George Oppen: Escape from ants, water meters, and the revival of the Melita coffee filter cone

We had quite a start to the day:  The café-presse broke, as café-presses will do, right when you want coffee;  Dobby discovered non-hairball inspired projectile vomiting, which I joyously cleaned up; I infused twice the amount of an antibiotic and decided to care less; The West of the Lone Alp Tête de Hergé Water Municipal OverLordShip sent us the sweetest municipal worker ever, even if he did keep slapping me on the shoulder [He told me that I "looked fetching today," so he can slap the hell out of that boneless hump as much as he likes, and he also declared the outrageous water readings to be the fault of the electronic doodad and not the result of a gushing leak, or my two diuretics.]; Then the ants attacked, again, this time traversing the back porch, the kitchen window, and proceeding, lemming-like, to drown themselves, en masse, in a sink full of soapy water.  This was accomplished in the course of 30 minutes, as I *know* there were no aunts committing suicide a half hour earlier, when I so carefully hooked myself up to the wrong antibiotic -- right next to the Death Pool of soapy Lemon Ajax.  Meanwhile, the Special-Oh-So-Special Topiary Team arrived to try and rectify some of the burgeoning Labyrinth issues... and we had to send La Bonne et Belle Bianca Castafiore out to oversee their work, despite her obsessive reworking of the Jewel Song (Gounod's Air des bijoux) into a soulful Lithuanian version.  Unfortunately, her tendency to transpose parts with Latvian translation... well, we're not sure her focus is entirely on the correct training of the British Boxwoods.

I signed up last week for the Poem-A-Day service of the Academy of American Poets.

That can be a real life-saver on mornings such as this 'un.

And as I calmed down, I realized I didn't like today's poem much.  So I locked myself in the Computer Turret (one day soon, I'll explain the modifications we've made to accomodate slithering into that space from a power chair, with CRPS-flaring legs, a reconstructed ankle and elbow, a prosthetic hip, one prosthetic shoulder, and one shoulder gone missing... using the rope ladder/bridge strung from our small tower to the barn, now the Rehab Center for Carnies and Wayward Acrobats.)

And I spent several hours with George Oppen, renewed that love.  Fred was good enough to ferry up a thermos of excellent coffee mid-afternoon, and the Marlinspike Hall Domestic Staff showed me the kindness of pretending they didn't know it was me up here delivering my usual arias of "damndamndamndamn" when the Screaming Ninny CRPS Dystonia Spasms showed up.

I'm in a sharing mood, as your current thought ("Dear Jeezus, does she have to share everything?") attests.

Courtesy of the Poetry Foundation, my intention to start a sort of poetry war action, and my outright theft of their holdings, here are Sections 1-22 of Oppen's Of Being Numerous:

1

There are things

We live among ‘and to see them

Is to know ourselves’.

Occurrence, a part

Of an infinite series,

The sad marvels;

Of this was told

A tale of our wickedness.

It is not our wickedness.

‘You remember that old town we went to, and we sat in the ruined window, and we tried to imagine that we belonged to those times—It is dead and it is not dead, and you cannot imagine either its life or its death; the earth speaks and the salamander speaks, the Spring comes and only obscures it—’

2

So spoke of the existence of things,

An unmanageable pantheon

Absolute, but they say

Arid.

A city of the corporations

Glassed

In dreams

And images—

And the pure joy

Of the mineral fact

Tho it is impenetrable

As the world, if it is matter,

Is impenetrable.

3

The emotions are engaged

Entering the city

As entering any city.

We are not coeval

With a locality

But we imagine others are,

We encounter them. Actually

A populace flows

Thru the city.

This is a language, therefore, of New York

4

For the people of that flow

Are new, the old

New to age as the young

To youth

And to their dwelling

For which the tarred roofs

And the stoops and doors—

A world of stoops—

Are petty alibi and satirical wit

Will not serve.

5

The great stone

Above the river

In the pylon of the bridge

‘1875’

Frozen in the moonlight

In the frozen air over the footpath, consciousness

Which has nothing to gain, which awaits nothing,

Which loves itself

6

We are pressed, pressed on each other,

We will be told at once

Of anything that happens

And the discovery of fact bursts

In a paroxysm of emotion

Now as always.   Crusoe

We say was

‘Rescued’.

So we have chosen.

7

Obsessed, bewildered

By the shipwreck

Of the singular

We have chosen the meaning

Of being numerous.

8

Amor fati

The love of fate

For which the city alone

Is audience

Perhaps blasphemous.

Slowly over islands, destinies

Moving steadily pass

And change

In the thin sky

Over islands

Among days

Having only the force

Of days

Most simple

Most difficult

9

‘Whether, as the intensity of seeing increases, one’s distance from Them, the people, does not also increase’

I know, of course I know, I can enter no other place

Yet I am one of those who from nothing but man’s way of thought and one of his dialects and what has happened to me

Have made poetry

To dream of that beach

For the sake of an instant in the eyes,

The absolute singular

The unearthly bonds

Of the singular

Which is the bright light of shipwreck

10

Or, in that light, New arts! Dithyrambic, audience-as-artists! But I will listen to a man, I will listen to a man, and when I speak I will speak, tho he will fail and I will fail. But I will listen to him speak. The shuffling of a crowd is nothing—well, nothing but the many that we are, but nothing.

Urban art, art of the cities, art of the young in the cities—The isolated man is dead, his world around him exhausted

And he fails! He fails, that meditative man! And indeed they cannot ‘bear’ it.

11

            it is that light

Seeps anywhere, a light for the times

In which the buildings

Stand on low ground, their pediments

Just above the harbor

Absolutely immobile,

Hollow, available, you could enter any building,

You could look from any window

One might wave to himself

From the top of the Empire State Building—

Speak

If you can

Speak

Phyllis—not neo-classic,

The girl’s name is Phyllis—

Coming home from her first job

On the bus in the bare civic interior

Among those people, the small doors

Opening on the night at the curb

Her heart, she told me, suddenly tight with happiness—

So small a picture,

A spot of light on the curb, it cannot demean us

I too am in love down there with the streets

And the square slabs of pavement—

To talk of the house and the neighborhood and the docks

And it is not ‘art’

12

‘In these explanations it is presumed that an experiencing subject is one occasion of a sensitive reaction to an actual world.’

the rain falls

that had not been falling

and it is the same world

. . .

They made small objects

Of wood and the bones of fish

And of stone. They talked,

Families talked,

They gathered in council

And spoke, carrying objects.

They were credulous,

Their things shone in the forest.

They were patient

With the world.

This will never return, never,

Unless having reached their limits

They will begin over, that is,

Over and over

13

           unable to begin

At the beginning, the fortunate

Find everything already here. They are shoppers,

Choosers, judges; . . . And here the brutal

is without issue, a dead end.

                                            They develop

Argument in order to speak, they become

unreal, unreal, life loses

solidity, loses extent, baseball’s their game

because baseball is not a game

but an argument and difference of opinion

makes the horse races. They are ghosts that endanger

One’s soul. There is change

In an air

That smells stale, they will come to the end

Of an era

First of all peoples

And one may honorably keep

His distance

If he can.

14

I cannot even now

Altogether disengage myself

From those men

With whom I stood in emplacements, in mess tents,

In hospitals and sheds and hid in the gullies

Of blasted roads in a ruined country,

Among them many men

More capable than I—

Muykut and a sergeant

Named Healy,

That lieutenant also—

How forget that? How talk

Distantly of ‘The People’

Who are that force

Within the walls

Of cities

Wherein their cars

Echo like history

Down walled avenues

In which one cannot speak.

15

Chorus (androgynous): ‘Find me

So that I will exist, find my navel

So that it will exist, find my nipples

So that they will exist, find every hair

Of my belly, I am good (or I am bad),

Find me.’

16

‘. . . he who will not work shall not eat,

and only he who was troubled shall find rest,

and only he who descends into the nether world shall rescue his beloved,

and only he who unsheathes his knife shall be given Isaac again. He who will not work shall not eat. . .

but he who will work shall give birth to his own father.’

17

The roots of words

Dim in the subways

There is madness in the number

Of the living

‘A state of matter’

There is nobody here but us chickens

Anti-ontology—

He wants to say

His life is real,

No one can say why

It is not easy to speak

A ferocious mumbling, in public

Of rootless speech

18

It is the air of atrocity,

An event as ordinary

As a President.

A plume of smoke, visible at a distance

In which people burn.

19

Now in the helicopters the casual will

Is atrocious

Insanity in high places,

If it is true we must do these things

We must cut our throats

The fly in the bottle

Insane, the insane fly

Which, over the city

Is the bright light of shipwreck

20

—They await

War, and the news

Is war

As always

That the juices may flow in them

Tho the juices lie.

Great things have happened

On the earth and given it history, armies

And the ragged hordes moving and the passions

Of that death. But who escapes

Death

Among these riders

Of the subway,

They know

But now as I know

Failure and the guilt

Of failure.

As in Hardy’s poem of Christmas

We might half-hope to find the animals

In the sheds of a nation

Kneeling at midnight,

Farm animals,

Draft animals, beasts for slaughter

Because it would mean they have forgiven us,

Or which is the same thing,

That we do not altogether matter.

21

There can be a brick

In a brick wall

They eye picks

So quiet of a Sunday

Here is the brick, it was waiting

Here when you were born

Mary-Anne.

22

Clarity

In the sense of transparence,

I don’t mean that much can be explained

Clarity in the sense of silence.

George Oppen, “Of Being Numerous (1-22)” from New Collected Poems. Copyright © 1968 by George Oppen. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

Source: New Collected Poems (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2008)

Ants be damned, water workers be blessed, gratitude for Melita coffee filter cones, and thanks to Fred, but most especially thanks to George Oppen, who nailed poems to wood, and who STAVED, STAVED, STAVED, and singularly rendered it a not-necessarily transitive verb.

"the present American poetic diction of brevity"

I enjoyed one of those moments, just a moment ago. I was browsing, looking for a short prose piece by my favorite poet, George Oppen. Thomas Devaney reproduced for his blog, creatively titled Thomas Devaney: Poet and Critic (very NPF Person & Poet Series), a newly discovered letter from Oppen to Buddhadev Bose, dated February 19, 1962, reproduced, annotated, and discussed here by Pat Clifford in the Jacket 36 2008 feature dedicated to Oppen's centenary.


What a boring and important world is the world of pain-staked attribution, and, in large part, that is what Oppen's letter to the Bengali author is about -- whose version of this formed the foundation for that, and whose translation of this is best in that application, and whose permission for all of it must be given and by whom received (and when?) -- such are publishing concerns.*

Rewriting exact translations, what Clifford calls transcreation, is tricky business.

In the middle of it all, you read this:

New Directions has agreed to print a collection of my work. I am very anxious to include the 'To Memory' as it appeared in San Francisco Review, and a poem derived from your 'Still Life' which is a still freer version. It contains only the line 'What are you, apple' as a direct quote from your work. Your form, since it has expressed it, is surely 'good' form: it is simply not mine. My alteration is not meant as an attempt to 'correct' your work, but only to assimilate it to the present American poetic diction of brevity: to make the experiment of the American voice and tone expressing these concepts which I believe no American could form for himself.

The prose piece I have been looking for is, largely, about a Frenchman who carefully drives his bike into a tree, carefully committing suicide. It is a war poem, and about family, and about burning, focussed intention, as well. It is a poem against forgetting.

But this letter fragment will do nicely.

*The inferred content of the letters from Oppen to Bose, 1961-1964:

Oppen wrote at least at least five letters to Bose. The first letters deal with publishing concerns: Oppen submitting poems for Bose’s Kavita, Bose seeking to have work included in the San Francisco Review. In another, Oppen requested permission to use Bose’s poems “To Memory” and “Still Life” in The Materials. Other letters concern a memorable visit by Bose’s daughter Damayanti Basu Singh to the Oppens’ apartment in New York.

Of course, as soon as I uploaded this piece, I found what I originally wanted tonight, which turns out to be Section 5 of Route. It tells of the dilemma faced by Alsatian men during World War II, when they faced the possibility of being drafted into the German army. Some went into hiding, living in holes, which came to be known as faire un trou, and some lived in those holes for years. The Germans took revenge by killing his parents, pimping his wife, stealing his children.

There was an escape from that dilemma, as, in a way, there always is. Pierre told me of a man who, receiving the notification that he was to report to the German army, called a celebration and farewell at this home. Nothing was said at that party that was not jovial. They drank and sang. At the proper time, the host got his bicycle and waved good-bye. The house stood at the top of a hill and, still waving and calling farewells, he rode with great energy and as fast as he could down the hill, and, at the bottom, drove into a tree.

It must be hard to do. Probably easier in an automobile. There is, in an automobile, a considerable time during which you cannot change your mind. Riding a bicycle, since in those woods it is impossible that the tree should be a redwood, it must be necessary to continue aiming at the tree right up to the moment of impact. Undoubtedly difficult to do. And, of course, the children had no father. Thereafter.

There have been maintes opportunities lately for me to embrace the PennSound Project. One of those is its author page for Oppen.

American Idyll: Post 1,000

{photographs are from the american idyll blog, property of TW and ruuscal}



Congratulations to TW (and sidekick ruuscal) on the publication of the 1000th post over at American Idyll.

I remember my first visit -- that would have been in the wee hours of 4 January 2008, about 12 hours after receiving my first ever email from this talented Brother-Unit of mine. I had only recently learned he was still alive and had inundated him with pesky overtures.

I followed my heart and, despite the steady silence, sent a copy of the "new" Oppen collected works as a Christmas gift, thinking that the poet's own gift with words (and silence, too) might speak a better language.

a substantial language / Of clarity, and of respect

It was a very blue time.

I had sent off to him a final email and was kicking myself for it -- too long and too clingy, it had ended:

Make of all this what you will, but please believe me -- I have never been allowed any knowledge of you, except that which my memory guards, and I bring to you no agenda or pre-conceptions. I would prefer not to be the foil for the anger you bear toward some notion of a collective "family" -- but if I need to play that role, I'll give it my best shot.

I wish... so many things. That I could touch your face. That all of this massive stupidity and meanness had never happened.

So it was with exceeding joy -- that has not finished with me yet -- that I found this among the detritus of my inbox late in the day, Thursday, January 3 :

dear x -

thank you for the very generous and most appreciated gift of the poetry, your xmas card and emails. it has taken me longer than my usual tardy brooding tendency toward mute unresponsiveness to answer at all due to a recently broken shoulder, a loathing of christmas in general and a too-slammed-to-do-anything-but-try-to-survive workload of helping to keep an understaffed sportsbook afloat during college football bowl season.

plus, as you may surmise from the breezy fashion with which [one of our unfortunate relatives who had attempted to thwart our reunion] feels so free to reduce someone about whom she knows so little into a bite-size caricature, i am not one for busybody blabbermouths in general, and neither care to be anyone's project nor consider that there is any fold which i am longing to be brought back into à la the long lost lamb. (no prize find for some oprah/dr. phil instigated genealogical scavenger hunt moi)

but you seem very likeable. just enough snark and darkside to make me think we may just get along. at any rate, by way of new year's greetings i forward a link to one of my tiresome blogs in the hope that an amateur's photos celebrating grand canyon backcountry may assuage some of the insomniac wanderlust that is sure to afflict a cerebral soul confined to a wheelchair: american idyll.

more soon,
tw (haven't been called xxxxxx in 35 years)

Honest to God, I had no recollection of the Dr. Phil/Oprah reference, but isn't that timely?!

I had -- in the dead of winter -- made wonderful gazpacho that afternoon and Fred and I had fought before he went off -- purportedly, to run errands, but probably just to get away. The details of the fight escape me, but I recall it having stemmed, in large part, from my sad and poorly controlled frustration at not having heard any word from Tumbleweed.

You know, I think the spat involved whether or not we needed a new model PUR water filter. Why do I remember that and not how the green of his shirt set off his hazel eyes?

When Fred came home, I was awash in happy tears. We rejoiced together and I was so overwhelmed and exhausted that I decided to put off checking out my brother's blog. *One* of his blogs.

But I couldn't sleep that night, couldn't rest. In the dark, I pulled my laptop into bed and fumbled until I found the link to American Idyll.

Word and image! ut pictura poesis! You'll not be surprised to learn that my graduate work was organized around the excessively cute dialectic of "lutte" pictura poesis. So how perfect and what a testiment to the Nature::Nurture struggle was the sight of his powerful photography and the sound of his chosen texts.

He was right, of course, and American Idyll has assuaged considerable wanderlust and has served to defy both physical and mental limitations.

It's a place for mindful meditation and the occasional romp in the water...

It is only a dream of the grass blowing
east against the source of the sun
in an hour before the sun’s going down


whose secret we see in a
children’s game
of ring a round of roses told.


Often I am
permitted to return to a meadow
as if it were a given property of the mind
that certain bounds hold against chaos,


that is a place of first
permission,
everlasting omen of what is.

For TW on the Occasion of His Birthday

Thanks, Fresca, for encouraging me to pursue giving to TW in the rich spirit of his own recent gifts.

I put it all in action, anyway, by asking my Brother-Units last year to consider packing boxes of Important Stuff From Their Lives in lieu of shrink-wrapped, brand-spanking new orders from Amazon.

Send only used items, I said. Send things that have mattered to you, at different times, over the years, I urged.

Grader Boob, ever difficult, sent me a $300 gift certificate to Amazon.com -- 'nuff said.

TW took me at my word and sent me a box of music, books, videos, prayer flags -- I held my breath, I am still holding my breath.

I understood the enormity of the gift, and my appreciation knows no bounds (He sent me another box for my birthday in January.).

But I did not understand the risk; I did not understand the fear. (TW subsequently joked that he was sure he would never hear from me again.)

Both need to be transcended, of course, for the gift to be given. Hell, for the gift to make it to the car for the trip to the Post Office, one has to be at a kind of peace.

I know this because the contents of my box for TW -- he shares Hitler's birthday, the one piece of trivia I always remembered about my lost older brother -- how he lamented that coincidence! I know this because the contents of my box for TW lie before me on a faded patchwork quilt. I cannot find a box big enough to hide everything in, so it is all there, mocking me.

But I am at a kind of peace.

I have resisted the urge to enclose a "blank sheet of paper... by way of explanation."

Do you remember that line? From Raise High the Roofbeams, Carpenters? I always felt (pretty much like every Perpetually Misunderstood Perpetual Adolescent when left alone with Salinger) that my brothers and I were Franny, Zooey, Buddy, and Seymour, that we were capable of every fey bit of wit, and might have authored each slight, or unwieldy, whimsy.

That line figures among the choice few to which my mind clings with relative accuracy. Funny, but while there's nothing of Holden Caulfield in my memory, there are a dozen or so references from the Glass Family series, and Nine Stories. (Haven't you chuckled to yourself, then hummed, just before crowing to your love, busy pulling a tee shirt over his wet-haired, curly head: "It's a fine day for banana fish, darling!"? Of course, if you were as sharp as you like to think you are, you would have chirped "This is a perfect day for bananafish." But who would say such a thing?)

An old man, compact, tiny, an old deaf-mute man, affixed with a cigar and mute eloquence, this old man gloms onto Buddy as he dashes around town the day of Seymour's wedding. It's hot to the point of melting good will, notes are being left in lipstick on mirrors, ice is melting in gin, lightly clinking, and the Matron of Honor brays like a donkey, she is that mad. The old and tiny deaf-mute, impeccable in his wedding duds -- Muriel's uncle, if it matters -- nods and smiles at whatever he imagines is going on, and, clearly, the goings-on have morphed into something downright congenial and civilized for the dear man.

It's a lot to load on the shoulders of a fictive game piece (He's always figured in my head as one of the Monopoly game piece do-dads -- but now that I have seen them, I see that he is not all there, not at all.

He is adequately depicted by the Top Hat, I suppose. Or is that a Bowler?

No, it's always been: dog, top hat, wheel barrow, race car, boot, iron, ship, and thimble. Not Lincoln's stern stovepipe, but not a squat close-fitting bowler either.


Well, obviously, I have the whole thing confused in my extra-leaky sieve-of-a-noodle -- confused, maybe, with the Monopoly Man?



It's hard, dealing with resounding meanings, seeking to rely on memory, cultural memories and personal ones, too. It's confusing. [A remembered image of GW Bush springs up, unbidden, unwanted, and there he is, shaking his large head and cartoon face above some podium, somewhere, lamenting "It's hard work..." over and over and over again.



Anyway, I've resisted the urge to explain to Tumbleweed the rationale driving the choice of items in his birthday box. How to say that seven times, already, in the course of my years, I have gotten rid of what mattered the most to me, materially. A few times, it was after heartbreak. A few more times, the culling harvest came on the heels of deep depression (once this involved a good Beaujolais and burning things in a crackling fire). A couple of instances simply reflected the need for money, and so my treasures were sold off, piece by piece. Several years ago, I realized that Fred had hoarding tendencies. I always knew this, I guess, but it reached a crisis point when my pain and disability began to dictate some real physical limitations. I was his defense against chaos -- not just my harpy's tongue, but my inbred need for cleanliness and order. I had always at least set the boundaries for his mess -- his office, his workroom, and so on.


But one day, his books were piled on my shelves. His collection of fine backscratchers were piled on top of my sundries, things much more genteel, Gregorian Chant and seashells.



Somewhere along the way, through the many moves, the incessant cleaning and sorting, stuff had lost its importance. I was filled with an urgency, a growing need to get rid of things. And so, I did. The difference between this latter instance and the times before? I did not reacquire. After I sent my favorite novel to the thrift store, along with a fine assemblage of American fiction, I did not reorder it six months later, desperate to reread what had once been so important.



Believe it or not, I did not finger meaningfully each besotten Memory Charm. I didn't sit with it, second-guessing, sighing. I remember tearing up one of two pictures I had of my paternal grandfather, disposing of several chapters from my thesis, preparing some fine Irish linens for donation -- all without a hint of a muscle twitch in my face.



It was, simply, time. I had enough, more than enough, and my gathering of things no longer represented me.



In other words, I was sure that there was nothing here for me to send to Tumbleweed, nothing that meant anything to me, nothing that met the requirements I had set last year for The Gifting. Any music I might choose was already music he would have, for I was instructed in things musical by our brother Grader Boob, who had been schooled, early on and most lastingly, by TW, himself.


Besides, he had given me the gift of his DeadHead days -- I had not tramped around the country making recordings, living large. No, I had it easy. And maybe I am a bit of what TW most derides -- maybe I am of the bourgeoisie, maybe I am a bit "pop" instead of "cool." His bookcases are full of resplendent nonfiction works of revolutionary ideology. I have all the Harry Potter, and I like Maeve Benchy.



He photographs, religiously, the Grand Canyon. I snap pictures of pink azaleas.



Yes, I almost defeated myself before beginning. He's my big brother and I want him to think well of me.



So I took the me out of it, in order to represent me, truly. I began to play a question game and let the answers commandeer the choices. Then I employed some common sense and returned those items beyond the pale of personal to their proper places in my home. TW does not have the right to everything meaningful, particularly when -- without that "blank sheet of paper... by way of explanation" -- the defining context for the thing is left out, left aside, or best left unsaid.





Beyond the pale. Yes, that's it, richly.



From Gary Martin's website, The Phrasefinder, the origins of beyond the pale:

Meaning: Unacceptable; outside agreed standards of decency.

Origin: Firstly, let's get get clear what word we are talking about here. It's pale, and certainly not pail, - the phrase has nothing to do with buckets. The everyday use of the word pale is as the adjective meaning whitish and light in colour (and used to that effect by Procol Harum and countless paint adverts). This pale is the noun meaning 'a stake or pointed piece of wood'. It is virtually obsolete now except in this phrase, but is still in use in the associated words paling (as in paling fence) and impale (as in Dracula movies).

The paling fence is significant as the term pale became to mean the area enclosed by such a fence and later just the figurative meaning of 'the area that is enclosed and safe'. So, to be 'beyond the pale' was to be outside the area accepted as 'home'.

Catherine the Great created a 'Pale of Settlement' in Russia in 1791. This was a western border region of the country in which Jews were allowed to live. The motivation behind this was to restrict trade between Jews and native Russians. Some Jews were allowed to live, as a concession, beyond the pale.

Pales were enforced in various other European countries for similar political reasons, notably in Ireland (the Pale of Dublin) and France (the Pale of Calais, which was formed as early as 1360).

The phrase itself comes later than that. The first printed reference comes from 1657 in John Harington's lyric poem The History of Polindor and Flostella.

In that work, the character Ortheris withdraws with his beloved to a country lodge for 'quiet, calm and ease', but later venture further - 'Both Dove-like roved forth beyond the pale to planted Myrtle-walk'. Such recklessness rarely meets with a good end in 17th century verse and before long they are attacked by armed men with 'many a dire killing thrust'. The message is clearly, 'if there is a pale, you should stay inside it', which conveys exactly the meaning of the phrase as it is used today.

(Besides, I have to save some things for Future Boxes.)

This is what I am sending TW:

A hand-loomed weaving from Nicaragua, the details of which tell the story of a farmer, a scarecrow, haystacks, and the crows, themselves. I wrote a short story based on this weaving. Maybe next box, I'll send the story along, to complete the gesture. It was a mystery, a real who-done-it, and took place in Texas. The background color is a deep purple. Somehow, the bright primary colors on top of that manage to be pretty instead of garish.

A Mercedes Sosa CD, just because of Gracias A La Vida:



A CD/DVD combo of Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris: Real Live RoadRunning. Okay, so this is not important to me... but it's something from Grader Boob to me, and I would like TW to have it. The same goes for the Marx Brothers Silver Screen Collection. Yes, I re-gifted.

A cassette of people (Gabriel Byrne, Minnie Driver, Colm Meaney...) reading The Poetry of William Butler Yeats.

The Definitive Collection: Nina Simone. 1959-74.

Neil Young: Live at Massey Hall, 1971.

A documentary on Townes Van Zandt -- Be here to love me. (I don't think I've ever before mentioned my total, total, total love of Townes Van Zandt on this blog before. I kind of liked the guy.)

Old Friends Live On Stage: Simon and Garfunkel. From the Old Friends tour -- "Their first and quite possibly last Second Coming for the Twenty-First Century..."
I very much appreciate how Simon chose to explain the thorny relationship between himself and Garfunkel -- "I don't think of Art Garfunkel as my friend. I think of him as family."

One worn copy of Thomas Savage's The Power of the Dog, with an afterword by Annie Proulx. The inside front cover, unfortunately, bears my scribbles about various mutual funds that I apparently was considering as investments. Trust me, if any of them were great picks, I'd pass them on.

T. H. White's The Book of Merlyn. A talisman, that book. Improbably, it is the book I have discarded and then replaced maintes fois. My folksy bible? I dunno. But I actually remember the very moment I first read the passage about Arthur's final meeting with Mordred, when he had almost brokered, hammered, hobbled together, and achieved -- a bit of truce, a peace -- when one of Mordred's officers saw a snake in the grass -- real, not proverbial -- and drew his "bright sword" to slay it:

The waiting armies, taking it for treachery, raised their shout of rage. The lances on both sides bowed to rest. And, as King Arthur ran towards his own array, an old man with white hair trying to stem the endless tide, holding out the knuckled hands in a gesture of pressing them back, struggling to the last against the flood of Might which had burst out all his life at a new place whenever he had dammed it, so the tumult rose, the war-yell sounded, and the meeting waters closed above his head.

Lancelot arrived too late.

Vasari's Lives of the Artists. I am having a hard time letting it go... but it will go.

The Thurber Carnival -- I am having a hard time letting it go, too, but only because it is a superb help when I am sick. It will go, too, but I am not sure that is the height of wisdom.

Despite TW's deep and abiding atheism, Thomas Merton's Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander -- because this is about what has been meaningful and important to me, and something must represent the considerable amount of time I have spent forcing myself on various fine monks at various fine monasteries -- my ideal vacation for many years! Odd that the dozen or so passages I marked up (at least I used a pencil) now leave me cold. But Merton stole my heart when I discovered he also read Oppen. [There is no need to send TW any copies of Oppen's poetry, as that is something I did within weeks of first finding him two years ago. If you are dear to me? You will, in short order, possess two books: George Oppen's Selected Poems and Disturbances in the Field by Lynne Sharon Schwartz. The latter is pure self-indulgence but I have tired of pretending to care. I like it, that's all. If you are especially beloved, there is much more to the Reading List, but also a greater likelihood that I will make you listen to Important Book Passages during Extended Late Night Readings. It's part of my secret plan to keep that group very, very small.]

A slim volume, also something I have discarded and repurchased a few times, but out of need and not want: A Tomb for Anatole by Stéphane Mallarmé, with daring translations by Paul Auster. [Uh-oh! In looking up that link to Amazon, I happened to see that there is a new version out, For Anatole's Tomb, Patrick McGuinness (Translator). I do not DARE scratch that itch in the face of my declarations about divestment, above!] I have little love for Mallarmé, in general, but abiding love of this project of his, to which I have returned each time the death of a child has joltingly brought the world to an end.

Except for a small clay figurine of a bonsai master, a malleable brooch in the shape and color of an autumn leaf, and a sample of my astounding collection of islamic prayer beads (I use them as Worry Beads), there remains only one more item for TW's box, this go-round:

The Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh Volumes I-III bound by the New York Graphic Society. These are my most prized of tomes, and I am happy to be sending them to my big brother, for I know that he will read and treasure them, in his turn. ["This collection requires, and rewards, a devoted reader."] These are the entire texts of every extant letter Vincent wrote to his brother Theo, with beautifully reproduced facsimiles interspersed throughout. Bought from an English professor at the University of Virginia who auctioned them on eBay, I opened his heavy box to find he had enclosed what amounts to a formal Letter of Introduction:

I am so pleased that these books have found an appreciative home.
I know that I enjoyed them and I am sure you will. I trust that you and
Vincent will have many enjoyable hours together.

If I can manage to find it, I plan to include a picture of Sleepy John Estes' hands. It is beautiful, a gift from many years back. It was an image from a CD liner that a photographer friend enlarged for Fred, who then had it framed for me. My best recollection is that I broke the frame, Fred was gonna repair it... and at that point, Sleepy John's hands are lost.

Maybe I will take on the search in time for Christmas. Someone should have those beautiful, bowed hands to look at.

Of being numerous

Photos of and by Brother-Unit Tumbleweed, from his blog American Idlyl.











POEM from Of Being Numerous
by George Oppen


6.
We are pressed, pressed on each other,
We will be told at once
Of anything that happens

And the discovery of facts bursts
In a paroxysm of emotion
Now as always. Crusoe

We say was
‘Rescued’.
So we have chosen.





7.
Obsessed, bewildered

By the shipwreck
Of the singular

We have chosen the meaning
Of Being Numerous.

9
‘Whether, as the intensity of seeing increases, one’s distance from Them, the people, does not also increase’
I know, of course I know, I can enter no other place


Yet I am one of those who from nothing but man’s way of thought and one of his dialects and what has happened to me
Have made poetry


To dream of that beach
For the sake of an instant in the eyes,


The absolute singular


The unearthly bonds
Of the singular


Which is the bright light of shipwreck



25
Strange that the youngest people I know
Live in the oldest buildings


Scattered about the city
In the dark rooms
Of the past—and the immigrants,


The black
Rectangular buildings
Of the immigrants.


They are the children of the middle class.


‘The pure products of America—’


Investing
The ancient buildings
Jostle each other


In the half-forgotten, that ponderous business.
This Chinese Wall.



26
They carry nativeness
To a conclusion
In suicide.


We want to defend
Limitation
And do not know how.


Stupid to say merely
That poets should not lead their lives
Among poets,


They have lost the metaphysical sense
Of the future, they feel themselves
The end of a chain


Of lives, single lives
And we know that lives
Are single


And cannot defend
The metaphysic
On which rest


The boundaries
Of our distances.
We want to say


‘Common sense’
And cannot. We stand on


That denial
Of death that paved the cities,
Paved the cities


Generation
For generation and the pavement


Is filthy as the corridors
Of the police.


How shall one know a generation, a new generation?
Not by the dew on them! Where the earth is most torn
And the wounds untended and the voices confused,
There is the head of the moving column


Who if they cannot find
Their generation
Wither in the infirmaries


And the supply depots, supplying
Irrelevant objects.
Street lamps shine on the parked cars
Steadily in the clear night


It is true the great mineral silence
Vibrates, hums, a process
Completing itself


In which the windshield wipers
Of the cars are visible.


The power of the mind, the
Power and weight
Of the mind which
Is not enough, it is nothing
And does nothing


Against the natural world,
Behemoth, white whale, beast
They will say and less than beast,
The fatal rock


Which is the world—


O if the streets
Seem bright enough,
Fold within fold
Of residence ...


Or see thru water
Clearly the pebbles
Of the beach
Thru the water, flowing
From the ripple, clear
As ever they have been



29
My daughter, my daughter, what can I say
Of living?


I cannot judge it.


We seem caught
In reality together my lovely
Daughter,


I have a daughter
But no child


And it was not precisely
Happiness we promised
Ourselves;


We say happiness, happiness and are not
Satisfied.


Tho the house on the low land
Of the city


Catches the dawn light


I can tell myself, and I tell myself
Only what we all believe
True


And in the sudden vacuum
Of time ...


... is it not
In fear the roots grip


Downward
And beget


The baffling hierarchies
Of father and child


As of leaves on their high
Thin twigs to shield us


From time, from open
Time