I'm wondering why you want to know

A public policy organization here wrote a crucial report about homicides in Oakland. I have it, have interviewed the authors about it, even though they were pretty hesitant about doing the interview. Anyway, the report, or analysis, is a primary tool for a big violence prevention approach the city is taking that I am writing a story about. I think the report is amazing and fascinating and was working on my piece and praising it and wanted to write a sentence about how long they had worked on it, but realized I didn't have that info. That's all. So I emailed one of the authors with the question, How long did it take you to put that report together? She responded with a question of her own:

I'm wondering why you want to know.

It's like these people are on drugs they're so paranoid. As if my job ain't hard enough. Now I'm kind of wondering why I wanted to know.

Poem by Derek Mahon

Can't find the book this poem comes from; it's somewhere among the piles

I have long loved this poem by the Irish poet Derek Mahon, but I always have to look up the word "imprevisable," even though its meaning is detectable from its spelling. It means "lacking predictability," but also can mean voluble, or "moving quickly from solid or liquid to vapor." I think maybe Mahon/Horace meant it to be read both ways, even though the meanings are, in this context, contradictory: that is, certainly the future is unpredictable, except that we will all change from our bodies of mass and water into vapor, into dust. But this is a happy poem with a message of embracing life in moments, as it happens, and not worrying yourself too much. I love "the days are more fun than the years..." Decant your wine.

How to Live
(Horace, Odes, Book One, II)

Don't waste your time, Leuconoe, living in fear and hope
of the imprevisable future; forget the horoscope.
Accept whatever happens. Whether the gods allow
us fifty winters more or drop us at this one now
which flings the high Tyrrhenian waves on the stone piers,
decant your wine: the days are more fun than the years
which pass us by while we discuss them. Act with zest
one day at a time, and never mind the rest.
                                                       - Derek Mahon

Slowly twisting in the wind - Lines from the Singing Loins

The Singing Loins are a great folk duo from the Medway Delta in Kent, SE England. Some of their records have been produced by Billy Childish. They create great harmonies and play many serious songs ( Video: "Hauling in the Slack"), but they are also funny, and even in the song these lines are from, all about self-doubt, they end up laughing. Anyway, this is how I always feel whenever it's time to write, especially the last few stanzas and the wind-twisting thing:

Little Devil Doubt by the Singing Loins

Little devil doubt
I'll cast you out
Tomorrow...
For today, you've ruined me (sic) life.

Little devil doubt
I'll cast you out,
Today....
For tomorrow, I've work to do.

Little devil doubt
though I've not sinned
I'm slowly twisting in the wind.
I wish my friends would all come by
to pull my leg and help me die.

Slowly twisting in the wind
Slowly twisting in the wind

Little devil doubt
I'll cast you out
In a while...
For now, I'm paralyzed.

Little devil doubt
I'll cast you out
this minute...
Before you hang me high.

Slowly twisting in the wind
Slowly twisting in the wind
Slowly twisting in the wind
Slowly twisting in the wind...

All these Pale Fires...

Reading Shakespeare last night, came to the passage from which Nabokov chose the title for my favorite novel, Pale Fire. Then, this morning, there the term was again in a Flannery O'Connor short story, so here they all are together, along with some Nabokov Pale Fire paraphernalia....

The sun's a thief, and with his great attraction
Robs the vast sea. The moon's an arrant thief,
And her pale fire she snatches from the sun...
                                           - Shakespeare
                                             Timon of Athens
                                             Act 4, Scene 3

Tarwater lurched into the middle of the stream bed and crouched on his hands and knees. The moon was reflected like pale fire in the few spots of water in the sand... 
                                                                     - Flannery O'Connor
                                                                       "You Can't Be Any Poorer Than Dead"

Nabokov's endlessly great novel:                                                 His fictional poet's poem:

                                     Also Shades' famous index cards: 

Shade stuff from the beautiful Gingko Press edition, Berkeley 2011.

                                                

The Lonely Goatherd

The charlatan,
a suicide,
he never really could decide:
mountain goats?
Or whores with sores
in their throats?
                   -J. O'Brien

A Messenger

He said, “God is the light of day.” 

Then what is the dark of night? 

He said God is:
the bright white wine
and the inky red that stains

the enormous void we bear 
and the thing we bear it in
all we do not know 
and how we know it. Tell him
my mind flutters and flits
like a very plain butterfly
over a flaming field in mid-summer
that deadens the soul. 

And there is no chance of rain 
and the sun is set to remain
remote for years without dying
and nothing will change
not direction nor this weak, weakening 
effort to alight in shaded 
safety. 

                              Tell him this then, 
approximately where I can be found: 
in a field aflame in dead 
summer, unable to land.
                                       -J. O'Brien

Poem by Patrick Kavanagh

Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh

I think someone out there who knows might say that Patrick Kavanagh was 20th Century Irish poetry's bridge, if not thematically then in terms of greatness, between Yeats and Heaney. Apparently, he admired later Yeats. In style and sometimes theme he anticipated Heaney. In his lifetime he never got the respect those two enjoyed. Here I love the tone. Personally, I very much identify with "the mirage/ that was my future." I love the idea -- Give me back the fog! -- and the double-take syntax of the third stanza. It's worth lingering over. I like the occasional absence of expected punctuation. And how "without knowing" becomes a noun. (As I read it anyway.) These things attach you to a poem, they make it tangle with your brain and vice versa; you become intimate, first like wrestlers, then lovers.


I Had a Future

O I had a future
A future

Gods of the imagination bring back to life
The personality of those streets,
Not any streets
But the streets of nineteen forty.

Give the quarter-seeing eyes I looked out of
The animal-remembering mind
The fog through which I walked towards
      The mirage
That was my future.

The women I was to meet
They were nowhere within sight.

And then the pathos of the blind soul,
How without knowing stands in its own kingdom.
Bring me a small detail
How I felt about money,
Not frantic as later,
There was the future.

Show me the stretcher-bed I slept on
In a room on Drumcondra Road,
Let John Betjeman call for me in a car.

It is summer and the eerie beat
of madness in Europe trembles the
Wings of the butterflies along the canal.

O I had a future.
                                 - Patrick Kavanagh

Poem by Ralph Hodgson

'The thickets of the Heart" is such a lovely phrase, of course. I remember once being in New Mexico with an ornithologist netting tiny birds to weigh and tag them, how fragile they were in his hand. But I like the idea of lurking in the heart in search of joy. Hodgson also mentions goldfinches in a poem called "Ghoul Care" (unfortunate title) as one of the three charms that protect him from the master of "the Pit," that "prodigious Bat" that I suspect refers to sadness and perhaps depression. Me, I am weak at catching the twittering beauties, though sometimes goldfinches flit in abundance around my backyard. Maybe I need a new clap-net, whatever that is...

The Birdcatcher
When flighting time is on I go
With clap-net and decoy,
A-fowling after goldfinches
And other birds of joy;

I lurk among the thickets of
The Heart where they are bred,
And catch the twittering beauties as
They fly into my Head.
                           -Ralph Hodgson 
                             1917

Stanza from Roethke's "The Pure Fury"

This is stanza # 3 of 4 numbered stanzas, I was struck, real struck, by the line, A man's a beast prowling in his own house...


How terrible the need for solitude:
That appetite for life so ravenous
A man's a beast prowling in his own house,
A beast with fangs, and out for his own blood
Until he finds the thing he almost was
When the pure fury first raged in his head
And trees came closer with a denser shade.
                                    - From "The Pure Fury" by Theodore Roethke
                                                           

Heaney's journey to Aarhus

August 30, 2013 - Heaney died today. This is an excerpt, with some lines from the poet, from an unpublished essay I wrote about, among other things, my encounter with Ötzi the Iceman:

I’ve always loved old bones. I love their mystery, the tactile connection they represent to personal histories, so close yet so obscure. For me there has been no bigger thrill than peering into a gaping, ruined grave in Enniskillen to spy in the shadows an old browned skull and to imagine, just for a moment, just a sound the brain it held might have produced, just one emotion, one sensation. And if old bones were thrilling, then old faces, old noses, old fingernails and old whiskers were even better. Although I’d found they could disappoint, too. Once I had walked the long, grim, subterranean corridors of a monastery in Palermo where hundreds of dried mummies of all ages, dressed in their burial clothes, gazed back at me. Their poses bordered on clownishness and their display amounted to a violation, like a deprivation of promised sleep. They should have delivered me to a morbid nirvana. Instead they left me unmoved.

The Bog People by P.V. Glob

Then I read P.V. Glob’s classic, The Bog People (from the miraculous New York Review of Books imprint), about the fully-preserved Iron Age corpses found in bogs in Denmark and Ireland, men who were criminals, young women who were adulterers or in some cases sacrifices to the gods. I could spend an entire afternoon staring at photographs of the tormented, peat-stained, human face of the Tollund Man, his impressively aquiline nose, the vertical crease of mortal anguish in his forehead, the hangman’s noose around his neck still. I had read and re-read the poems the bog mummies had inspired in Seamus Heaney. For the poet, the Tollund Man, the Grauballe Man, the Bog Queen, and the brutality and cruel, ignorant sacrifice to which they bore witness, became useful symbols for the violent, religion-fueled predicament of the Irish of the 1970s. Here he would leave behind snipes and drowned farm cats as symbols and turn to something more ambiguous and better. “Opening The Bog People,” he told Dennis O’Driscoll, “was like opening a gate."

Through them Heaney could exercise his gift for ruthless identification and self-reflection. It’s all there in a bog poem called “Punishment,” with passages like these:

I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,

who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.

This desire I feel and draw I find in Ötzi Heaney describes precisely in these stanzas from “Tollund Man:"

Some day I will go to Aarhus
To see his peat-brown head,
The mild pods of his eyelids,
His pointed skin cap,

In the flat country nearby
Where they dug him out,
His last gruel of winter seeds,
Caked in his stomach...

Heaney dreamed of a journey to Denmark to see the Tollund Man, like mine to Italy to see the Iceman; I happen to know he made it. I could think of few better fates for a corpse than to become the inspiration for a poem, or a journey to Aarhus, by Seamus Heaney. And all Ötzi gets is me.
                                                                                     
                                                                                              -from "The Find"