« July 2005 | Main | September 2005 »
Inspired by Ernesto (imitation is the sincerest form of flattery), I thought I'd try my hand at a hay(no)ku:
If --
we’d stayed
warm in bed --
days
had thirty
fine fat hours --
languid
might describe
these silver mornings.
Time
though places
its firm hand
in
the small
of our backs
pushes
past the
scent of coffee,
the
red interior
of ripe fruit.
| |
|
The Washington Post yesterday had an in-depth article about evangelical chaplains in the U.S. military, and the "competition" they feel for "power" with chaplains from the Catholic church and mainline Protestant denominations. While evangelicals once were rarely in leadership positions, that balance has changed, particularly in the Air Force. ("There are more pluralists" - his word - "in power in the Navy," said one evangelical chaplain interviewed for the article.)
The Rev. MeLinda S. Morton, a Lutheran minister who resigned in June as an Air Force chaplain after criticizing the religious atmosphere at the Air Force Academy, said there has been a palpable rise in evangelical fervor not just among chaplains but also among the officer corps in general since she joined the military in 1982, originally as a launch officer in a nuclear missile silo.
"When we were coneheads -- missile officers -- I would never, ever have engaged in conversations with subordinates aligning my power and position as an officer with my views on faith matters," she said. Today, "I've heard of people being made incredibly uncomfortable by certain wing commanders who engage in sectarian devotions at staff meetings."
Complaints by Mikey Weinstein, a 1977 graduate of the Air Force Academy, led to an investigation that explosed both religious intolerance and a blurry understanding of appropriate use of religious language and influence. He asks:
"Could there possibly be a worse time for this fundamentalist Christianity to be pushed in our military, when we're in a war and the people we are fighting are recruiting their members by saying we're Christian crusaders?"
And of course that is exactly the point, one which is lost on the present administration. What bothers me particularly about this pervasive and extremely troubling trend of polarization between "us" and "them" is not only that policy is being created in THIS country, and war carried out, by zealots convinced they are divinely directed, but that young soldiers, asked to risk their lives in a conflict that has arisen because of two fundamentalist views of the world, are being preyed (yes, pun intended) upon by evangelicals at a time when they are most emotionally vulnerable.
I don't think it's going too far at all to say that a religious agenda is being advanced, not merely "allowed" in the armed services. Making inroads into the miltary is part of the largely-unchecked fundamentalist agenda that has sought greater influence everywhere in our society over the past several decades. And it is one more example of the increased blurring of lines between "church" and "state".
| |
|
A few weeks ago, I received an envelope from Mexico City: inside was a wonderful gift – the recent chapbook of poems, “The Body Aches”, by Ernesto Priego. I didn’t want to write about these poems until I had had time to really spend with them, but now that I have, I want not only to thank Ernesto for his gift but tell everyone who doesn’t already know his work what a sensitive and gifted poet and writer he is.
The chapbook contains some poems already posted on Ernesto’s blog, Never Neutral. It also contains his fascinating explorations of the hay(na)ku form, inspired by Richard Brautigan and Jack Kerouac and given contemporary expression by Eileen Tabios on her Hay(na)ku Blog:
…the hay(na)ku is a tercet where the first line consists of one word, the second line of two words, and the third line of three words:
Dogs
tongues loll.
Emphatic earth sponges.
--Oliver de la Paz
One of the best of Ernesto’s hay(na)kus is written for Eileen, and in it he pares language down to its bare bones with a repeated “I/thought I…” Here's an excerpt:
…
I
thought I:
subject becomes object
phrases
become sentences
poetry becomes destiny
…
There are also more conventional poems in free verse; my favorite is titled “Morning” and contains the kind of mournful, evocative images Ernesto’s readers have come to expect from his pen, as the poet, waking, imagines a former presence and time, and resists the moment of awareness when the reality of the day breaks into the suspension of reality that has been sleep. There is deep sadness, but also determination, and a loneliness that is so explored and examined that it becomes shared.
The last poem continues:
You will remember my face, though:
A blurry memory as deep as your own wounds,
Those dusty scars abandoned by the years,
A remembrance as forgotten as typewriters
And old journals on a wooden drawer.
Thank you, Ernesto.
| |
|
Yesterday we spent some time at the market with two friends: he is Quebeçois, she is Latin American. We rode our bikes to Jean-Talon to meet them, spent a couple of hours sampling a special tasting-display of Quebec wines (those ice-wines made from apples are really delicious) and cheeses, indulging in an order of deep-fried smelts and calamari, and watching as our friends tapped and selected a rolling-cart-full of melons, corn, peppers, cauliflower, apples - all the heaviest things the market had to offer! Switching back and forth between not two but three languages is also the best practice one could hope for.
They took the metro home, we rode, and then worked for a while before meeting them again in the evening at Le Sommet de l'Harmonica ("Harmonica Summit"), a festival of Quebeçois and traditional music and dance - this year with an emphasis on master harmonica players - which is taking place this weekend at Park Lafontaine.
"After we left you," said E., "we got on the metro. I realized after a while that there was a kind of crazy woman at the other end of the car, and she was imitating D. - you know, talking with her hands and so on."
The woman of this pair is, to say the least, very expressive.
"I was watching her, kind of, but then she got up and approached us. I didn't know what to expect. But in this very heavy Quebec accent she said to me - looking at the big bunch of basil sticking out of my bag - 'You have verduuuure!'" (You know: "greens".)
I said, "Yes, it's basil, it's delicious."
She looked at me and then said, "You know, that stuff gets a lot of fleas in it."
"Yes," I said, "I know. And this one is COVERED!"
E. said that didn't faze the woman in the least, and the three of them ended up having quite an entertaining conversation before they got off the train...
| |
|
The market was red yesterday: red with bushels of plum tomatoes, red with strings of peppers, red with the last flats of strawberries and the first baskets of apples. J. and I split up; he with our list of vegetables and fruits while I went in search of sausages, fresh eggs, bread, olives -- both of us adrift in a sea of crimson, scarlet, vermilion.
The egg-man plucked my half-dozen jumbo brown eggs out of his flat and placed them in a grey paper carton, which he wrapped in newspaper and tied with string, and I went off with my purchases to meet J. at Motta, the Italian deli near the edge of the market, where our virtuous calorie-resistance finally melted and we bought a piece of pizza, a few slices of almond pound cake, a bag of slightly-sweet, bread-like "bracelets", and a piece of brownie-cake the color of ebony, shimmering on top with chocolate frosting.
On the way back to the car we walked through the Italian neighborhoods where trellised tomatoes, pole beans, chard, and flowers filled intensively-planted gardens, and the last of the lunch patrons lingered over coffee on the terraces of the local cafes and pizzerias. On a corner of rue Alma, an elderly Italian gentleman was saying goodbye to a friend, his "arrivederci" curling around his tongue like a burst of espresso flavored with lemon peel. A tall fence enclosed the yard of his house, and above it draped the branches of two plum trees, one laden with a heavy crop of dusty purple fruit, the other, yellow. Between the branches I saw the grey-haired head of his wife, her round face smiling and kind, as she calmly picked grapes grwoing on an elaborate horizontal trellis that extended from the porch roof.
"Arrivederci," I said softly to myself as we continued down the street, trying to match the old man's inflection. "Arrivederci."
| |
|
An article in the Toronto Star asks three Arab Canadians how they feel about the eviction of Gaza settlers. Having been stunned (but not really surprised) this past week by the contrast in media coverage between the destruction of Palestinian homes and orchards during the intifada, and the endless pictures of weeping Israeli settlers as they were evicted from Gaza, I was glad to see this article.
Beyond the differing portrayals of emotional states, which beg the question of who we consider "more like us" or "more human", as well as the issue of what we are doing to create greater understanding rather than fanning the flames of cultural collision, the media coverage has pointed out just how poorly informed the public is on Israel's intentions for settlement in general and the West Bank in particular. I am, to say the least, dismayed - but that is nothing new on this tragic subject -- the source of much of what has transpired in our world over the past years. A just and lasting peace in Israel and Palestine is absolutely crucial for any progress toward ending terrorism.
| |
|
On Sunday we visited friends at Lake Winnepesauke in New Hampshire - a beautiful, big lake still wild enough to harbor loons. It was the weekend, and the lake was noisy with jet-skis and motor boats, but in the cove where our friends were staying, shielded from the open water of the center by a large, white-pine encrusted island, we could sit peacefully on the dock most of the day, talking, taking pictures, and jumping in the water when we got too hot. for lunch we made a big salad of lettuce, cold corn cut from the cob, cucumbers, tomatoes, with a little bacon on the top, along with a plate of mixed garden tomatoes - red Brandywines, orange and red cherries, yellow pears, juicy First Ladies with basil and mozzarella. Summer.
At the end of the afternoon J. and I headed north, a five hour trip that took us through Franconia Notch in New Hampshire's White Mountains. We hadn't been there for a while - not since the Old Man, the state symbol, lost his face. But we know those mountains, having skied many of them, which gives a vivid memory and the ability to connect peaks and points that a valley-view or a map can never do. Cannon Mountain, that enormous hunk of granite at the northen end of the Notch, is the home of many of my happiest skiing memories as well as some of the knarliest terrain I ever managed to get down. J. and I were silent as we drove up through the pass, just holding hands in the car and taking in as much of the view as we could. When we passed Cannon and looked up at the tramway station on the top, he laughed and said, "I'll never forget being blown back through that door." I'll never forget the top of Cannon either, or the view across to Mt. Jefferson and the Presidential Range, so full of snow and ice you'd think it really would last all summer.
Rehearsing With Gods, Photographs and Essays on The Bread and Puppet Theater
We crossed into Vermont and immediately the terrain changed to curving hills and pastoral slopes dotted with dairy cows. We stopped in St. Johnsbury at a small, spotless Chinese restaurant connected to a gas station and ordered two quick stir-fries to go, and while we waited I went and stood out on the street, staring up past the yellow flat-roofed laundromat in one direction and the thrift store and sub shop in the other. St. J. has always struck me as a quintessential, mostly unchanged Vermont town - too far from the flatlands of Massachussetts and Connecticut to be altered into suburbia. It is also the gateway and last outpost for Vermont's wildest, least-settled region, the Northeast Kingdom. By then the moon had come up, huge and orange, and it hung over us as we drove past the tiny towns and long stretches of dark forest: home to rednecks and anarchists, religious quasi-cults, artists and puppeteers, Buddhists, old-style skiers, hardscrabble farmers. It will be a while before the people change there; the land may be a different story if nothing is done about the warming that has already gravely altered the precarious tourist/ski economy of the region. I felt my fondness for the Kingdom swelling as we drove in silence past Barnet and Glover, remembering a night like this, close to twenty years ago, at the Bread & Puppet Domestic Resurrection Circus here, when at the close of the pageant a huge puppet - a peasant earth-woman several stories high propelled by puppeteers with long sticks - slowly advanced from behind one of these hills just as the full moon rose, accompanied by a flock of life-size puppet sheep: a pastoral vision of redemption and hope after an hour of dramatized trauma, destruction and war.
No place on earth is far enough removed now to be isolated from reality; I'd like to think though that unspoiled places like this still help keep hope alive.
| |
|
Keep writing in the dark:
a record of the night, or
words that pulled you from depths of unknowing,
words that flew through your mind, strange birds
crying their urgency with human voices...
Denise Levertov, via Whiskey River
I was awake in the night, and rose and walked through the dark house to the couch, its blue velveteen merely another shade of non-color against the dark colorlessness of the room. It was three or four o'clock: a time when sleeplessness used to fill me with anxiety but now feels precious when I wake into it: a time for listening, thinking; when quiet opens out into a spaciousness that fills the rooms and spills out the window into the night.
That window was open, and I lay on my back listening to the sound of the night insects, and a light rain falling on the porch roof and the street. The rain stopped, and began again. I dozed, or maybe didn't; I wasn't sure; a soft breeze came in the window and I tucked my bare arm under the edge of the quilt, listening.
Today I read Denise Levertov's poem about writing in the dark and remembered something: I am young - six or seven - and the hallway of our house is completely dark. But I am standing at the old square piano in my pajamas, and I begin to try to play something, in the dark, not looking at my hands or the keys. My mother hears the notes and comes out of the bedroom, surprised. She asks me what I am doing. I can't explain. I just know that at that moment it is very important for me to feel something, to feel what music is like in the dark, without the guides and signposts and coordination I instinctively know are already starting to close in, defining it for me.
| |
|
Les Grands Ballets Canadiens are presenting the same two ballets we saw recently in Park Lafontaine at the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival in Becket, MA. Here's a review (via Montreal City Weblog) that I liked not only for its enthusiasm but the additional information on the scores for the two ballets, which were - I thought - a huge part of the excitement and innovative quality of the pieces. The first ballet, TooT, is choreographed to Shostakovich's Jazz Suite No. 2 in its circus-reminiscent sections, and music by the Balanescu Quartet for the more inner, reflection sections. This ballet has one of the most ingenious sets I've ever seen: curved mirror-clad risers that become a circus ring, tables, buildings, a forest.
The other ballet, Noces, is set to Stravinsky's score of the same name, which the NY Times reviewer called "riveting and barbaric". It evokes a Russian peasant wedding, and was originally choreographed by Nikinsky. In the Montreal troupe's version, the corps of women dancers, all clad in different versions of white tulle and satin "wedding dresses" are set against lines of dark-suited men in what is certainly a clash, even war, of the sexes.
| |
|
During the work-retreat this week, we did a series of interviews. One of them took us to a neonatal intensive care unit in a major medical center. Amid the beeping monitors and tubing and high-tech equipment were the plastic pods in which premature babies spend the first days - even months - of their lives. The pods were draped on top with white fleecy cloths, stenciled in a cheerful pattern of blue baby footprints, and they had round hand-holes on the sides through which a nurse or a mother could grasp the tiny finger of a child. There were babies in the pods: babies with feet hardly bigger than one joint of my thumb, some with IV lines somehow inserted into imperceptible veins. A window at the far side of the room looked out over white pine trees, and blue hills.
In spite of the intensity of care that was being delivered, we were welcomed in and our questions graciously answered. One of the babies had been born 30 hours earlier, in a remote rural location, and had just arrived by helicopter. The parents came into the unit not long after we did, looking very young, dazed, impoverished, and as lost as if they had landed in the middle of Manhattan. Just then a pilot in a green flight suit came up to the unit to say he was ready to go; there was another baby to pick up, and in a few minutes a bright-eyed nurse and the pilot were wheeling a transport pod down the hall, toward the elevators, toward the helicopter pad on the back side of the hospital.
We learned later that some of the babies are born early and with complications because of the parental drug use; the agitated, crying babies go through detox for a week or more. I tried without success to imagine anything more unfair: being born into starvation, I suppose. But that's the heartbreaking and ever-sharper contrast, isn't it, in this rich country with its blue hills and high-tech medicine, its fertile valleys and schools and towns and differing possibilities that sift some children into white coats and flight suits, articulateness and skill, and others into a spiral of hopelessness, despair and escape into addiction. In this nursery tiny fingers grasped hands that reached for them out of both worlds; I realized I was hoping for miracles even greater than the precarious preservation of new life.
| |
|
