Thursday, June 29, 2006

Reading on a plane ride

Now jet-lagged, tired
body trailing night
like the man-made clouds that mar sunrises

then cramped and wind-blown
with re-circulated air
and polite conversation
and a book wings open
and we all fly together

Wednesday, June 28, 2006

And here it fell apart
the future like patterns
of nothing
like ligaments and tissues
of a 90-year-old heart
lika a hip bone on the front steps

like a glass that dropped
from the hands that held half-wet
a white drying cloth

like anything that surprises
you
like anything that scares you it fell apart
like a body in a casket

like cigarette ash
like a hole in the car seat
and we are swatting where our legs meet
and we aren't watching the road
and we are building two tracks in the ditch grass
together
like ruts on the Oregon Trail
this was where we passed, these two troughs
plowed through the soil
here we laboured and did not sow

or here we left deep lines
like baby's skin wrinkled
our legs curved like saplings
our arms curved, our backs
like ape's, like new humans
like the past curved
in our womb of steel frame and shattered glass
and pillowing white cloth

when we are lying side by side
when we have passed
may worms and ants carve passages
as our bodies sigh together
and our memorial shall be of flowers
silk or lasting plastic

Sunday, June 18, 2006

Yet another...

My Heart

Thick, swollen, strong
fat and hard as old farmer’s hands

holds you smooth-worn
as old hickory
handles

smooth as far-off fields
new-plowed, soft as blowing wheat
around old lines of stones

Monday, June 12, 2006

St. Patrick's Breastplate

I have been engaging in an interesting attempt at memory recall this morning at work. On Sunday we sang a hymn called St. Patrick's Breastplate, which is our second time singing it. The first time was a disaster, because the hymn is very complicated (compared to most standard hymns), especially if you aren't familiar with it. This second time it went a little better, but I can't say I sang it quite perfectly, even by the end. Now this morning I started to think of a measure of the melody. As I hummed it, it brought to mind the next part. After a few tries, I was able to physically reproduce that with my vocal chord vibrations, which seemed to set it more fixedly in my mind.

This in turn made me realize that the first measure that I had remembered was similar to the song but not quite right. I assumed I had hit the wall there. But as I was working, it suddenly occured to me how is should sound; once again, it took a while to reproduce physically. This process continued until I had reconstructed the whole melody. Yet immediately after I had sung the song with the congregation yesterday, I had been humming it and couldn't remember the whole thing! I even tried for quite a while. How then could I remember it today? It appears from this that it is possible for one to recover a truth or an actual thing more correctly or completely given time to dig into long-term memory (?) (mid-term memory?) compared to the immediate retrieval of short-term memory.

Of course, I'm not completely sure my final complete memory of the song's melody is correct; I believe it is, because it arose into my mind wrapped in a certainty, an authenticity I could not naturally doubt, though of course I doubt it intellectually.

Friday, June 02, 2006

After reading through almost all of In Search of Lost Time, I get to the crux of the novel: The narrator describes how certain objects or situations in the present bring back memories, and that this moment when two times coexist, when two part of himself are simultaneously realized, makes him happy and is somehow really meaningful. Whoop de doo. You could hear that in any parlor hypnotists pitch.

There's a lot of really good prose, really interesting ideas in the novel, but I find its self-stated raison d'etre falls rather flat. Which is interesting, because it is this that makes him regain his belief in the value of literature, which he had lost after reading the "Goncourt Journals," a jab at realist lit.

My purpose in reading these classic novels is to measure myself against things which I suppose likely to represent the highest work of humanity in the arts. The final part of my coming of age, my bildungsroman so to speak, has been the realization that humans are not so wise or capable as I had thought, that things are wrong in ways far less idealogical than I used to suppose. As the adult world becomes accessible to me, I realize that much loses its charm and mystery, its capacity to hold the ideals that governed the first part of my coming of age. Much more is lost than I had supposed possible by the realization that it does not lie outside the scope of one's own power, one's own soul. I don't know how to say it, but there is a scope, a range one feels inside oneself, and what is truly wonderful must lie beyond, or at the highest ranges which lie mainly in the half-percieved.

Of course I do not say that these great classic works have dissapointed me. I do not say that they are not beyond me. I do not say, when I walk into the art museum, "I could have painted a better cow than that." There is a complexity in Proust I cannot replicate, nor understand. Still, I do not find what I am looking for.

A few years ago, I began to learn ways of seeing which were essentially negative. Ways of hating and despising the world I percieved, or simply of creating a feeling for its "folly." Ways of distilling a wave a sorrow from almost any event or object. As I was in this period, I consoled myself with the belief that there was a corresponding way of seeing which transformed all into beauty, joy, and distillations of love. I believed that if I had one way in the scope of myself, perhaps the other existed also in me. So that is what I am hoping to find. Tolstoy did help a little (especially the peasant prisoner of war, for instance), and passages in Proust as well. But I think it cannot be a matter of memories revisited, of overlapping time, of lost time regained. These are merely ways of knowing some true "I."