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February 24, 2008Lower the lights, Samson,to make it a little more conducive to poetry,said Diamond Dave to his son at a reading. POETRY HAPPENSwhen everything comes together in the spark of the moment, like a match head erupting into flame. Perhaps lowering the lights is a contributing element that makes the moment what it is, and no doubt there are other elements that all combine to add up to love. Love happens. HAS LOVE FOUND YOU or have you found love?I asked a friend, catching up by email. I’m asking myself that too. I’m also asking, do I want to find it? You never know when it’s going to walk unbidden into your flat. It actually did, once. I was sitting in my apartment in Portland and a fellow staying with a tenant downstairs knocked on the door and walked right in. A total stranger, he told me he’d heard I was a writer and so was he. Long story short, he courted me, won me, and took me to Freeland, Whidbey Island, Washington where we spent 6 months on 11 acres of land off of Milepost 22 between Langley and Greenbank, not far from Useless Bay. He was a rebel type with silver hair, silver tongue and gypsy mustache, who turned my head for a time. He was also a sociopath and career criminal. He ended up in the hoosegow and, later, Arkansas State Penitentiary, where he died his predictable death from some conflict with another prisoner. “How can you not dance?” he used to say, as if life demanded it. One time a friend told me I shouldn’t be buzzing people up to my top floor apartment without knowing who it is, and that someday it might be Jack the Ripper. Nevertheless, not long after I buzzed in who I thought was the same friend, opened the door and resumed washing dishes. There was a knock. “Is that you, Jack?” I called from the kitchen in my bathrobe, expecting the same friend. “NO, IT’S THE FBI.”And it was! They were looking for Bud, who always hurried to get back into trouble as soon as he’d gotten out of it. I said the last time I saw him my foot was on his backside kicking him out the door. Looking back, I didn’t love him; I was just looking for excitement. Excitement that included crystal meth, the crabs, rifles, a marriage engagement, bridge-climbing and grand larceny. Ah, youth. After Bud got picked up for driving with a suspended license, I couldn’t wait to get back to single city living in Portland. Old friend Joe Puccio’s voice once again echoes through the corridors of time: “You’re alone because you want to be.” Sometimes, being alone is all I can handle. My mind is so distracted by the logistics of dumping my stuff, selling this place and finding a new home, I have little left to give, whether to my book proposal, new relationships, reading, friends, or even myself. AM I UP FOR THIS?“(I shouldn’t tell you this),” Jeff Daniels says sheepishly to Meryl Streep in “The Hours,” “I’ve fallen in love.” “Really?” “Yes. With a student.” “With a student…” “Exactly! I know! You think, am I still up for this? All this intensity, all those arguments, doors being slammed, but—you know what it’s like.” I do know what it’s like. Think I’ll fall into a book instead. BOOKS FALL OPEN, YOU FALL INwrote David McCord. Timothy Egan, in his New York Times article “Book Lust,” quoted Steve Jobs as saying, “the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year.” He was dissin’ Amazon’s new Kindle electronic reader, dismissing it as “product.” Egan, and I, do not concur. “Reading,” he says, is not like the interface between a user and his technology; “it is something else, an engagement of the imagination with life experience. It’s fad-resistant, precisely because human beings are hard-wired for story, and intrinsically curious.” TOM CRUISEhad a need for speed; I have a need to read. It is an urge that must be fulfilled—like the itching feeling that comes over me to hunt thrift shops for buried treasure. Every now and then I just have to do it, and the jewels emerge. Nothing else satisfies the need to read, whether for information, relaxation, education, enrichment or enjoyment—the search for words and thoughts beautifully arranged. Sometimes I wonder if I should spend so much time reading. Would it be better spent wandering the streets of Paris? Or just connecting more with people who don’t appear between the covers of a book? Especially in going through my books and encountering dozens I’ve already read and don’t remember a word of. “Oh yeah, I have to read that again.” But when I look at my extensive library I am confronted with my mortality. I couldn’t live long enough to read them all. Yet I like just being surrounded by the potentialities of books, the treasures I’ve yet to unearth. I’m leafing through Biblioholism, The Literary Addiction (defined by author Tom Raabe as “the habitual longing to purchase, read, store, admire and consume books”), which my friend Margie gave me in Berkeley on May 17, 1997, inscribed: “From Powell’s [Bookstore] in Portland. Today we are visiting you in exotic Berkeley. You’ve found your spot.” A year later I wrote beneath it on the flyleaf, “High anxiety H bus read while cracking up! November ’98, Berkeley to SF. Will I ever find my spot?” YEP, FINDING ONE’S SPOTis a high-anxiety ride. Ten years later, eight into the new millennium, I am still looking for it. I will find it, only in the fullness of time. I’ll keep you posted. I’m looking forward to reading in my new apartment and not feeling like I’m stealing time from something else. In my teens and twenties I was busy being studious, educating myself about music and film, and plowing through boyfriends; in my thirties the fun I should have had as a child and young adult declared its right to be enjoyed, and my lifestyle was all about fun and having it; now, in my forties and fifties, my concept of fun has changed. It’s not only about getting older. The fun is still being had; it’s just differently expressed and enjoyed and it’s just fine to have it by myself. I love sitting alone in a corner of the couch reading, as much as I ever did dancing all night. As Longfellow put it, THE LOVE OF LEARNING, THE SEQUESTERED NOOKS, AND ALL THE SWEET SERENITY OF BOOKSI’m fortunate to have many readers who appreciate those things, so I hope I didn’t come across, in the Carlin piece, as not caring what my readers think. If I didn’t I wouldn’t provide an email address. But sometimes I think fondly of the days when most artists and public figures were inaccessible—when there was still a mystery about certain people instead of a website, an events calendar, a mailing list, etc.. While author Barry Gifford offers a website, his email is handled by his assistant Oscar and he once yelled, at City Lights Books, “That’s not what I’m here for!” In these days of comments and responses to the comments, there is simply too much opinion out there to digest. While I am most interested in what my readers have to say, when you take the trouble to write, at the same time I won’t whitewash my work to make it more palatable to “the public.” The public is made up of individuals, and they all have something different to say. You simply can’t make artistic choices without displeasing someone. In fact, after the George Carlin rumination, one reader asked to be removed from my list (a high-profile San Francisco personage, no less). He didn’t say why, but I assumed he didn’t want to open his morning email and find a slew of cuss words, even though I provided a “nasty language ahead” cautionary note in the email to my blast list. But another reader wrote: AX IS A MIGHTY PIRATE WITH A SALTY TONGUE!George Carlin exposed the secret language we use only in certain circumstances and certain company (or conscientiously avoid), and defused their mystique as gently as a gerbil. In fact a reader called one such word a “Carlin.” But they’re still out there getting under people’s skin. I ADMIT MY EYES WIDENEDwhen I saw that Katy St. Clair, in an SF Weekly feature, had described her experience of the camaraderie of staff after the closing hour of a bar: “It was fucking great.” Obviously “fucking” falls into the realm of acceptable language for this alternative paper. But it did make me wonder why she chose it for this sentence. “Fucking” does sound an alert, however it’s used. “Here I am,” it seems to announce itself. I paused for a moment, writing my last column, to ask myself if my use of “That is my idea of a freakin’ [instead of ‘fucking’] first movement,” was a concession to sensitive readers—but to me the words are not interchangeable. I use “freakin’” as a light-hearted colloquialism of the general impression something makes on me. For instance, I have long identified myself as a “Bach freak.” Bach freaks know what I mean, and we know who we are. I am “obsessed with or unusually enthusiastic about a specified interest,” according to my online dictionary. Everything Bach wrote is freakin’ great—good enough to freak out (hyperventilate) over—but I heard a fucking great performance of the Bm Mass at St Mark’s. The Eroica is a freakin’ great symphony, and I heard a fucking great performance by Suwallish and the Philly Boys. “It was a blast!” “It was so much fun!” “It was really great!” “It was fucking great, man.” GREAT IS NOT AS GREAT AS IT USED TO BE.Once upon a time, it was pretty great to be great. But in this age of excess and hyperbole, it’s as if great is not great enough a compliment as “as great,” “greater” and “greatest,” so calling someone “great” lacks conviction, when you could be calling him “the greatest.” How would you rather be announced: Please welcome the great trumpet player Miles Davis. Please welcome one of the greatest trumpet players ever, Miles Davis. Please welcome the single greatest trumpet player ever, Miles Davis! Do you like better: “You look great!” or “You look really great!“I see “fucking” as the far end of a continuum of intensifiers you can add to great to make great greater: “great great (so nice, say it twice); pretty great, really great, reeeeeeeeeee-ally great, so great, such a great-whatever, exceptionally great, super-great, mind-blowing great, it was …..it was fucking great, man.” “FUCKING GREAT”is outrageously so, great to the max, like Burning Man is fucking great or a Dead Concert was fucking great. To me it connotes more of a life-altering or lifetime-memorable event than the other expressions, which could mean you simply had fun like many other forgettable times. Someone saying, “It was a great concert,” does not say too much about the concert. But “it was fucking great man,” means I should have been there; I missed an experience that words would only diminish, that does not rival other “fucking great” events—they coexist as singular moments of your life, like “the time I saw the Stones,” or “that time I hiked down the Grand Canyon.” “Man, it was fucking great. “Anyway there’s a limit to allowing others to horn in on one’s creative process. You have to trust yourself, or you’re not in charge. St. Clair’s “fucking great” surprised me, but I was blown away (my jaw literally dropped) by a love note in “Atonement.” Spoilers! The character Robbie is writing and rejecting various apologetic notes to the lithesome daughter of the manor, Cecilia (he the son of a servant, who’s been Cambridge-educated by the Lord of the manor), and naughtily types one outrageously honest version never meant to be read—which he of course accidentally slips into the envelope instead of the polite handwritten version he considers most suitable. He asks her young sister Briony (with a crush on him) to deliver it to her. WHAT’S THE MOST HORRIBLE WORD YOU CAN THINK OF?Briony asks later. Well it’s one that will blackball Robbie out of the family forever. The note, which she immediately read, said, “In my dreams I kiss your sweet, wet cunt.” Whoa! Can you imagine that usage among the gentry, in 1935, when the picture opens? I agree, that is the most horrible word. I consider it to be the ugliest and meanest-spirited of Carlin’s heavy seven; although Urban Dictionary says its derivation, “cunner,” is used “amicably” among friends. I would never use it in an intimate context as Robbie does here. And yet it is so unbelievably inappropriate, so revealing of him, so unexpectedly shocking, that Cecilia’s latent feelings for Robbie blossom on the spot. Such is the power of words. Love happens. I WAS SURPRISED,when Vanity Fair asked Joan Fontaine who or what is the greatest love of her life, she said, “The English language.” As it has long been mine. If I want to admit it, if I am indeed alone because I want to be, it’s so I can be alone with the greatest love of my life, the English language. Whether reading or writing it, poetry happens.
Salud, Neruda ------------------------------------------------------------ Poetry happens
Poetry...love...love...poetry...what's the diff? copyright Alexandra Jones 2008 |
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