a PA system broke in, clotted with static, and something resembling a voice growled from the speakers. Deep within that unintelligible rasp, I thought I recognized the words “track troobles.”

The phrase left me with an funny image of unruly tracks bent on causing mischief. So why do tracks get troublesome? Are their grievances justified? When will their “troubles” be over so that we can continue our journey? The explanation “track troubles” can mean anything, and therefore means nothing. That makes it the perfect explanation to give to the public who for some reason still seem to half-heartedly expect an explanation in cases like this.

It was not long before the train started to move again, but then a noisy altercation broke out between rail cars—and I could see it all through the car door window. Several youths were suddenly there, berating another young man, shoving him, slapping him, roughing him up. All this was accompanied by a symphony of profanity beyond anything I had ever heard. I noticed, next, that my fellow passengers had become rather intensely interested in their fingernails, or in picking lint from their clothes, or in examining the dreary, track-side brambles through the windows of the moving train.

They young men were Glasgow toughs, no doubt, for Glasgow, Scotland, was where this rail line terminated. Their language was nearly indecipherable. The only words I really recognized were “fooken” this and “fooken” that. The ringleader was a near-emaciated Grotesque—all gnarly and tattooed, shrieking out curses and threats and performing (because it did seem like a performance) a towering rage, as if he were an obscene star-tenor in a hellish opera.

No doubt the poor victim had broken a code, probably some minor thing, but enough to trigger an insane rage within the Ringleader in whose world all this cruelty and madness undoubtedly made sense. It was tense and silent inside our rail car as the passengers worried that the toughs might turn their attention to us. There was no sign of any security people on the train, and minute after minute went by.

Then, finally, help arrived—not some crack security team with bulging guys in wraparound sunglasses. The help was not there to “defuse the situation,” or if that failed, to taser everyone in sight. It was just one man in a rail uniform, and he was not big, not tall, not strong—and he was not young. Nevertheless, he was pissed.

He waded in to those young men without hesitation, wagging his finger in their faces, and soon had them scattered to the winds. It was a miraculous display of courage and moral indignation: not on his train. Later, the little train man passed through our car gathering up litter and putting it into a plastic bag. Just another shift in the life of a worker who does his job.

I wish to hell I could afford to travel more. I like being in another country—a country not my own. I am just an observer then, and a bit of a ghost. It’s not my country, and I have no right, and limited inclination, to judge that country or it’s people. I am a step further detached from the raw scenes of human life. What a relief! What a beautiful thing it is—the anonymity, the witnessing of life at a remove.

Some will condemn this kind of attitude, but for me it is the only path to even a glimpse of transcendence. Sure, I will still help old ladies across the street, and do my part where it is needed. But I’ve seen the human race at work for more than a few decades now, and I know it goes on this way forever. I like to move among them, and hear their voices, and see their careening parade, but I keep my distance. It is distance, distance that I mean to honor here.

Zeitgeist Cantos: Alberto Gonzales

Alberto Gonzales is such a nice guy,
Sincere--and respectful--though not very tall--
He swears that he never would tell us a lie!
Though there could be a few things he can’t ...uh ...recall--
But meetings are boring, spent twirling your tie,
Dreaming of Maui (or that girl down the hall).
So don’t act like Al is some Hannibal Lecter,
If he sticks in the craw of Senator Specter.


Now Senator Sessions is shaking his head!
Kennedy seems florid and about to faint--
His cheeks look like bags that are stuffed full of bread.
Don’t know the Geneva Conventions are quaint ?
Get thee to a military tribunal! Dead
Hitler, Stalin, Caligula--Al ain’t.
He’s just one more face in the culture’s decline,
Who can’t tell the truth, and will never resign.

The Literary Geese

At SE Portland’s Westmoreland Park, the water birds cavort in a turmoil of flying, diving, dabbling, swimming, skittering, scudding, splashing-- not to mention various promiscuous shenanigans that would make Hugh Hefner blush! Yet--did you ever notice, at that park, a gaggle of geese that keeps mainly to itself, that comports itself in a more serious and, even, literary manner?

These are the Literary Geese of Westmoreland Park. They stand apart in a riparian clearing between the reeds and bushes. They stand apart from the querulous ducks, the opportunistic sea gulls, and the other foraging waterfowl.

Did you know that geese have a literary tradition as well as a literary canon?

It is in the oral tradition, of course. They flock together to repeat and memorize the great texts of Goosedom. This is what that gaggle of geese is doing at Westmoreland Park--the ones that stand off by themselves. They recite, in goose, the great works of their culture.

The venerable texts of antiquity are declaimed (needless to say), such as The Tower of Dabble. Yet it is perhaps in the novel form that Goose Literature reaches its highest achievement. One need only cite The Scarlet Feather, Fluttering Heights, The Old Goose and the Sea, Quiet Grows the Down, The Great Gooseby, and Wings of the Goose to indicate the literary riches here.

And then there is that mammoth tome--certainly a challenge to the oral tradition in itself-- War and Geese.

So next time you visit Westmoreland Park, you might enjoy observing, from a respectful distance, the Literary Geese who gather there.

Quote from Thoreau

“It is desirable that a man...live in all respects so compactly and preparedly that, if an enemy take the town, he can, like the old philosopher, walk out the gate empty-handed without anxiety.”

In this jabbering, possession-seeking world, are there any Thoreauians around anymore?

Do Dreams Make Any Less Sense Than Life Itself (Part 2)

Sure, in conscious life, things “seem” to happen. You show up for work at the usual time and see the usual people. Work is done. You grow older. Tangible things occasionally appear to have been accomplished that could never have been accomplished in dreams. Right?

Yet things are accomplished in dreams too. A castle built upon a lily pad! The Living sporting freely with the Dead! Try that in real life.

I don’t see any more evidence for one than I do the other.

Still, I can imagine some objector sitting across a table from me (someone who finds my ideas preposterous) pulling out a hatchet--and chopping off my little finger!

“There,” he would cry, “do you still think dreams are as real as conscious life.”?

And as the pain invades my body and my blood spurts out upon the table with every beat of my heart, I might need to concede that he had made, at least, a neat, rhetorical point, and had illustrated it effectively.

But convinced? Convinced?

Margaret's Letter from Ireland

"I've adjusted easily to the reversed driving requirements and love the slow, lazy pace of walking incredibly small brick streets. Everyone here whistles, walks arm-in-arm and says 'Thanks a million' at the smallest kindness. Now that Broadband has arrived, I could imagine living here at least part time."

Today's Quote from The Brothers Karamazov

"I've been sitting here now, and do you know what I was saying to myself? If I did not believe in life, if I were to lose faith in the woman I love, if I were to lose faith in the order of things, even if I were to become convinced, on the contrary, that everything is a disorderly, damned, and perhaps devilish chaos, if I were struck even by all the horrors of human disillusionment--still I would want to live, and as long as I have bent to this cup, I will not tear myself from it until I've drunk it all!"

Ivan, Book 5, Chapter 3.

Dead Christmas

Funny how so many Christmas songs are sung by people who are quite dead. Although they sound enthusiastic, they will not be experiencing any holiday cheer this season, since their season has passed.

Nat Cole will not be roasting any chestnuts. Mel Torme (who wrote that song) will not be roasting any either. Bing Crosby’s Christmas will not be white, or otherwise, and he will not be having either a merry little christmas or a large, dreadful one. “It’s the most wonderful time of the year,” Andy Williams sings. He's not dead, but if he were there would be no year this year for Andy, and this time, no time.

No one ever actually asks us if we want to listen to Christmas music, do they? No poll is ever taken. It is assumed, irrationally, that we all want to hear Christmas music quite badly--and then it is rammed down our throats without mercy--on the radio, in stores, on the street, etc.

Grandma won’t be celebrating. She got run over by a reindeer.

And by now those folks from Mannheim may have been run over by a steamroller.

The chipmunks: they’re road kill.

At least Elvis was having a blue Christmas. He didn’t pretend to be happy.

“Christmas is the Real Day of the Dead,” She Said.

This was spoken as she swung around on the bar stool, and I was caught somewhat off-guard with my face buried in the newspaper and my fingers playing along the rim of my whiskey glass.

“How so?” I said, straightening up and taking a sip from the glass. I wasn’t quite ready to look at the eyes that were boring into me.

“How so?” she mimiced. “Because ghosts come home, because home is fucking not there anymore, and the ghosts don’t know where to sit. They wander around wondering just where the fuck to sit. Don’t you get it?”

I took another drink. I had been reading an article about the recent downturn in the housing market, and I was only half finished. I looked down at the paper.

“I guess ghosts have issues,” I said.

She looked at me for a long time. Finally I turned and glanced at her. Not much there that could stand up to a high wind: thin branches reaching out from a defoiliated tree. Yet she had long, dark hair, running with beautiful veins of gray.

“Ghosts don’t have issues,” she said. “They’ve suffered quite enough. WE have fucking issues. I have fucking issues. YOU have fucking issues.”

“The difference is--I make an effort not to let mine get the best of me,” I said.

She stared at me intensely, and then her eyes seemed to moisten. She spun in her chair and crossed the room, sliding into a booth occupied by a group of people who were engrossed in conversation.

I finished my drink, put on my coat and hat, rolled up the newspaper, and stepped outside. A gust of wind blew my hat off and it went into the gutter as cars sped by on the wet road. “Dammit,” I said.

Sure. There was an Oregon town stained by mill smoke. I can’t prove it existed--just take my word for it, okay? The rain was a real power on earth, and men came home from work muddy and beat. I can’t even talk about the weight of the hills and the terrible denseness of the timber, or how fog could so easily smother everything and everywhere. “Work” was something quite different,then, than it is now--more of a struggle to conquer, or survive, and all entangled with the weather and the seasons, and the pathway of the sun, and its settings and its risings.

Sure. People seemed large then. A hero was someone who cut the most trees, loaded the most trucks, plowed the most acres. Heroes were people you knew--not some studied or preposterous image that flickers on a screen. And you should have seen the work the women did--longer hours and more work than was expected of any man.

You simply can’t remember without summoning all those ghosts and all they gave of themselves. The woman in the bar was right, or at least she spoke the truth of her heart’s disconsolations. Christmas is the day the ghosts are most apt to return. We should buy presents, presents of flowers, only for them.

Christmas, as they say, is for kids, or for new families, or for those others who can live in a simple and uncontaminated Present while rarely remembering anything.

For the rest of us, our hearts will be with the ghosts on Christmas Day. New Year’s Eve, we will have a few drinks, and New Year’s Day we will get up early in the gray dawn and move on.

The Stowaway

Somewhere tonight there is a ship at sea. The sea is dark and impossibly vast-- at least when I think about it. In the hold of that ship, out on the sea, is a crate. It is completely dark inside the crate.

In the crate is a Stowaway.

I’m sitting here sipping a cup of tea. The radio is talking about Iraq. The beautiful Natasha is here. She is cross-stitching. She is also having a cup of tea.

I feel the presence of the stowaway out on the ocean-- that will never change-- and the heaving of the ship on the heavy seas. It’s cold and cramped in the crate, and he must be quiet, very quiet. What does it matter what language you speak, if you can’t speak, for the full length of a sea?

The decision was made when he sneaked aboard. It’s too late to change much now. Everything floated away astern, and flocks of bird dove into the churning detritus.

I can feel the Stowaway sailing toward this very port. Maybe next week I’ll drive down to the docks and catch a glimpse of him, slipping through a gap in a fence and heading down toward the railroad tracks. Then I’ll drive back home.

Now I know what happened. That day the seas were dark and heavy. I had never known a storm like that, and before I knew what it meant, I had crossed an entire ocean. No wonder the city seems so terribly strange, though I’ve lived here all these years.

Letter Exchange with Evangeline Latham

Evangeline's Letter


Henry (you old poop!),

So many freaks... so few circuses...

I’ve concluded that this isn’t a household I live in-- it’s a group home for the terminally loopy.

I meant to write about my little world here, but didn’t. Maybe next time.

Don’t let the freaks in your world freak you out (they sure do in mine!)

Evangeline



Henry Responds:



Evangeline,

Modern life is the Circus, and there is plenty of room under the Big Top for the freaks. It is only because you and I have been semi-recluses that we can see this. We have missed the full barrage of the insanity that has taken over the world--with particular rapidity in the last few years. It was our isolation that allowed us to detect what was happening although nothing, of course, could be done to stop it.

Those who have been out in the middle of the blast have gone crazy without ever knowing what was happening to them-- because everyone around them went loopy at the same time. Now they run here and there thinking they are relatively normal, when they are actually fucking nuts!

They careen through the jingle-jangle world jabbering into cell phones and acting basically psychotic.

Up here they forgot to look at the green hills with the plunging streams, and now it is too late. Down there they forgot all about the brown mountains with the white snow on the peaks, and no one will ever be able to reach them again.

Proceed carefully. Give them plenty of room!

Dog celebrates Armistice Day in the Mud

Henry’s dog, Hilda, greets bad weather with an open mouth, lolling tongue, and dilating nostrils. Any amount of rain, mud, or sodden leaves that she can manage to stick to her fur just makes the day that much more euphoric.

Up the Columbia River Gorge, Henry and Hilda pushed through the relentless rain, climbing over and through recently fallen trees.

They dumbed-down Armistice Day by expanding it—having it honor all veterans of all wars, because you can’t have a holiday for every war in which millions were slaughtered (or starved, or died of fever in their own excrement), because, if you did that, we would never get any work done. So here is a day honoring all of the slaughtered in their various eras, or whatever (we were never that good at history), all at one fell-swoop. So let’s go have brunch!

Armistice Day was to mark the end of World War I, the war to end all wars. It’s too long ago now to remember any of the dead, and our imaginations have atrophied.

Yes, there were a few English poets who bought it: Brooke, Owen, others. They thought Robert Graves was dead, but he wasn’t. Hooray! And there was Walter Cooke, Henry’s great, great Uncle, who was in the British Expeditionary Force and killed at Mons in the earliest days of the war. But he was from a rough, factory town. Perhaps he would have died young anyway.

Let’s forget them. Let’s forget that quaint term Armistice Day. It’s Veteran’s Day now. A much more efficient way to manage our remembrance.

Henry and his dog Hilda climbed today in the Columbia River Gorge in the pouring rain. Finally, they got so cold that they just stood in the trail, shivering and looking at each other. They say the Great War wiped out a whole generation. It started to rain even harder. Henry and Hilda turned around and headed back for the car.

Henry Finds Natasha

If the glorious Natasha could fall from the sky into the realm of Henry-- it could only be in this time of falling leaves. Henry knows full well that even among the driven and flashing colors, the appearance of Natasha is visionary. So perhaps it’s even like finding the Star of India, highly-polished, while looking through a drawer of old buttons.

And at this time. On the verge of winter.

In fact, Henry thinks, it is statistically impossible, so this may be all a dream.

And, realistically, when things fall to earth-- that is where they are-- on earth and earthbound. We live in a major epoch of fallen angels, if you will, and it is littered with broken wings. Even recognizing them through their injuries and burns requires Deep-Seeing and eccentric, intuitive forensics.

You want proof? Here is an oil painting of the glorious Natasha: In the background is broken pottery and shattered, family heirlooms. There is even more fantastical detail: a collapsing chicken farm, an urban landscape buried in gray snow, an orphan out upon what appears to be the Russian steppes, a broken wheelchair, highways and airports painted at distorted angles. It seems to comprise a profound restlessness that Henry can hardly describe in one attempt.

And in the foreground is the glorious N. —smoking a cigarette!

My Dog Hates Fireworks

For three days she hid in a thicket, in a hole she dug for herself. Then she came out because of thirst and hunger. Thanks to the fine man on NE Ainsworth St who lured her with a piece of cheese and then called me to come and get her.

For the time being, she will not get out of the car when I pull up at a Portland City Park. Did you know that Portland Parks and Recreation actually permits the on-going inanity of fireworks in city parks?

Why Aren’t We in the Streets?

Protesting global warming, demanding cuts in emissions, demanding clean alternative fuels, and an end to our dependence on foreign oil. “Because it’s too hot,” you will say--and after we all stop chuckling, those words should haunt us.

Are we really going to let this happen, and then go gently into that good night, leaving the full catastrophe for future generations? Government will only prevaricate, and prevaricate, and make token gestures until it is too late.

Sitting behind a computer screens writing blogs will make nothing happen.

Recently I was very impressed by the huge Hispanic street protests over proposed immigration bills. That is how you deliver a message. That is how you show some backbone.

Can we come out from behind our computer screens? Can we turn off our cell phones? Can we miss a day of work?

Why aren’t we in the streets?

Henry Fails to Achieve Full-Ghostliness

Henry is becoming more invisible and more insubstantial every day. He still lives at the same address, but increasingly as a kind of ghost. His neighbors say they never see him coming or going these days, yet there has been no particular change in his routine. If Henry were to rob a convenience store (preposterous-- he never would), none of the witnesses would be likely to remember any of his features.

Henry thinks it will be a good thing when he finally achieves full-ghostliness, because then he can live anywhere he wants without paying rent! In a state of full-ghostliness he can have a view, and hardwood floors, and air-conditioning, and a claw-foot bath tub-- although when he slips into the tub the water will not be seen to rise.


Trouble is, Henry’s dog Hilda is not becoming more invisible. She has a healthier relationship with the Actual, and that anchors Henry somewhat to physical reality. After all, his highest calling is to cook Hilda’s food and provide for her every need. She is superior in every way, and Henry is her butler, valet, and chamberlain.

Something of the Victorian value of Duty is at play in all this. Henry is grateful for the employment, despite the fact that full-ghostliness must, for the time being, be postponed.

Why Henry Can’t Have Any More Girlfriends

Women will not intentionally direct their luxuriant prose toward Henry in a personal ad, you can be sure of that.

“You are confident, yet not arrogant:” Forget Henry. He is fatally flawed there. In fact, he has these qualities quite reversed. He is arrogant, yet not confident. And every man he sees bristling and shimmering with confidence he will regard as a fool playing a fool’s game, and a bore to boot.

It is a shame that all those imagined beach walks will exclude Henry, for he loves the beach in all weather and the beautiful surging of the sea. And he loves women, as they are so spectacular.

Canute the Dane, now, was confident. Confident that he could command the tide. Or was that arrogant? Henry is not sure. Not that Henry is exactly Ethelred the Unready, but he is no Canute the Dane.

But Henry can’t have any more girlfriends. How could he? He clears his throat an average of 371 times before falling to sleep. He cannot breathe out of his right nostril when lying down, so stuffs it with wadding to open the passage. He gets up seven times a night to go to the bathroom. In the middle of the night he straps frozen peas to his damaged foot so that it will stop burning and he can go back to sleep. I rest my case.

There’s no room left here for old men. They are paltry things, tattered coats upon sticks. Why must we put up with them?

Let’s give them an ultimatum. All of you-- start walking. No, I didn’t say start coughing; I said start walking. Limp if you have to. Better move it. In five minutes we release the dogs.

Lachrymose Aardvarks are the Answer

Lachrymose Aardvarks are the only answer left to us. We must bring them out upon the stage for everyone to see.

But you object-- the President is up there now, the most powerful man on earth, talking with a mouthful of food and rudely interrupting everyone with his beer-hall take on foreign policy. If we brought out the Lachrymose Aardvarks now we might all sense the terror that is alive inside of our mediocrity.

At any rate, we must wait for longer shadows. Lachrymose Aardvarks are primarily nocturnal and it is getting quite hot.

It’s getting so hot! Those liberal, activist scientists are going to make a big deal out of this-- about how hot it is getting. I bet they will. Who let all those aardvarks in here! What the hell’s going on?

The biggest disappointment about us is how small we turned out to be.

And the Lachrymose Aardvarks, it turns out, are completely dry-eyed. This is something of a shame because their noses are beautifully shaped for the drip of tears. We wanted a Walt Disney aardvark, didn’t we?

The Un-lachrymose Aardvarks dig into the hills of fat termites. You might think we could exit the stage with more dignity. My goodness, it is appalling how we continue to fight with each other as we writhe upon the tongue!!

If I Were a Duck (or a Coot)

If I were a duck, I would not muck
Around in other people’s business.
I’d swim all day (the pure-duck way)
In the spell of nature’s deliciousness.

If I were a coot, I would not loot
The world of all its bounty.
I’d dabble here, and dabble there—
Then fly to the next county.

If I were a duck I would not suck
the bone of all its marrow.
I’d drop from above to the lake I love
And eat no more than a sparrow.

If I were a coot I would not shoot
Another bird with a rifle.
That miscue --mad humans do--
Even over a trifle!

If I were a duck I could not truck
With all this greed and shouting.
I’d fulfill my needs among the reeds
Dabbling, dredging, moulting.

But I am a man and know my clan
Will never stop their madness.
If I could just fly --through the azure sky--
Perhaps I’d lose this sadness!

Fireworks Vendors Should Pay for Terrorized Pets

Let's tack on a surcharge to every firecracker to help fund emergency animal hospitals and to treat animals that are injured while fleeing firecrackers and other explosions.

As I speak, the insipid blasting continues. Americans in general know little of their own history. Too bad America did not wait and get its independence from Britain in due course. Then we would have outlawed slavery years earlier, and we would have had a parliamentary system instead the system we have now, corrupted by money and power.

Recent Inventory

--Gas at $2.39 pg.
--4800 ft. elevation gain.
--Creek water: ineffable cubic cubits.
--Two dog baths at self-service rub a dog dog wash. (1. human excrement purging - $15. (2. Conventional, ever-popular rotting- carcass-smell purging -$15.
--4 Italian masterpieces of Percy Shelley. Death by drowning!
--Online dating service $19.95 per mo. deducted automatically.
--Distance to death: Enter now or click Remind Me Later.
Chains______ Rods______ Furlongs_____ Leagues______. Remind me
later.
--Two black, obsidian eyes.
--A subscription to Spring. “We’re crediting your account.”
--35 stanzas written.
--One well drilled to bedrock. Pump needs fixed.
--Self-worth on bad days: two kopecks.
--Looking up from this page at the Triumphal March, and the bunting
and the banners and bands: so strange. Fathomless!

Snowed-in in Portland

The snow in Portland this morning was up to the roofline. Fortunately, my front door opens inward. I was confronted with a wall of snow, and nothing but a stout, metal dustpan to attack it with. It was difficult going, and some of the snow fell back into the house-- but I managed to cut steps in the snow and my dog and I climbed out to see a striking scene!

Only the upper parts of houses and their roofs were visible. All the cars had disappeared! Even a neighbor’s colossal SUV had been erased from existence. I went next door to dig out the elderly woman who lived there. Other neighbors began to appear, popping out of their burrows like prairie dogs.

When we had the elderly woman’s entrance cleared, she appeared in the doorway wearing a heavy coat. She wanted to come outside. We grabbed her arms and lifted her to the lunar surface. It felt like the Dakotas in 1881.

No one was going to work today. No cars. We stood there silently. The dogs laid down in the snow at our feet. The air was stunningly clean, and you could hear the wind clicking the twigs in the bare trees. The sky was an otherworldly shade of gray and silver, and the clouds seemed laden with anticipation. Suddenly, I knew what mattered in life, although I could not articulate it. Yet, I knew. I knew!

And the snow kept coming.

Do Dreams Make Any Less Sense Than Life Itself?

I am fleeing through this green, green field. Who is with me? It is Amber, from Accounts Payable! She comes into my arms and kisses me. Her lips are cool, soft, and definitely potentially invigorating. She says, “I’ve always wanted to do that.” “Really”? I say, dumbstruck.

I want to kiss her again— but someone, something, is after us. Evildoers, perhaps. They’re pretty much everywhere these days.

I see a day-glow orange helicopter perched on top of a red barn. We must escape! The helicopter is listing, about to fall off the barn roof. How can I climb up there? And I don’t know how to fly a helicopter.

To make matters worse, Amber has turned into a cow.

Suddenly, instead of being in a field, we are floating down the swollen Wilson River toward Tillamook on top of the barn. Yet the barn is clearly a log raft, although I keep calling it a barn. Apparently, in this dream, log rafts are called barns.

Amber is a guernsey cow... no, a holstein— one of those attractive, splotchy ones. I still admire Amber’s beauty, although the desire to kiss her has become significantly less. I think this is good— Amber can live with the Tillamook cows and work for the Tillamook Cheese Factory. Tillamook has the world’s most contented cows.

Then our log raft begins to be boarded by the evildoers. One, who looks like Dick Cheney, smirks and levels a gun at me. I wake up in a sweat.

Crazy. But do dreams make any less sense than life itself? What do we really understand of life? Aren’t our certainties really just day dreams? We don’t know what it feels like to be a dog, or a weasel, or a toadstool. We cannot begin to comprehend the size of the universe. When someone talks to us, we really don’t know what they are saying— our English might as well be Bantu, and the Bantu might as well be rain. And the speaker has no idea what he means, and walks home later wondering what exactly were those sounds that spilled from his mouth.

Life is a fascinating phantasmagoria, but we leave it knowing no more, and perhaps less, than we knew when we entered. Life is a dream, and is no more substantial than the dreams in which we float at night, as we lie in our beds.

Sorry, I’m Not the Bagpiper

I was definitely not the bagpiper. Although I can see how they might have made that mistake. I sport the look of a bagpiper, in particular my air of having just stalked in from the Lonely Moors. You could easily imagine me (although, perhaps, with a shudder) wandering in kilts through Highland heather and ragged gorse— my bare, hairy legs being devoured by vicious Scottish midges.

Apparently this impression was so powerful that they simply overlooked the fact that I wore no kilts, and held no bagpipes. This is what happened:

Down on the Oregon coast, recently, I stopped at a house to pick up something for a friend. I had never been to this house before, and didn’t know the people. I was following the directions written for me on a piece of paper. I located the residence, and in the famous words of Bobby Darin, “How was I to know there was a party goin’ on?”

I knocked on the door and was welcomed warmly into the house. Attractive people stood and beamed at me. I was taken on a tour of the spacious digs, and encouraged to admire the view from the bay-facing windows.

One person in the room was a petite woman, with close-cropped hair, and a waif-ish appearance. She stared at me, for some reason, as if she could not avert her eyes.


Then, unfortunately, I asked after the parcel I was there to pick up. The hostess said, “Do you mean... you’re not the bagpiper?” I felt Hope escaping from the room like felons from a prison during an earthquake. All I could say was, “No, but I play the harmonica— although I didn’t bring it with me.” Feeling rather bad about this later, it suddenly seemed to me that I have always disappointed people by not quite being the person they hoped I would be.

Still, the small, waif-ish woman approached me, even after my non-bagpiperness had been fully and terribly revealed. She came close, and smiled, and spoke softly. She told me her name— but in the noisy room, I didn’t quite catch it.

Then they brought me the parcel that I had come for, and I made my hasty retreat.

No, I am not the bagpiper. Sorry.

I am not the Pied Piper— either. No one should follow me. Why would they? It’s rather exposed here, on the Moors, where I live and walk.

If the petite, cropped-haired, waif-ish woman had tried to follow me, I would have uncoiled my long-legged stride and quickly left her behind.

But I would look back, then, three times. If on the third look, she were still following— I think I might stop, and let her catch up.

Henry's Cantos: Dancin' that Old Wiretap

“Thing is, they hate our freedoms,” Mr. Bush said.
(An odd thing to hate, from over an Ocean).
Nothing we spoke— it’s certain nothing we did—
Could ever have stirred that Muslim commotion.
So let’s take our freedoms, and keep them well-hid,
And foil all the plans they may have in motion.
Better yet, let’s just kill all our freedoms!
If they come round again there’ll be none here to meet ‘em.


A man that’s condemned is safe from a death
—By a firing squad that aims its guns well—
If on the morn of his scheduled last breath,
They find him hung from a rope in his cell.
Like druggies, who find someone’s done all the meth,
The terrorists will know what they can’t quite dispel—
That we’ve been clever, and so business-like,
And aimed on ourselves a pre-emptive strike.


A brilliant idea, I birthed it today:
Things are most safe that are safe in the grave.
Pensions are safest when taken away.
Wetlands are safest when filled-in and paved.
Health care is cheap when there’s no way to pay,
And loonies are pleased when left out to rave.
So let’s dance in jack boots that good fascist rap,
Surveillance, filming, and that old wiretap!

Cantos de Henry: The Bush Cantos

The Constitution, a stack of paper,
Will burn if someone wants to light a match.
It is, to Bush, hardly more than vapor,
And in “time of war” barely worth a scratch.
Besides, pure power suits so well his nature,
And helps rich friends with all the plans they hatch.
Yes, the “Consty” is such a worthless sheaf—
Annoying to our Commander-in-Chief.

And Cheney is heard growling “thousands saved,”
Yet cannot, of course, tell us when or how.
Methinks the man is utterly depraved,
or would have been, about something, right by now.
They’ve squandered many billions filling graves,
And turned the Ship of State into a scow.
Heady days these are in King George’s reign—
And we thought Nixon was the one insane.

King George says we must start by cutting costs.
He’ll stop this tax and spending— stop it fast.
To help those poor people (Katrina-tossed),
Give minimum wage and Medicaid the lash!
And now before another day is lost,
Alaskan wildlife must go next, and last—
He’ll strip the pension from some old geezer,
Then appear before troops— All Hail Caesar!

All I Wanted, Really, Was to Talk to Shakespeare

What a terrible day. They chased me down the cacophonous streets. I’ll never again be quite the same.

I’m not sure which was louder, the shrieking of the chasers, or the bellowing of the street vendors as I made my frantic attempt to escape. One vendor, just as I passed, announced out his "EELS!" with such lungs and volume that I think my hearing could be damaged in my right ear.

There were carts and people everywhere and the stones were slick with rain and dung as I ran. I jostled people aside. It seemed like they were half my size, like lilliputians. More and more people joined the chasers. Some screamed that I could be French, or an agent of the Pope, but most screamed WITCH, WITCH, WITCH! Eventually, there was no escape, and I prepared myself (but how does one really prepare for that?) to be ripped apart. Yet, that was not the way things worked out.

They put me in a tower, while preparations were made. I was to be disemboweled, hung for a while by a rope, and then drawn-and-quartered. The whole city was assembling and armies of pilgrims poured in from the countryside. Handbills circulated everywhere telling of the event. Songs were composed about the execution of the Witch, and sold for a penny on the street. Crowds gathered to sing wonderfully of my extinction.

Soon enough I saw the gleam of torches in the passageway and heard the serpent-rattle of the keys. I found a seam and slipped through the tissue of Time—that’s not a problem for me—but still I am badly shaken by the experience. All I wanted, really, was to talk to Shakespeare, and ask him a few questions about his life, and the nature of his genius.

Eugene McCarthy

Eugene McCarthy has died. He won the Oregon Primary in May 1968, defeating Robert Kennedy. It was the only time a Kennedy had ever lost an election, and the news swept the nation.

Many people today probably do not know who he was, but once his name was on everyone's lips. An honest, quiet, thoughtful politician. (Yes, It's true--don't look at me like I'm crazy.) This man helped us out of the insanity of the Vietnam war.

Let's praise and remember him.

Why Dogs Roll in Stinky Stuff

Although they like the smell, dogs are not exactly perfuming themselves as people always say. The point really is that they want to take the smell with them—a moveable feast of stench.

Out hiking the other day, Henry’s dog Hilda came running back to him, her brilliant discovery clinging to her fur. She had exited out of the undergrowth, and in her eyes there was a crazed look, as if she had just seen Xanadu, or Darien, or the Seven Cities of Gold.

For dogs are pantheists, euphoric lovers of the wind and the smells that ride the wind—and lovers of water that soaks a fern or collects in a clouded sump of fallen leaves. The air is so stunning to them that it makes their eyes bright. They can detect that the forest and the hillsides are actually respiring, literally heaving with life.

When dogs are brought to a standstill by a beautiful stink, they recognize it as nothing less than the present moment revealing itself as Reek. The present moment—that always exists and simultaneously evaporates, with all its miraculous realities. In which a grouse drums it wings, and steam comes from the mouth of a skunk. In which every plant in the forest can be felt reaching for the sky, and each drop of moisture knows the will of gravity, slipping down a tree trunk or straining through a coat of moss.

And so dogs roll then in the godly stench. In order to thank it. In order to pay homage to it. In order to preserve it and bring it home to their hapless human. It’s a gift of love, and they know how badly their human needs it.

When Hilda came running back so proudly to Henry, he said all the wrong things, of course. My god, Hilda, what have you done? Why did you have to do that?

What Henry should have said was: why am I so absurdly clean? Why do I miss the meaning of everything? Why am I so lost?

Henry’s Dog: Hilda, the Babe-Magnet

Something has changed for Henry as he hikes the alpine trails of the Pacific Northwest. It is now the era of Hilda.

Hilda is the best dog now in existence, or that has ever existed anywhere, or at any time.

That day at the county dog shelter: her virtues not fully revealed as she shook and trembled—filthy, sick, and scared—but she could still look directly at Henry with her eyes filled with soul. He sensed her heartbreaking greatness, and carried her out of there in his arms.

Enough. To the topic at hand.

Henry and Hilda pass women hikers on the trail and they fall in love with Hilda at first glance. For, in addition to Hilda’s perfections of spirit and disposition, she is gaspingly cute—all the more so when muddy up to the haunches, with her long hair adorned with cockleburs, her lips pulled back in a smile, her tongue hanging, and her eyes bright with all the euphoria of the outdoors.

Seeing Hilda, women often beam and coo. Who could resist, unless it be the men, mechanically plowing along, inferior in observation and empathy? And Henry, sure, enjoys the residue of the smiles meant for Hilda—if after admiring Hilda they turn to glance at him. It is like the warmth that remains in a campfire hours after the fire has died out. Or it is like those old tube radios, where the music still sounded for a couple of seconds after you turned them off.

Most of the women are young. Henry not exactly so.

But all homage and attention must belong to Hilda. Trail Dog Extraordinaire. Transcendent Beast. In the era of Hilda, the light of Henry’s life.

Things Waiting

This morning on the bus I was peering through the wet window, then through the icy rain, then through the darkness—and I saw things waiting. A porch swing with no one swinging. They would have to be crazy! Through one dark window I saw the ridge line of a grand piano. No one playing it this early, that’s for sure.

I saw more disuse than use. So much was huddled and taking cover beneath the night and the rain. So much is gigantically over us, under which we are nothing. Although all the time harboring our illusions, of course, and playing out our intricate charades.

Then I saw a teeming coffee house all lit up and people rushing inside. There was a thing not waiting. Look quickly, my friends. Over there!

The Kissing Gate

Over in England, in Cumbria, in the Lake District—as you walk through the stony streets of a stony town with an English breakfast coagulating in your stomach—as you walk to the outskirts of that town and begin to climb the Fells—you might pass through a kissing gate.

Allow me to break this to you right away: the kissing gate, despite its name, does not seem to have been intended for romance. If lovers wish to stop at each gate for a kiss, however, I am not aware of any particular prohibition. But you would be freelancing at that point, because it is not the purpose for which the kissing gate was designed.

Once I had a sweetie, and when we were out hiking we stopped for a kiss on every bridge we were crossed. That was in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, where there is much water, countless drainages and watersheds, and I sometimes think of how myriad were the streams that roiled beneath our feet as our lips met.

A kissing gate has a kind of spring-loaded door, which opening inward, leads you into a small, box-like corral. This so that if some freedom-seeking goat or sheep should attempts to rush by you as you open the gate, they will be trapped in the small corral. They are trapped because the gate you open inward to enter the corral “kisses” up against the exit from the corral, sealing off escape. Should this happen, and you find yourself confined with sheep or goat in mid-gate, you could then negotiate or wrestle the beast back the direction it came and exit the gate when the coast is clear.

I was never rushed at a kissing gate by any goat or sheep, but now that seems a little tragic. I would not have minded a skirmish like that—the butting, the pushing, the clomping, the grunting, and my fingers in the soaking wet mane of goat or sheep.

Why not? Those were mornings of liberty a few thousand miles from home. I had walked the slick streets of town, and I was heading up toward the high Fells. The rain that had soaked goat or sheep had come in off the Irish Sea, and had brought the beautiful smell of the sea with it.

Emmy Lou Just Seemed Bored

It was like watching cars being built on an assembly line. Punch in on the time clock. Produce songs according to plan and blueprint. Punch out at quitting time.

A few weeks back, I gathered up my tired bones—on a weeknight, believe it or not—and went downtown to hear Emmy Lou Harris and Buddy Miller. Afterward, the sad predictability of the performance started me thinking about musical artists on the road. What do they think we want from them? How can they keep the performances fresh? How can they stay creative?

I was fascinated by Buddy Miller’s little guitar-delivery man. He was already two steps out from behind the curtain when the last chord of each song was sounding in the air. He would hand Buddy his next guitar, tuned and appropriately capoed, if necessary, then leave the stage to prepare the next song’s guitar configuration, following a script he clearly had memorized.

Emmy Lou sang without passion, nearly every song utterly familiar, and performed pretty much the same program she had performed a while back at the Portland Zoo. Emmy Lou occasionally talked to the audience--dutifully it seemed—and tried to say something about Portland that would strike a note with the audience.

The only honest note was when she spoke about having given up on marriage, and she made other comments about how she had begun to despair of ever seeing any human progress in this troubling world.

Do these artists think this is what we want—a run-through of moldy hit songs? I think there are some concert goers who are indeed essentially concert “collectors,” as if concerts were beanie babies or something, and perhaps they really are just there to hear the familiar. But I think anyone who really admires a creative artist wants them to remain creative—wants them to create and perform new material and bring their talent to new works both topical and timeless.

So if Emmy Lou has given up on the human race, maybe that is what she should write songs about. Many fine works have been created on the subject of the hapless, hopeless, damnable human race. Let her do dark songs, and let the audience sit there and listen, if that is what it takes.

And why not throw the little guitar-delivery man a curve? Change the song now and then and leave him holding the wrong guitar. He has nothing to lose but his air of bored assurance.

Why I'm Not Dangerous

Don’t do much harm—at least most of the time.
Don’t eat too much; I only take mine.

Don’t want your autos, your bargains, your brides.
No need to attack me, or shove me aside.

Don’t want the houses you ring with a fence,
Or your opinions, which don’t quite make sense!

Keep your damned war—seems crazy to me—
Though loud as a parrot that screams in a tree.

So many young men always ready to fight.
Mr. Rousseau was wrong; Mr. Hobbes was right.

Use all the water to green up your lawn.
The earth will get better, after we’re gone.

After we’re gone with a hole in the sky,
Coyotes will scamper, and the crows will fly.

But pay me no mind. Forget what I’ve said—
I’ll drink one more whiskey and then go to bed.

Drunken Bores and Headline Writers

Am I the only one who hates the stupid puns, double entendre, and corny wordplay we see nearly every day in the headlines of the Portland Oregonian? If this is so, I probably should be led away—no matter to where—as not quite fit for this fitful world.

Sure, Shakespeare used puns and such, but I think there was a more complex symphony of wordplay going on there. The level of punning and wordplay we see in the Oregonian can only be found consistently among drunken bores and headline writers—and that obnoxious guy, Ernie, who works down the hall in Accounting.

The use of bad wordplay cannot bring respect to the paper. The use of bad wordplay is not respectful of the serious subjects the paper is covering on the front page.

FORT CLATSOP FIRE KINDLES EMOTIONS, the paper screams. Yes, everyone up there was looking forward to the 200th anniversary of the arrival of Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery in the driving, November rain of 1805. Fort Clatsop was to be the center and show place of the festivities. Clatsop County has struggled valiantly against hard economic times over the last 30 years. No doubt a few emotions were indeed “kindled” when the fort burned down.

DEQ CUTS MAY LEAVE US WHEEZING, the Oregonian recently announced, and what followed was the humorous story of how budget cuts have eliminated pollution monitors that allow us to know the levels of toxic pollutants that we are absorbing each day. There must have been general hilarity in the news room when they came up with that one. If the situation can be tossed off with a joke, then it can’t really be serious.

When I see these headlines I wonder: do they really think they being witty? I think it is fine in the back sections of the paper, but not on page one.

Perhaps the headlines are just intended to be a type of eye-candy, and I admit that the word WHEEZING in big, block letters on the cover of a major American newspaper did draw me in. Newspapers are today under economic strains of their own. The average age of their readership is higher as more and more young people receive their news from the internet. Subscriptions numbers at many newspapers have declined. It appears the headline is now just in the service of the bottom line.

Nevertheless, if the Oregonian building ever burns down, I guess I’ll have to write a blog entry entitled NEWSPAPER FIRE KINDLES EMOTIONS. And if the paper ever goes bankrupt, perhaps I might use UNEMPLOYED JOURNALISTS PRESSED FOR DEBTS.

Hey, want to hear some more? I can be awfully clever sometimes. Hey, wait ...

I Dread You Boys of Summer

I dread you Boys of Summer in your orange tank tops—and your mullets. Or worse: you are shirtless, in open air made toxic by your incessant barbeques. If you must be shirtless, Boys of Summer, be shirtless in Gaza.

I dread you Boys of Summer with your throbbing stereos. Must we know what music sounds like when it has rabies? You need to understand that Robert Plant and Jimmy Page are old now. They probably have arthritis and liver spots. Their prostate glands are swollen and they cannot seem to pee quite right. Civilization did not reach its zenith with Led Zeppelin, Boys of Summer.

I dread you Boys of Summer with your beer—because you drink like children eating ice cream, getting more on you, than in you. And you fret too much over the foam that pours into your paper cups from the ubiquitous keg, which you erect on high, like a pagan god.

I dread you Boys of Summer with your leaf blowers and lawn mowers, and all your revved engines and your exhaust fumes, and all your bellowings and bugle-ings.

But you are a force of nature, Boys of Summer. The summer will bring you to bloom like time-lapse photography in a bed of ghastly flowers.

And all I will be able to do is pray for a torrent of unseasonable rain to drive you back inside.

Bread and Circuses

This is the way things are in Plodnia. The working class has no political consciousness.

There was a time when the working class did have a political consciousness--but those days are long forgotten. Perhaps a few hermitic scribblers, in their garrets amid a gauze of spider webs, may remember that time, and consider it a golden age. But who really cares what they consider?

One piece at a time, the Commissars steal everything from the working class, but there is no outrage. In fact, the workers stand proudly in the roadside ditches and cheer the Commissars as they speed past in their large, glossy cars.

The Commissars provide Bread and Circuses for the working class, and the workers have their sports and their alcohol to swell them up. The best circus is war. Plodnia recently fought a war against Knocknia. Many sons and daughters of both countries volunteered to fight, and many died in the conflict, although no photographs or films of the slaughter were permitted by order of the Commissars.

Finally, the Commissars of Plodnia met with the Commissars of Knocknia and made peace to their mutual satisfaction. A wide-ranging trade agreement was signed between the two countries at the Economic Summit.

When the bodies of the dead soldiers came home for burial, the coffins were draped with flags. At the funerals, the workers of Plodnia said of their children, “They died for Plodnia. They died for us.” And the flag of Plodnia was draped over the coffins. The workers of Knocknia said of their children, “They died for Knocknia. They died for us.” And the flag of Knocknia was draped over the coffins.

There is no outrage in Plodnia. This is the way things are. The workers stand in the ditches and cheer the large, glossy cars.

Ten Questionable things about Portland

Henry has his blasphemies. It is likely these are written just to stir up trouble.

1. Downtown Portland.
Going down town these days is not worth it. The last time there, I had to wade through armies of panhandlers (able-bodied), and a dozen braying preachers.

2. The Portland Oregonian.
In the old days the paper at least had the virtue of being stolid and steady. Now we have silly headlines and irrational, continuous attacks on public employees, teachers, or anyone else who has managed to negotiate some health benefits and a retirement plan. Can’t they find some lawyers, tow truck drivers, or grave robbers to hate? And whenever they have a big story in their hands (Packwood, Goldschmidt), they hold their fire.

3. The myth of Powell’s Books.
Hard to find a good, cheap, used book there anymore. New books dominate the shelf space, and many writers are represented only by their most popular works. The Poetry section, for instance, is badly neglected. They joke about the Mississippi River being a mile wide and an inch deep. Powell’s keeps getting wider, but I don’t think it is as deep as in the old days.

4. Kells.
My idea of an Irish Pub is something a bit more working class.

5. The myth of Portland as a jazz town.
We have great local musicians, sure. But we hardly ever see big national or international players come through here, and where are the venues for them?

6. Portland TV News.
Most everyone I talk to agrees that it is unwatchable with its incessant crime/sex stories and general, relentless fear-mongering.

7. Portland TV Weather.
A few rain showers are now “storms” requiring a “storm watch” by “meteorologists” in a “Storm Center.” You can only laugh.


8. The Waterfront Blues Festival.
It used to be great, but now it is too hot and too crowded, and too many 12-bar shuffles can wear you out on the blues. I think they should shift to an eclectic format with blues, jazz, reggae, brazilian pop, celtic, etc.—a real world music festival.

9. Portland Center Stage.
Too much fluffy stuff. I would have it become edgier and rougher. Portland Center stage puts nearly all of its energy into charming its audience, and very little energy into confronting its audience. Just look at this next season’s lineup.

10. Portland Beaver Baseball
PGE stadium is like an estate sale where someone has died. I think now there may be only one squalid concession stand in operation. Many of the best seats are bought up by groups and businesses and sit empty all through the game. Once, baseball was the people’s game. Down with all skyboxes and luxury suites!

Do We Really Have to Put Up With These Damned Skateboards?

Here in Portland, Oregon, we are actually planning to aid and abet skateboarding by constructing skateboard-whatevers (rinks? bowls?) in our city parks. Soon there will be nearly nowhere to go to escape that most obnoxious of urban sounds—the clatter of a careening skateboard.

The TV coverage of this initiative usually shows film of some expert skateboarder executing nifty turns and flips, but the reality on the street is far different. I have always found it fascinating how hapless most young skateboarders are when it comes to riding the damned things.

Take this kid down the street, for instance. I have watched him grow to young manhood attempting to skateboard. Like Bob Dylan’s harmonica playing, his skateboarding never gets any better. He is still trying to jump that curb after all these years. He still fails every time. The skateboard still goes flying. The obnoxious clattering sound echoes timelessly around the neighborhood. The kid needs to learn when to cut his losses and move on.

The other day, riding the bus, I saw a young man on the sidewalk riding his skateboard down a steep hill between Divison and Powell on SE 39th. I could see that he was going way too fast and was starting to panic. Finally he bailed from the skateboard and hit the sidewalk running, but lost control and fell face-first into the middle of a side street. The skateboard took off on a course of its own—out into the middle of busy 39th Avenue. A pickup truck ran over it, sending shards of broken skateboard high into the air. The bus passed by, and I was left with that visual tableau of the sprawled, skinned-up skateboarder watching his demolished skateboard falling back to earth for its last clatter.

Mayor Tom Potter says skateboard parks are a good thing. Gives the kids something to do. Keeps them out of trouble. Would it be too preposterous to suggest they lay in the shade and read a book?

Okay, okay—I’m not that far gone. Of course it would be too preposterous.

Let’s hope the idea has some merit.

A Rollin’ Down That Eastern Seaboard

Over the years, Dave Dudley’s version of Six Days On the Road has managed to inhabit my body and brain like some kind of internal parasite. There is no getting rid of it, perhaps not even after death. It’s along for the ride until the last stop, and whatever wisp of spiritual smoke that may float away at the moment of my demise will surely contain it.

Especially the words: “a rollin’ down that Eastern seaboard.” These words pop into my mind all the time, for no discernible reason. Nothing will be particularly “rolling” at that moment. The directional “East” will have no relevance to what I’m doing just then, nor will that lovely word “seaboard.”

When I’m alone I sometimes say it out loud, startling myself. And I fear that I might accidentally say it in public—how would you feel if a stranger on the curb next to you suddenly intoned “a rollin’ down that Eastern seaboard”? Time then to prudently draw yourself away.

A while back—I confess—I cheated on “a rollin’ down that Eastern seaboard.” My mind was invaded and taken over by the words: “the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.” The phrase descended on me like a mob of marauding Picts. You can see what a seductive challenger this one is, and a lengthy struggle took place before “a rollin’ down that Eastern seaboard” was able to finally repel the swarthy foreign invader.

Well I pulled outta Pittsburgh a rollin’ down that Eastern Seaboard. I had my diesel wound up—you see—and she was a runnin’ like a never before.

There was no way that the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, bestride it’s querulous camels, could keep up.

Duel With the Sanctimonious Twit

These are heady days for the Religious Right, as they are called, but American history has been chock full of these revivals. In the 19th century, these “Great Awakening”-style movements would sweep through all the little towns, putting a good deal of pressure on the citizens to “come to meeting.”

If you stayed home, the others would of course claim that they were worried about your Immortal Soul, but what they really felt was suspicion. What was the matter with you that you would not join them? Everyone knew whom it was that refused to be saved. And perhaps you should have gone—where else would you have any fun, with everyone witnessing and all, in a sleepy town?

Everyone was for Jesus and Life Everlasting and against Sin. There was a whole list of sins, but the favorite sin, exciting to be disgusted by, was Lust. The terrorist Lust was among us, a fifth column, the enemy within.

There must be something wrong with me, some deficiency in my moral sense. I just can’t see how what people are doing in their bedrooms—next door, or in the next town, or the next state—has any effect on me. If Ralph and Velma next door, or Ralph and Ron, spend the night swinging naked and upside down in a trapeze while talking dirty in Sanskrit— well, it won’t change my day one iota.

What I think is sinful is Debt. Buying things when you don’t have the money—the absurdity of saying “my car” and “my house” when both of them are actually owned by the bank—when you are really living in the bank’s house and driving the bank’s car. The only thing I owe money for is the electricity that has ticked off the meter since I paid last month’s bill. So excuse me if I evangelize for a moment—it’s time we all came to meeting and burned our credit cards.

Imagine my consternation, then, when the Sanctimonious Twit, an employee of the New Yorker magazine accused me in letter number #3 of “reneging on a deal, and, I dare say, breaking a covenant” by, according to him, owing that glossy rag $39. 99. Yes, I had a subscription, but what the hell was he talking about? How could I have been receiving the magazine this long, how could I have been laboring through all those long articles about the Sex Lives of Dead Writers, if I had not paid for it in advance with a check?

I tried to imagine the Sanctimonious Twit. Fresh out of some Eastern College, no doubt. Entry level job in the circulation department, no doubt. Determined to bring a flare and a pungent prose style into field of subscription correspondence, that was clear. Determined to get noticed and promoted once his superior qualities were recognized, for sure. Ego the size of Jupiter-- indisputable.

The Sanctimonious Twit wasn’t particularly threatening in his first letter, just filled with excess pomp. “We’ve done our part, and we are sure you will now do yours, promptly, so that your subscription may continue without interruption,” he wrote. I hate it when people make remarks like, “Thank you in advance for taking care of this matter.” These kinds of statements are a sub-Class under the general Phylum of Guilt-Trips, and when I hear them, rebellion breaks out in all the provinces of my mind, the insurrection soon becomes general, and I mutate into a snarling refusnik.

Was there some small print that I had missed when I subscribed, and was the S.T. saying that I had committed myself to eternally renew my subscription? That would be damned deceptive. Well, screw you, S.T. I’ll stop taking your gaudy magazine. Winner take nothing, Sanctimonious Twit.

The letters kept coming. According to the S.T., everyone at the New Yorker was “saddened, disappointed, but mostly, perplexed” as to why I hadn’t paid my bill. But soon his tone turned more icy. I was notified that the staff of the New Yorker had recovered, somewhat, from the shock of my betrayal and had steeled themselves to do what must be done—my subscription was being terminated, and the S.T. hinted darkly of “starting the collections process.”

So the magazines stopped coming. I confess, I began to wonder what I was missing. Opportunities were probably being lost to learn about the sex life of Sherwood Anderson, or the sex life of Flannery O’Connor. And no longer was I reading that Les Paul was appearing every Monday night at the Iridium Jazz Club, even though I lived a whole continent away and there was little chance that I would ever get back there to hear him.

Just when I thought I was finished with the New Yorker forever, I received a letter. No, it was not from a collection agency. To my surprise, it was from the Sanctimonious Twit, and now he was taking an entirely different tone.

The S.T. hoped that I was well. They, of the New Yorker, understood that the whole thing had been some kind of misunderstanding, and although they were not sure why I hadn’t paid, they still trusted me and valued me as a reader. It was only a shame that their famous writers were now laboring at their word processors with no hope that their work would ever again be read and appreciated by my someone of my refined and penetrating sensibility.

Then it suddenly came back to me, and I don’t know why. Suddenly I recalled the postage-paid postcard urging me to subscribe now and be billed later, and I remembered that I had filled it out and sent it in, on the spur of the moment, in violation of all my pay-as-you-go principles. The sanctimonious Twit was right, I did owe money to the New Yorker. It had been nearly a year since I had sent in the card— how did the Sanctimonious Twit expect me to remember anything after all that time, the sanctimonious twit!

So I sent in my payment. Mostly I could not stand the thought of those poor, famous writers drifting into despondency because I was no longer reading their work. I imagined a tear running down the cheek of John Updike as he sat at his lonely desk, and Roger Angell so depressed that he could no longer take a healthy interest in baseball. I was also pretty worried about missing a poem by Charles Simic or Wislava Szmborska. I love Wislava Szymborska!

Stupid, Moronic fireworks

Fuzzz. Fuzzz. Fuzzz. Pop! Pop! Pop! Heh, heh, heh.

Stupid, moronic, fireworks. The 4th of July now lasts for a month. Now America can finally achieve its true potential— the lighting of fire crackers. Fuzzz. Fuzzz. Fuzzz. Pop! Pop! Pop! Heh, heh, heh.

Now fathers have the opportunity to teach their children an important lesson in citizenship. No, I don’t mean a lesson about the right to vote, the Bill of Rights, or the separation of Church and State. I mean—

Fuzzz. Fuzzz. Fuzzz. Pop! Pop! Pop! Heh, heh,heh.

Our pets are cowering in corners and closets, shaking all over as the blasting goes on and on and on. Fuzzz. Fuzzz. Fuzzz. Pop! Pop! Pop! Heh, heh,heh.

Is Dog man’s best friend? Then the friendship is one-sided.

Stupid, moronic fireworks. Stupid, moronic guns. Stupid, moronic American men.

Fuzzz. Fuzzz. Fuzzz. Pop! Pop! Pop! Heh, heh,heh.

Immortal Childhood Humiliations

Nothing can last like good, high-quality, Childhood humiliations.

After we are gone, they will float above the earth along with the all the other childhood humiliations, in a great flotilla, as part of the ozone layer. They will obtain immortality.

Sure, we remember the good times just as well, don’t we? Like that day many years ago at Buck Lake when we swam for hours, and fished, and had a picnic with the Grandparents, and Uncle George? There was a gorgeous sunset that day, I remember.

Although ... it might not have been Buck Lake, because that has always been private property. Dad was always opposed to fishing ... so I don’t quite know how we managed to fish. Uncle George was back in prison by that time, I’m afraid, and hadn’t seen a sunset for years. Come to think of it ... I don’t really remember that day at all!

I do remember my first school book report.

It was to be presented in front of the class. I was a shy boy, it seems. The thought of getting up before the class filled me, utterly, with pure terror.

I began to get nervous days before the report. I didn’t sleep at night. I was a mess. It would be a wrong to say that, when the fatal day arrived, I had butterflies in my stomach . By that time they were frigate birds. As my turn approached, I prayed for a careening comet to strike the earth and kill us all.

My name was called and I shambled to the front of the class. My report paper shook in my hands, but I managed to mumble a few opening words when the teacher interrupted me. She said that I should read the title of my paper first, I had forgotten to do that, but—in my terror and with all those eyes looking at me—I could not understand what she was saying. So I said, “what?”

Actually, I didn’t actually say “what.” I mean, yes, I said “what.” It’s just that I didn’t actually SAY “what,” actually.

I shrieked it. At the top of my lungs.

There was a nanosecond of pure, beautiful silence. I can still picture that roomful of young students, wide-eyed, agape, still. Where are they all now, I wonder?

The nanosecond elapsed. The students burst into laughter like a cave full of rabid hyenas. They began to writhe as if their chairs had all been electrified and someone had just thrown the switch. I blushed clear down to the roots of my being. I appeared to have the Mother of all sunburns, and I don’t think it really subsided for next 72 hours.

After all these years, I must commend the teacher’s self-control. She repeated her question with a soothing tone, although it was perhaps a little frayed around the edges, and the corners of her mouth seemed to be twitching under the influence of some temptation.

It was a good thing I had my sweet English mother at home, calling me Hen-er-y (she always used 3 syllables), and ready to dispense fresh, warm cookies upon my arrival. If I had grown up in this era where both parents work, I probably would have gone in my room and stopped breathing.

But it is only childhood humiliations that are immortal. That is one of the best things about getting older.

If I were caught now with my fly open while being introduced to the Queen of England and, with the CNN cameras running, she reached over (with some of the solicitude of my old teacher) to zip it back up—well I wouldn’t care about it an hour later. Sure, CNN would show the film 10 times an hour for the next week. So what--

Too old to care. Ha!

Henry As Monk

Henry is a kind of monk, although of no particular Order of monks.

But, wait, I should clarify that. There is definitely an Order to which Henry belongs—monks are not immune to the grim truths of demographics. However, this Order of monks does not gather together for prayers or porridge. They live isolate, in their flats, apartments, and trailers, avoiding most everything and everyone, especially each other. The things of this world are confusing enough without coming face to face with some bloody doppelganger at each turn in the road.

“Get away from me, you bloody doppelgangers,” Henry typically says. “Just keep the hell away.”

There was a time, reportedly, when monks were something of a scourge upon the land. (Nowadays there are so many scourges upon the land that your average monkish scourge upon the land would probably not even be an issue.) Monks would come out of their monasteries and have too much to drink, beat up a few churls, kick a few villeins, threaten a few yeoman farmers, do some major property damage, and just generally play the immorality card for all to see.

There were bad monks then, and bad nuns, too. They were protected by the Church and were not subject any to civil law. Sometimes the bad monks and the bad nuns would get together for steamy, intoxicated sessions of cloistered debauchery. At least this is what was alleged by civilian authorities who were either hungry to confiscate valuable church estates, or just jealous, or both.

Henry is a poor, secular-humanist monk, somewhat dissipated. This is quite out of fashion with the zealotry and public piety of the day, as people gather to weep over road-salt stains beneath freeway overpasses. You could shun out-of-step Henry for this—but then you would have to find him first.

He may be in his monastery by the river, dreaming of beautiful women. He may be in some bar lifting up a glass to smell the fresh-poured whiskey. He may be scrambling along some high ridge in air thick with rain. He may be at home with his books and all the words that pour out from between the covers.

All his Stations of the Cross.

The Eye Looks for a Resting Place

Watermark by Joseph Brodsky, the late Russian poet, is a superb little book. It is a small, prose essay about why he liked to go to Venice alone, in the dead of winter, and where his imagination took him while he stayed there.

One of the ideas he expresses in Watermark came back to me as I was riding to work this morning on the bus. Brodsky says that the eye seeks out beauty on its own, looking for a resting place. It is almost like the eye is not directed by any conscious idea. All that is necessary to say is that the world is chaotic, and the eye seeks sanctuary in beauty.

This must be why, on the bus, my eyes were plunging into the deep, green lawns like two pearl divers into the sea. It must be why my eyes would flee to the banks of these lawns, and dive, rather than adhere more than a moment to the dejected faces at bus stops, or the rows of useless cars lining every curb. Even the houses were frightening. The idea of being confined in any of them, the idea of being locked into any life that might live there inside.

So the eyes may seek beauty for many reasons, but they may also run to it for refuge.

Brodsky says this is also why a man looks at an attractive woman. We could have some fun with this and say that Brodsky’s idea supplies a satisfying explanation for something that might otherwise be called “checkin’ out the babes.” But he is right. In a roomful of faces, the eye will glide to the one that brings it the most pleasure. It might be the face of a beautiful woman or a handsome man, or it might be the face of someone very elderly, wrinkled and dignified, with their humanity looking out from the ancient face.

When a man admires an attractive woman, there just may be deeper meanings in it, and more innocence, than most people would suppose.

Forwarded: Another Letter from Evangeline Latham

Dear Henry,

There are big changes in my life. It’s crazy! I’m moving to Albuquerque. I am moving in with a gentleman friend, and I will be opening a used book store! I hope to hear from you.

Peace & Love, Evangeline

Reply to Evangeline Latham

Dear Evangeline,

But you hate Albuquerque.

And the revelations in your last letter are a violation of our implicit pact. Yes, we never discussed it, but it was implicit. In fact, it was so very implicit that it could not have been any more implicit without being explicit, and when something is explicit, then it’s a contract, which you have violated—

You in your shack and me in mine. Like two employees in distant Lookout Towers. Me having someone to come to: you. You having someone to come to: me. Arsonist! You’ve set fire to your Lookout Tower and all the surrounding forest. I can see the smoke billowing up from the Southwest.

Let’s hope the "gentleman friend" is a gentleman. When a woman tells a man about another man, calling him a “friend,” she is deploying the world’s most clumsy and obvious attempt at ambiguity. The first man, of course, knows immediately that the woman is sleeping with the second man.

You have that right. I am impossible, I know. But you are impossible too. It was our bond, for christssake. Are you pretending now that you are not? Better to retain possession of your desert shack. I give it, say, approximately an octet of fortnights. Then you will be back on your porch with your stars and your nighthawks.

Yet perhaps with the gentleman friend you are not impossible, and intend to leave me to be impossible all by myself?

I like the idea of a used bookstore. I only ask one thing—and please, please, try to see reason on this. Please do not put Zane Grey on the Literary Fiction shelf, okay?

Love, Unpeaceful Henry

Shocking Confessions

It is amusing to think about the near total obscurity that awaits the average blog. So why write one at all? I guess it is just for (to use that most unimposing word)—fun.

Samuel Pepys wrote his famous diary mostly in shorthand, and in his will he directed that the volumes of his diary be sent to his university library, along with his other books. He included in the shipment a small volume which explained the system of shorthand that he had used in composing the diary. Eventually the diary was discovered, and a scholar spent years decoding it for publication. It was an arduous task, with the scholar never realizing that the key to translating the text was sitting on a nearby shelf the whole time.

You never know. Perhaps my blog will be like that shorthand key. Someday someone may discover it on the world wide shelf, chase off the spiders and blow off the dust, and be bemused for a moment by my absurdities.

It might help if I spiced it up with more shocking confessions. I certainly admire personal essays from Montaigne to the present, but I find I can only dribble out confessions, rather than deliver them in a full flood like other writers. Besides, our personalities are rife with contradictions. A voice within me will always demand a retraction of any confession I am tempted to utter.

I should make the blog more personal by going on about things—like my love life, for instance. Okay, here goes.

I am currently waiting for Juliet Binoche to recognize my existence and come to live with me in my squalid garret in Portland, Oregon, USA. I think this is about to happen, and so I need to work on my French. It has been a long wait, but I don’t mind. Some have told me that Juliet is married with children, but I know these are scurrilous lies. Scurrilous lies!

Let's all calm down, shall we?

The Columbia river, while it was carving out its Gorge and importing coastal mountains on board its gaudy basalt flows, probably never thought it would have me continually crawling all over its steep slopes.

(Excuse the anthropomorphism, a river being too intelligent to think.)

Nevertheless, I am always out there, even without recognition, doing some gut-wrenching climb whose goal is the top. What is the top? A view. There is the river. There are the miniature human contraptions. Here comes the weather.

At the summit, am I closer to God? Go ahead and try to answer it. We always have tried, but then we must learn to let it go. Everything is carrying on as it must carry on. It is a basalt flow that carries all before it. We are being carried along. Those uprooted trees ahead are my ancestors, disappearing around a bend in the river.

At the summit I look down, rather than up, to a weed cracking through a rock. Let’s all calm down, shall we?

It’s time to descend and go home. Tonight, when the heats backs off, the air will be cooler and moister as it fills our lungs. I’ll sit outside for a while. There are certain books that I am never finished reading, and there is a Chilean cabernet that I can afford which is damned good!

Truth Before Hope

“Man can live without hope, but not without truth.”

These were the words of Albert Camus, as quoted by his biographer, Olivier Todd. So often lately I have found this statement, without warning, swirling around in my consciousness. I wonder what I should make of these words—and yet, I instantly embrace them.

I anticipate certain objections. First of all, a war over the definition of truth. Some will say that Universal Truth is readily available, just follow us, and here, have some potato salad. Others will say there is no objective truth, and every so-called truth-telling is simply a story, a tale, a performance.

There are, however, assaults on objective and historical truth that we cannot ignore. Holocaust denial is the most obvious example. In the future some may say (or perhaps they are saying it even now) that all those filmed interviews with Holocaust survivors were “staged,” and all those written memoirs are “forgeries.”

It is easier today for such pernicious lies to flourish, because we live now in a world where interviews are indeed staged, where reporters at press conferences are plants, where photos are doctored, and where documents are tweaked, forged, and sexed-up. To the extent that our American democracy participates in these charades, we should be deeply alarmed. Would it be too preposterous to say that such a culture of lies and dissembling threatens all the hard-won victories of a humanist tradition and the Age of Reason?

Today there is a profound need for voices like those of Albert Camus and George Orwell. Remember that in denouncing Stalinism, both men upset their allies on the Left, who felt that the whole socialist movement would be damaged if a wedge were driven between the Soviet experiment and other socialist groups. Many on the Left feared that Camus and Orwell’s words only aided the Right, and many were willing to look the other way, in the face of Stalinist atrocities, in the hope of securing their socialist dreams.

But Camus and Orwell spoke out. Truth was more important than hope.

Transcendence Through Real Estate

An epiphany!

I’ve just learned, through a TV infomercial, that I can achieve transcendence—or even better—“success,” by investing in real estate with no money down! You just don’t know how I have longed to become an entrepreneur. (Although the word bothers me because it seems vaguely French.)

All I have to do is send for this video or take a course (it’s wonderful that these instructors will give up their time to help people like me, when they could be out getting even richer buying property) and I am on my way to financial security through real estate. Real estate, you see, never goes down. It only goes up, so you can’t lose! I heard countless TV testimonials by people no more vapid and dough-faced than I am myself—and they are out there getting rich.

What you do is buy these houses, do a few small, clever, cosmetic repairs, and then sell them for a huge profit. A guy no more vapid than I am myself made $40, 000 on his first deal!

I feel sorry for those who have not embraced the true religion of real estate. We entrepreneurs, with our rampant speculations, will price them so far out of a home that they will be sleeping on the asphalt. On second thought, I don’t feel sorry for them. They simply have no gumption. They are not born again with the entrepreneurial spirit. I need not be ashamed of having initiative, and if I rise further and faster by climbing over the bodies of the fallen—well it’s their fault for lying in the road.

I just need to make that first purchase, and I am on my way. My shit won’t stink, and the maggots won’t dare come near my corpse for a thousand years.

Camping Out with the Gray Gestapo

I recently made a kayaking assault on the South Puget Sound—driving up to a state park, where I had a camping reservation. I had barely entered the grounds before I was interdicted by the “Gray Gestapo”—elderly park volunteers! These are pretty rough customers. They presume everyone guilty of intent to violate park rules until otherwise proven innocent.

I parked by the restroom and went inside. An old guy came in and told me that I couldn’t park there and that I had to move my vehicle—while I was still standing at the urinal! You see, it seems that the only place you can park is at your “site.” In effect, a no pay, no pee policy.

Unfortunately it was still two hours before official check-in time, and that effectively made me a non-person, without rights or recourse. So I blew out of there to find a better place to launch my boat. In the rearview mirror, I saw the squad of oldsters moving together, their arms folded in triumph. They were counting coup.

It is a terrible thing—giving some people authority. Their noses enlarge and their faces sprout hair. Fangs grow and glint.

I drove a few miles and eventually found a quiet little day-use area with a boat launch, unpatrolled by any forces of repression. It was a little town called Allyn. I started to put my boat together, a Klepper folding kayak. The Teutonic Boat often attracts notice—but this day I had to answer questions from 2 or 3 parties as I went about assembling it. The most popular questions were quantitative ones: how much does it weigh? How long does it take for you to put it together? We are Americans, and these are the questions that absorb us.

I could hear myself talking like a tour guide: “This boat is made in Germany by the Klepper Company. They have been making this model from the same basic design for nearly a hundred years. The first models were constructed to accompany scientific expeditions to areas where accessibility was difficult. Now, notice how the hull…”

The people nodded their heads slowly, and said, essentially—Well, how about that.

One old-timer with a cane hung with me for quite a while. He once built cedar skiffs by hand in which the boat joined together without caulking. He was attending the gathering at the nearby picnic area and finally hobbled back over there. I think he would have rather stayed with me and discussed boats.

I finally launched and paddled away down a body of water called Case Inlet. Not the wildest region—both sides of the inlet in this area are lined by houses along the shore. Some of them are quite luxurious. It was all private property, with no place to land. If you tried to make landing, you would probably be accosted by a red-faced, semi-intoxicated man in Ralph Lauren. He would no doubt come stumbling down the rocky beach, sputtering trespass.

The ownership of property has always seemed absurd to me—and somehow strangely wrong. How can we really ever own anything? And doesn’t what we think we own, out of some sort of arrogance, really own us? It’s like what Erich Maria Remarque says in one of his novels: “Why do we make so much fuss about things which at best are merely lent to us for a little while; and why all this talk about degrees of possession, when the illusory word ‘possess’ means merely to embrace the air?”

But it was a fine day to paddle as the tide flooded into the inlet. At one point the oddest feeling came over me, and I felt impelled to turn around completely in my seat and look behind me. There was a seal just behind the boat, staring at me with huge eyes in his gray-blue, whiskered face.

At a rocky point I turned into a bay. There was a house right on the point, and before the house, leaning out over the water, were two of the largest and most beautiful madrone trees I have ever seen. I admired their golden and twisted trunks. The upper branches were blood red, and when the leaves showed their undersides in a stiffening breeze, it was like the trees were shedding a shower of golden flakes. They seemed to belong on some perfumed Greek isle, not in the Pacific Northwest.

I headed back to the camp after the paddle. I showed my reservation “papers” to the Gray Gestapo, which they found to be in order, and I was allowed to occupy Site #12 until 1 PM the next day, check-out time. I had full restroom privileges in the interim. I felt then that I was actually shimmering with legitimacy.

For dinner I had baked chicken, which I had cooked the night before and brought along in a cooler. I washed it down with a decent Argentinean malbec. The Gray Gestapo kept a watchful eye on me until they retired to their motor homes for Pinochle or Canasta. Then ensued a brief Prague Spring in the beautiful, dwindling dusk, and I got out of there early the next morning.

Becoming Invisible

On my morning bus ride to work, two schoolgirls often take the seat in front of me and immediately pull out their thick textbooks. I can’t help a quick glance to see what they are studying. Today there was a nice graphic of the human heart with its various ventricles, arteries, and chambers, and, as the page turned—a patient in a hospital bed hooked up to IVs and a chapter called “Urinary Samples Collection.”

What must they think of all this, these malfunctions of the body, and does it make them think about death? At their age I was terrified of death, and yet, in utter contradiction, convinced that I would never die. I think this was because I felt that I had an inner world that was unique and so would be exempt from the common fate. How could anyone else have an inner cosmos so rich with dreaming, or have the ability to stop time just because a shower of rain struck the windowpane of my room?

Later I realized everyone had an inner world, perhaps not so different from mine, but the fear of death remained. Oddly, as I get older the fear lessens. Aging does the preparatory work for dying, and this is not such a bad thing. Each year you become slightly more invisible, much like in the sense of Ralph Ellison’s great novel. More and more people cease to see you, or they look right through you.

This can be difficult to adjust to, yet I should consider its advantages. There are no expectations imposed on me now. My friends and family have all given up! No one looks to me to guarantee their happiness. And I can now write this thin, trivial blog, unencumbered by any exalted potential I was once supposed to have. Makes it easier to get words down on paper—and it’s a boon to honest expression.

The schoolgirls get out at the high school, lugging their gargantuan backpacks. I’m going on a few stops further down the line. Good luck to them. Good luck to them.

The Many Shades of Solitude

There was a radio show last night on the topic of solitude. It impressed upon me just how many types of solitude there might actually be. Perhaps the show did not even scratch the surface with the varieties it mentioned.

Of course, the commentators advanced the most popular theory on solitude—namely, that it is asocial—as when, after the terrible crime, the local, stunned citizen stands before the TV cameras and says, “he was kind of a loner, and kept pretty much to himself.” This is the Solitude-As-Breeding-Ground-For-Evil-Theory.

Another theory had solitude as a kind of selfishness. Another blamed it on youthful romanticism, an immature act that would abate as soon as the solitude-seeker grew up. Another had solitude-seekers as control freaks, who simply want everything their own way.

Everyone kept saying: “human being are social animals.” This was proffered as axiomatic, leaving solitude as a kind of aberration, interesting because of its oddity.

It is shame that someone like Henry Thoreau could not have called in to join the discussion. The 5th chapter of Walden is entitled “Solitude,” and Thoreau makes it clear throughout the book that it is Man, the social animal, that is on the wrong track. It is all these social animals in their social structures, constructing their rules and etiquettes, repeating the hidebound sayings of their fathers, prying into their neighbor’s business, and asserting their pressure on any solitude-seeker not to be different, not to be creative, not to rethink the old dogmas.

Now here is an example of what Man-As-Social-Animal can come up with: isn’t someone always telling us that “the American Dream is owning your own home.” Owning your own home! Is that it? Is that our shabby and paltry American dream?

Thoreau is only one figure in a grand tradition of solitude-seeking, comprised of those who have sought an invigorating and restoring solitude. Many of these solitude-seekers wrote about their experiences and brought their findings back to the world. Most would probably say that solitude made them more fit to be social animals, rather than less.

Yet the radio commentators seem never to have heard of this tradition, and I must admit, in fact, that I sense that the tradition is in decline.

More and more, people are joining groups, or just wanting to be with their friends, or their families. There is a growing incomprehension of solitude—what good could it ever do anyone?

Forward: Letter From Evangeline Latham

Henry, you old poop! Are you still saving yourself for the Nebulous? This is your major occupation. Is it not, Bucko?

I know you better than you know yourself. It is all those bloody fir trees, those big goddamn fir trees, glowering down on you, and all that precious rain you insist on claiming that you adore. How utterly, utterly tiresome! Don’t you miss me, Henry—maybe just a little—now and then?

I’m writing this on the porch of the Chosa, and I will quit when the nighthawks begin to tumble through the sky, because then it will be dark.

Excuse the prolific dog-drool on this paper. The dogs (yes there are three of them now) don’t feel the need for the written word, so they keep coming over to spoil my thoughts, and despoil your letter. See—they think you are an old poop too!

I have my glass of merlot (almost empty—we’ll have to do something about that, won’t we?) and the stars are starting to come out all around me, and the nighthawks are flying…


Your distant (permanently dormant?) Sweetie,

Evangeline Latham

Job Opening: A New Joan of Arc

We are looking for a new Joan of Arc to lead us in a Quest. You should be young and beautiful, but if not, our mission will make you so. Perhaps you will be Amber of Albany or Heidi of Hillsboro, but whoever you are, you need to come forward now. Your compensation will be paid in Hope and all the ancient glory of the Quest. We will even suspend the Medieval Virgin Clause.

I, and my buddies Dan and Floyd, will get you anything you want. If you need ice cream in the middle of the night, we will fetch it. If you want Keanu Reeves—we will go to L.A. and get him. We will make him see reason. We are older guys, but quite determined. Together, we form a fairly formidable phalanx.

You will lead us in a great march upon Washington D.C. You will be the flower of American youth and idealism, and the whole country will respond to you. Through you, the American people will remember that they are The People, and they will see how they have been falsely taught to despise and accuse each other.

Because--isn’t it humiliating how we let ourselves be manipulated by advertising and propaganda? What work is ever really done in the interest of the overwhelming majority of Americans who are not rich and never will be? You, Joan of Arc, will show them how everything they have earned is being slowly and slyly stripped from them.

Following behind you, we will stop the madness. We will end the deliberately divisive partisanship, and the utter corruption by money. We will evict the lobbyists who crawl everywhere like centipedes, their numberless feet dipped and sticky with the hypocritical offal.

Jeanne d’Arc—come forward now!

Story Problem #2

Take all of your illusions. Multiply them by the years of your life so far.

Now replace these illusions with “truths” of the same number, and add up what they have cost you.

You have to walk, so add two feet. Add two lungs also—because you have to breathe. You have to live, so increase the number by what saves you.

If it is freedom, reduce all numbers to one.

What is the total cost? Just how mountainous is it?

The Secret Lives of Hoses

Usually I read while riding the bus to work. I try never to be caught without a book! Some days, however, I put the book away and look out the window as the bus rattles and belches its way into town. I play a little game then—I look out the window and I try to “see.”

Today I saw hoses.

The city is thickly populated with hoses, and we know little about their lives. For hoses exist largely along the sides of houses, a place only rarely frequented, even by their owners. At best these hoses are coiled and hung up, with stale water at the bottoms of their arcs—or ice when it freezes—and then the hose looks no different than usual, but is in fact stiffened with cold and isolation.

But many hoses are not coiled up and they lay today where they were dropped last autumn. I saw many of these as the bus churned by. Others are laid out to slither through a garden (with neat Biblical overtones), and are half-sunk there in the soil and never removed. Do the worms working below sense the presence of the Great Worm up above, cold, distant, and uncommunicative to them?

I saw a hose that had been stuffed into a barrel. There were several bights of the hose sticking out above the rim of the barrel and a hose-end lolled over the side as if it were wretching during a sea voyage.

In one yard I saw a hose laying in clotted sheepshanks, as kinked and knotted and forlorn as if it had fallen from the sky. A hose in the throes! But soon, as if in revenge, I saw another hose laid over a porch, crossing along the top step, containing within itself the patient potential for complete catastrophe. It is odd that a stranger passing in a bus sees this potential instantly, yet the hose’s owner does not see it at all. When the catastrophe happens, the hose will be cursed and scapegoated.

This is the nonsense I saw on the bus this morning.

Every Rain is Full of the Past

Finally, after an unusual winter dry spell, the rain is back in Oregon. The rain is now assuring us, in torrents, that rumors of its demise are greatly exaggerated. I go out in the rain just to feel its force and its intent. It comes in hard, and it bows my head.

Back inside, I hang up my rain gear on a peg, and the rain gear seems to hold my shape as if I were still inside of it, and it drips and sheds water as if I were still out in the rain.

Before I went out in the rain, I looked at it for a long time through the window. After I came back inside, I looked at the rain again, for a long time, through the window.

Things We Do When (We Suppose) We Are Alone

It is Henry’s intention to avoid the most obvious things here. Perhaps Erica Jong or others will explore—pardon the expression—that terrain. Henry’s problem is more pernicious and intractable. Every time he drives alone in the car he begins scat-singing, and somehow, some way, this must be stopped.

Henry loves jazz, but he himself would admit the dubious benefits of scat-singing. Even Ella Fitzgerald, who became quite good at it, transgressed the limits of patience. She went on way too long—and all the while Tommy Flanagan was sitting on his piano stool with his hands on his knees. Every extra chorus that Ella filled up with scat-singing was a Tommy Flanagan solo that never got played.

For Louis Armstrong, scat was part of the entertainment and he kept it short. It was when he raised his trumpet to his lips that the true artistry began. These days, fortunately, we have someone like Bobby McFerrin who has transcended scat into a vocal language of sustained creativity.

Once Henry gets into the car and pulls away from the curb—from his throat erupts projectile scat, and it quickly becomes as difficult to put out as an oil well fire. Like Ella, he is pretty good at it, but that misses the point wholly and utterly. You might preside over the best-groomed landfill and garbage dump in the county, but that does not mean people will take Sunday drives to admire it.

If you read this blog (and there is no evidence yet that anyone ever has), and you yourself are in recovery from the urge to scat, please offer your advice to Henry. Really, this is a cry for help. Henry beseeches you to show him the way to a cure.

Actually, Only the Witty Can Enter Heaven

It’s true—Dorothy Parker meets you at the gate and hands you a drink!

Jokes, as we have come to know them, are an instant disqualification. Beginning a sentence with “Did you hear the one about...,” plummets you pell-mell into the Flaming Pit. Laughing, donkey-like, at your own remarks inevitably inspires Lady Astor to put poison in your tea. Then Winston Churchill and Oscar Wilde hold you down and make you drink it.

Puns are permitted, strangely enough. There is a limit, however—and therein lies the danger. No ones knows exactly where the limit is, and expectorate just one pun too many and you may find yourself cast into the Molten Morass.

Still, perhaps we had better not practice our repartee or ever think of ourselves as witty. For the greatest wit is God (if she exists) and—who knows—perhaps her motto is “Wit to the Pit” after all!

Charles Lamb, Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb, Charles Lamb, took his sister by the hand,
and led her to the lunatic asylum

Charles Lamb, Charles Lamb, took his sister by the hand
and led her home,

and there she was the kindest of all hostesses
when Coleridge and Hazlitt and all the others brought the house alive
with their talk of books, and their drinking, and their cribbage!

Charles Lamb, Charles Lamb, had a terrible stutter,
and held back while the others filled the room
with their eloquence and high-flown thoughts—

Then Charles Lamb would blurt out something brilliant and absurd—
pun-drenched, wild, hilarious, and pure—
and the next day the only thing anyone could remember
was what Charles Lamb had said

Charles Lamb, Charles Lamb, the sweetest man in English Literature.