Skalduggery

And here’s the triggering town:

The beach -the social mix was much less…

Guess my cut, tank, Levis and boots just won’t do-

I like my bike and your bikini better – on you

There you have it, Monday’s whimsy. Make sure you visit Susan over at Stony River and wish her well – it’s been a tough week. I think I’ll keep trying out these little Monday bits of fun because – well, I need it! 😀 The vacation’s over, and it’s time to start writing about my usual fare. It seems to be somewhere in the area of f aux science, or science and democracy, or Max Weber and his depressing notions of scientific administration… hmmm, see you on Thursday folks.

Cheers!

P.S. I’ve got to get serious, my wife is hitting her targets from much farther… I’d best further my understanding – of women at the very least 😛

I know this doesn’t quite fit the tenor of this blog site… but I did say I’d try anything that caught my fancy… Susan over at Stony River provides a fun little exercise each Monday called Microfiction Mondays. She explains everything over there, so I’ll just get to business with her logo and trigger picture:

And here is the triggering picture:

At a much later date in our lives we

might have fled the room, but this

treasure of possibility at ages five and eight –

body armor, serious slingshots, traps of all sorts!

Now that was fun, Cheers all!

I’ve been reading bits, blogs, and books on writing again. Thanks in part to a vacation I picked up my journal again – for more than cursory entries – and gave it a serious working out. Another part I owe some thanks to is Jeff, an online buddy over at My Nasty Romance (MNR). I took a book on vacation with me called The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing by Richard Hugo. While reading The Triggering Town, I also ran across one of Jeff’s posts concerning the “Journey” known as writing… To turn this into a nice trifecta (though I won’t necessarily give places), The American Spectator (TAS) had an article entitled Look at Me by James Bowman. Though the Am Spec article wasn’t specifically about writers, it included them in the pantheon of creative riffraff who seem not to be concerned with freedom of expression:

Our concerns lie instead with that more recently discovered but, if anything, even more highly valued freedom, the freedom to be attended to by the world at large. You will of course tell me that there is no such freedom in reality, and you will be right. I have said so myself in this space (“The Shock Is Over,” TAS, May 2008) in the course of noticing how Saskia Olde Wolbers, one of the army of mostly unattended-to artists in our heavily overpopulated “creative” world, has referred mournfully to “the meaninglessness of being unobserved.” Since then, our national crisis of inattention has only grown more acute. Now it’s not just those ever-growing numbers of obscure artists, poets, actors, and other such riffraff that the wider world is neglecting, but the once enormously popular news media, with their delightful fables and fantasies of American public life (TAS October 2009).

Bowman’s entire article is definitely worth the read, especially as it relates to the fantasies and self-indulgence of our current crop of “creative types” who seem to conflate the notion of art with publicity. He notes “It’s hard to tell whether this assimilation of art to publicity has percolated down from the high to the popular culture or risen up, like sap, from the popular to the high. But there’s hardly any difference between the two now anyway” (TAS October 2009). That’s a sad finding.

I like to write, especially poetry – guess I’m part of the riffraff. On the other hand, Jeff over at MNR wrote a post that tells a short story of conversion. In his and Joseph Campbell’s words:

I’ve heard it before. Writing is a journey. Work on your craft. Feel the story. Stock your toolbox. Create characters so real they tell the story themselves. Melt your heart down in a small lead bowl and pour it onto the paper like molten soul and then the world will ache at your truthy tellings…

Blah.

It all sounded like hippie crap to me. Writing was an intellectual pursuit. It had plot, characters, and theme. Cross those three streams and, like in Ghostbusters, you could achieve anything. Well, like most things I encounter in my life, I was wrong. Writing is, indeed, a journey in more ways than one.

First, it is a hero’s journey in the classic sense. Joseph Campbell summarized the hero’s journey, or monomyth, thusly: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man” (MNR 20091024).

Jeff goes on to include the journey of self-realization in his conversion story, but worries that writing might be a tad (maybe even irresponsibly) self-indulgent. Makes me mindful of Robert Heinlein’s only half jesting notion that “Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.” What immediately captures me in Jeff’s commentary is Campbell’s notion of the hero’s journey. The reason is that it is a repeated theme in both art history and art criticism… if one steps back several decades. There was a difference between personal notoriety and art worthy of notice. Bowman put it like this:

All art needs heroes. In modernist art, the artist was the hero on account of his art. Now he’s a hero if he can just figure out how to get his art noticed. That’s the whole point of conceptual art, which has little or no content qua art (in the old sense of something beautifully wrought) apart from the concept that promises to get it talked about (TAS October 2009).

Finally, the third part of this trifecta is Richard Hugo, though not my favorite poet, he is one of my favorite teachers. Ever. In The Triggering Town, his chapter called “Stray Thoughts on Roethke and Teaching” has a few things to say that tie in here:

Roethke used to mumble: “Jesus, you don’t want to say that.” And you didn’t but you hadn’t yet become ruthless enough to create. You still felt some deep moral obligation to “reality” and “truth,” and of course it wasn’t moral obligation at all but fear of yourself and your inner life.

Despite Roethke’s love of verbal play, he could generate little enthusiasm for what passes as experimentation and should more properly be called fucking around. Real experimentation is involved in every good poem because the poet searches for ways to unlock his imagination through trial and error. Quest for a self is fundamental to poetry. What passes for experimentation is often an elaborate method of avoiding one’s feelings at all costs (Hugo, 1979).

I sometimes think it’s a matter of figuring out that reality isn’t necessarily what is real. Jeff put it like this: “…you let the words come out from under your fake self – the self the world knows – and you put it all out on paper as ugly as it was born. It’s slippery with nasty juices, vulgar, and raw as a rug burn. And most of all, it’s real” (MNR 20091024). In Jeff’s worries about irresponsible self-indulgence and Bowman’s charges of art as publicity (getting noticed) there is, I believe, a commonality of interest and intent. Bowman, after sarcastically ripping up Julie & Julia and to a lesser extent the author, he concludes his article:

Hooray for Julie! Who could wish her less successful, less rich, less famous, or played in the movie by anyone less adorable than Amy Adams? But I’d prefer to rent the video of With a Friend Like Harry…, a French film of 2000 by the German-born Dominik Moll, about a poet whose comatose genius is shocked back into life by the discovery that his long-disregarded juvenile oeuvre has found an audience solely on its dubious merits and not on account of his mastery of publicity or compelling personal story. True, it is an audience of one, and that one a criminal madman, but for any real artist that ought to be enough (TAS October 2009).

That isn’t a far jump to Jeff’s closing paragraph concerning self-indulgence: “I would suppose the answer is that it’s self-indulgent, yes. But not irresponsibly so since if even one person feels a kinship by reading the story, I’ve bestowed a boon” (MNR 20091024). Whether the boon is poetry or prose or both, it will have been a shame to fail to shout in the shower those most primitive sounds we make when alone in those reckless moments that trigger our hearts to sing sentences – which maybe only the person in the shower will ever hear. Like Hugo, I hope your “truth conforms to the music” and we meet to hear it.

Cheers.

Fuhgidaboudit!

Fogarty Creek

I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to post this here, but I wound up getting a bit of a challenge from an online buddy about my poetry – having to do with claiming to be “The Skald,” an Icelandic warrior poet. This photo essay and poem don’t really use any kennings or skaldic poetic techniques, but it is at least a poem 😉

Aiden the "Cool"

In terms of “creative writing” I’ve not written anything at this new Skalduggery yet, and a combination photo essay/poem seemed just the ticket to get started! I’d like to write something easy, but not so straightforward, something simple, but not uncomplicated – just something that has at least a little meaning. Try not to take this in the traditional “confessional” vein, but rather a blend of fact and fiction that describes a time with my grandson.

It would be easy for a person to say that I am afflicted with a serious anti-authority  complex…. Well, screw them; it’s great to be right. The real problem is how difficult, painful, and downright mystifying I find human relationships. Mostly, I pretty much suck at relationships and have fought with, argued with, or disappointed virtually everyone I know and most everyone who tried to be my friend… and yet, I still have a few friends.

It is not difficult for me to think that I am a failed son, brother, husband and father, a mediocre sailor, poet, writer, and artist, etc. ad nauseam…. Well, screw me; get over it. I take the advice I’ve given my children; “keep on breathing and keep on trying, just keep breathing in and out.” The real difference here is that my children are succeeding – they are the blooms in this desert around me.

Aiden the Agile

I can also imagine myself at the Benedictine Nursing Center, warehoused, waiting to die and desperately trying to wring some meaning from what has passed for my life. I worked at the nursing center for a short time on the Alzheimer’s/Dementia Unit while my grandmother was a resident of the facility. It became unbearably easy to weep for myself, for those I cared about, and those I was caring for – to weep for that THING we all have somehow lost forever and cannot hope to find.

Before one thinks this is some pessimistic exercise in futility, or a wallowing in self-pity, remember what I’ve told my children – “you are still alive, breathe in and out, be that courageous person that continues to breathe.” Even though depression, anguish, or despair may influence everything around you, EVERYTHING else is still out there – all of those small and good things. To me, this sentiment reflects my geography because this is so much like the Pacific Northwest! “OF COURSE it’s cloudy, but OOOHHH, look how the sun filters through the clouds and trees!” So then, I’ll breathe in and out and do my best because I’ll be in the ground soon enough.

Why the long schpeel? Because I don’t make real friends easily, and that history is important for my little poem about my grandson!

Things a Little Boy Can’t Say

Aiden Completes the Log Walk

The ocean splashed and crashed
His little voice away, and I,
Just feet away,
Boomed my voice’s harsh sound that bound
His little body to the spot almost daring him not
To move toward the edge of Fogarty Creek.

His eyes, yearned to yearn –
His thoughts sought to seek an explanation
For wanting to want so desperately
To get his feet wet in that cascade of wild water…

And in he stepped,
Through my warning, and
Straight into my anger –
Soaking his shoes wet with it.

“WHY?!”

His eyes yearned, then teemed with tears,
His thoughts sought and failed to find an explanation
For his body’s unthinkable betrayal of desiring

To desire to sneak
Those sneakers wet.

My anger dissipated on the drive home –
The shoes were none the worse for wear –
And after dinner, while playing with his Legos, he said,

“Grandpa?”

A Gift From Aiden to His Mother

“Yes?”

“Will you play with me?”

This was not forgiveness.
This had nothing to do with a young boy’s utter inability
To say what he most needed
To say
That day.

This was not adult explanation time.
Explaining something to a boy that needed no explanations
About my unjustified anger.

Where?

You see, there ARE things a little boy can’t say –
But not for want of trying.
There are things an old man CAN say, but
Ought to try not to…
So he will hear a simple offer of friendship.

“Grandpa?”

“Yes?”

“Will you play with me?”

“Aiden, there is nothing I’d rather do.”

Though he didn’t understand my watery eyes,
I’m pretty certain he understood my answer to his question,

“Why?”

“Because it is great to be breathing!
What a wonderful thing it is to be
breathing and alive today with you!”

Cheers all!

Powder and Grrr

He lived a hearty fourteen years. I found him in the dumpster outside the Benedictine Nursing Center in Mt. Angel. It’s been a very fun life to watch play out in the span of my own, and one that touched me daily – so I figure a small eulogy is in order.

Powder and Lladro

The doc said that “leapers” like Powder tend to have their hips fall apart on them, and certainly, by the end of his life he was hobbling around the best he could. My incredible wife carefully switched his diet from crunchy to soft as he started losing his teeth, we had a bit in common Powder and I… Today, partly because of an infected scratch, but mostly because he was getting to the point that it was difficult to eat and drink, we took him to the vet and put him down. My wife, my youngest daughter (now almost 21), and myself watched as the vet used anesthesia to put him to sleep, to drift off to he-man cat Valhalla. We all cried like school girls… which is ok for my wife and daughter, they were once school girls. Couldn’t help it, I hated to see him go. Though he didn’t die in battle, he was quite the warrior… and he was mine.