Visible saints from our visible wars,
Mount the black tarmac and try coming unstuck.
They come bleeding sand from invisible sores,
While smiling at wives and babies and luck.
We smile right back as big as we’re able,
And thank them at ballparks and ice hockey rinks.
Hiding old stories behind a cold fable,
Saluting with handshakes, tuition, and drinks.
Their service is broadcast in movies and books,
Rewritten, revised, and replayed to our moods.
They did what the softened civilian can’t brook
So we hail their hard hearts (but think ours less crude).
Some, though they drummed in the same brothered band
Must cover their ears with their unbloodied hands.
Category: Philosophy
The Kitchen Window
Genny lived next door
and made cupcakes sometimes
that we could smell in the middle of the day.
Our feet would come off the ground a bit
and we’d
float,
cartoonish,
noses up and eyes closed,
pulled in somnolent faith along an invisible rope
that painted our insides with
the light blue colors of an old, paint-flaking house
where she was forever framed in the glass of
her kitchen window. (please always have a
window in your kitchen
right there over the sink.)
Glass so old it sagged from time
and its own weight
until everything you saw through it looked uncertain
and underwater like a mute memory
more than the real, wrinkled face
that smiled nonetheless across
that little space between the houses
on a day that swung too high and short
even in the morning.
Genny lived next door and
made cupcakes that smelled so good
that our feet came off the ground
and our toes
– just
– brushed
the grass
and left wavy little trails all the way to her kitchen
where we woke up with crumbs
and blessings on our lips
and a little sunlit spot
that took the place of
knowing how we got there.
At Once Against and With
At Once Against and With the World
Autumn starts for me like this,
With an evening’s cold, capricious kiss,
Chiding me to stay alert
That I don’t miss my turn to flirt.
I hustle down the dim lit walks,
With lamps on slightly swaying stalks,
Not bothering to dodge the leaves
Cascading down from dormered eaves.
When now the hub of town comes near,
With its public houses pouring beer
Colder than the brittle air
Because it’s close and warm in there,
I go inside against the cold,
Where I like to think we’re men of old.
And on every wooden bench and stool
Sits a girl – an honored golden rule.
They’ve hung their woolen coats on hooks,
And the boys are warming them with looks.
A suggestive stitch, a hopeful hem,
Autumn’s stockings are November’s gems.
And so we work with noble tones
Toward a sense of coming home.
Because man seems tempted to his best
When woman is so smartly dressed.
When everything to do’s been done,
We wrap back up to hold the fun
As close to us as a person’s able,
And leave the rest upon the table.
Though warm within and cold without,
It is easy to forget about
The discomfort we’re supposed to know,
And on our brazen way we go.
Fall is where the season’s heart
Truly shows the human art
Of marching out with soul unfurled –
At once against and with the world.
Originally posted November 2010
Morning’s Mile
In the cities there is nothing
to milk but time. You are spared
the poetics of rote labor.
There is no duty to recall
in that strange awakening
of late adulthood
mother’s feathered hands
or the careful thud, thud,
thud of father’s boots trying
helplessly not to wake you yet.
In the cities when young
men find themselves wearing
their own fathers’ rent vestments
they do not smell like
dirt, shit, and oil.
They smell like paper
and staples and the florid
lining of a brass-clasped
briefcase swung swish,
swish against a silk-slacked
thigh.
In the cities young fathers
grow up slight and light
because their histories weigh
less and don’t ask much
muscle to carry around.
They lack the heraldic sound
of the only engine in a morning’s mile
being turned churlishly over and
breathing exhausted clouds into an
unhidden sky. But in the city in
the street where a thousand engines run
you don’t hear a single one.
Amotivational Wish
Not a typo. I wrote amotivational on purpose. That’s how this works.
College. Where I find unique challenges every day. I was able to say the same for the Army, but in the Army, motivation was either easy to come by, or all-too-readily available from any number of willing… mentors. In any case, you were simply going to do whatever was to do, and that was that. Rather parental, when parenting works.
In college, motivation can be more elusive. You are truly on your own here, and if the material presented does nothing to move you intellectually or emotionally, it can be hell to get started on a project. I suspect this is why so many students just do what they’re told and buy whatever narrative is sent their way. It eases the difficulty. There’s no real way, from the impotence of the student’s disposition, to ensure that the wheels get greased. So the student’s best bet is to become a wheel and catch as catch can whatever lube is dripped her way. To wit: an hour in a literature class is plenty of time to know exactly what the professor professes in public and private, and there’s a real narcotic allure to the idea of getting ideologically on board. Your assignments will conform to your conformity, and the sad coitus between two beings of diminished creative ambition will spurt along at a potentially Dean’s-list-level of coursework.
I see it, as best I can, from a distance. I call myself a writer with some confidence now, having produced some papers for school that I am perfectly proud of, as well as having one poem published and another take honors in a competition. I am a writer. There is power there, that I don’t think my fellow majors understand. I can sit in these classes, listen to these teachers, read the little post-modern litanies of a liberal arts education, take in the constantly present sense that “seriously, just do it like us, it’ll be so much easier for both of us” – and still write what I want. All it takes is evidence, and if you read regularly, you become so stocked with the stuff that you could be the 163rd CSI incarnation. I could read a piece of feminist literature and write a 5-page paper that never mentions feminism. And as long as I find the evidence for my points in the paper itself, I am in the clear. That’s the real power of liberal arts, as it is supposed to be understood. The power of being a writer with a little actual resistance in her. The power of turning post-modernism against itself and recognizing how easy it is to be right, within the framework of today’s vacated artistry and dissipated standards.
One of the first things anyone should be able to recognize from inside of the vapid collegiate gestalt is that the last thing anyone should be giving it is what it asks for. Maybe I am uniquely capable of seeing this because I am a parent: I know that you can’t raise a damn thing – child or idea or machine – by giving it what it wants. You have to give it what it needs. The university doesn’t need feminist papers or anti-feminist papers. It wants them both, though, because in either case the student is still just a wheel, safely hubbed onto the framework. What the university does need is true papers, real papers that are disinterested in social propulsion or the narrowing effects of thought-building. The university does not need to be saved by noble conservative infiltrators and their stout anti-political messaging. That’s more of the same, anyway, and absurd. It needs, like a protest needs a mute button, apolitical messaging. It needs, in short, to be made to forget about itself for a while. Again, exactly the same way that a parent knows that a child in a tantrum is best served by a distraction. The university is child to the student, and the student needs to start distracting its disobedient charge from its own illogic. You don’t do that by shouting “NO!” or by presenting oppositional logic. That just keeps the focus on the locus. Distract, distract, distract. You do it with ice cream and tickle bugs, wisdom and wit. You make it get up off the ground by showing it the sky.
But as nice as all that is to wail about for a minute, it’s only a small part of motivation. For instance, I am about to read “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” It’s a challenge that I am simply not sure that I am the master of. It’s ok, though, because again, there is a distance I can keep. A professionalism, and an artistry, even. Sometimes all it takes is is to talk to myself for a moment, and pencil up a poem to buoy me through the surf:
Every Wish has a Rider“Your wish has been granted”
said the Genie to the girl at the protest march.
She rose,
stiffened,
held her sign erect and raised
a single finger for the patriarchy
(forgetting her father)
in permanent letters
on the tip of a
long wooden shaft.
She heard herself say
“Thank you, sir.”
In Which We Get What We Ask For
On the draft of air displaced
over the heads of billioned minions
History whispers:
– out –
and is the only thing that leaves
the still dark office of morning.
Having hissed a warning and gone
to meet more of itself:
– rising –
and having got out,
is forgotten.
Much the way we advance
into a cubist’s missed perspective –
Everything in profile:
– sinking –
and having got in,
are forgotten.
Grades, Grays, Graze
There’s nobody in that picture. Mostly, at nine-ish on a cold weekday morning, the few people about are older couples, ambulating carefully along at a thoughtful and deliberate pace that I should adopt myself more often. There’s nobody in that picture, but there is a cool little seagull way up in the corner, like a staple, if at the entirely wrong angle. I might become paralyzed if someone handed me a stack of papers stapled that way.
Grades came in from Winter Quarter. All is well in the world, as I managed all A’s. There was some anxiety because my Brit Lit grade, while good going into finals, depended on a final paper and a final exam, so just about anything was possible there. Philosophy was a worry, too, because I went into finals with the lowest A possible at the time. My paper needed to be spot on, and I suppose it must have been. I know I had an absolute blast writing it. How could I not?
Here’s the cool thing about philosophy, too, that I wish more people would understand about life in general: Understanding something doesn’t mean agreeing with it. Believing in something doesn’t mean supporting it. I can write a fun and thorough paper on Sartre’s philosophy, absolutely sticking the landing on every point we were asked to hit, without agreeing with any of it. But we get stuck in these patterns of thinking where if I say that I understand the reasoning behind a travel restriction or a border wall, that means that I want them both to happen and think they should. We have these conversations where we view the person we’re talking to as if he were a Facebook comment, electronic, robotic, and incapable of intellectual nuance. Philosophy, done right, doesn’t make that mistake. I do think that Western people are generally raised to not do it right, and are trained to resist doing it right by schools and social media, so we are starting from a position of weakness. Everyone wants to win at something (because they weren’t allowed to as kids), but when you look around and don’t see any opponents, you have to manufacture them.
I do, incidentally, agree with a lot of Sartre. To get to the end of his ideas – to read your way through “Being and Nothingness,” for instance, is difficult and confusing. But once you get to the core of what he is saying it looks like a common sense acceptance and description of reality as it is. That table you’re looking at is a table. Seriously. Sartre doesn’t really allow for a bunch of esoteric weirdness that renders the table some imaginary construct of the mind. There’s a friggin’ table over there. Deal with it. And of course we have to deal with it, especially when someone else is looking at it, too, which is where I start to part ways with him.
Here’s a link to the paper. It’s only 4 pages, so a 5 minute read or so. What follows is an excerpt from it:
A certain momentary me. I know that this is just a story I’ve invented, and for a few moments the internal negation between that coffee-drinking self that’s been created, and the reflecting consciousness that created it, gives me space to wonder – do I have to be that person this morning? I could just as easily be a man who starts his day with a grapefruit juice or a tea or nothing at all. Neither coffee-me nor tea-me are a me that needs to be, and I’m starting to notice that with all of these possible beginnings to my day, none of them have singular importance. Whatever me it is that gets out of this bed – if I even do that – is no better or worse a version than any other. None of them can stake a foundational claim to me or my day or my life. This is a woeful resignation on the first Saturday of Summer. My Summer. I could choose a breakfast of fish and vodka instead of coffee, because the story of me as a coffee drinker is fundamentally unmoored from facticities like time and place and body and freedom. Anything else could take its place at any time. But that smell is delicious.
I’m still rocking along on Spring break and trying to write a poem that’s probably my most “serious” effort to date. But the funny thing about art and beauty is that the accidental kind is very frequently what tends to stick. The castoffs and the rigorless productions spring up out of the past and give you a “holy shit” moment. I wrote this one a while back, just a few quick revisions and done, and I love it more every time I read it:
Un-brella Weather
In October the wind came at its worst
and the rain became confused
from knowing how to fall
just plain down
anymore.
The boy said the rain is going sideways.
His sister used one hand
to put up her hood
then casually closed her umbrella
because she knew
it wouldn’t help anymore.
The boy said hey we need that.
But his sister just put the furled umbrella
(a rainbow colored rebuttal)
under an arm
and used one hand
to help him put up his hood too.
The Lamp, The Noise, The Cat
That’s the last of the final exams. What am I supposed to do? Buy myself something? I wouldn’t know what. I am buying myself lunch. That’ll have to do.
I met with Sven(!) yesterday after my British Lit final, to iron out some small details of the Sartre paper I have to turn in on Friday. Here’s an excerpt that I just wrote over my Italian club sandwich. It will read, initially, as possibly autobiographical. It is not. I have to write from the perspective of Sartre’s philosophy. Besides, I made it fiction by changing the length of the marriage. That’s all it takes, folks:
Part 4: She’s looking right at me, though. From the other side of the closed door, which is wearing more of the White Dove OC-17, she’s looking right at me. And I am disintegrating her idea of the coffee as she does it. How can she know if I’ll like it as strong as she made it? I’ve told her a million times that I do, and that I like it best with a little milk and sugar, but she knows she’ll never be sure of that. Because here I am, objectified by her consciousness, a thing in the house that negates her negations and dis-integrates everything that she thought she knew about this Summer Saturday. My Summer Saturday. And she does the same to me, out there turning me into Prufrock by measuring each transcendent moment of my life in coffee spoons. How can I be sure that she loves the warmth of the sun instead of hating the exposure she feels in its brightness? How can I know if she really is a morning person like she’s always told me she is? I cannot know it. My wife. Sixteen years married and she is unfathomable to me. We are unfathomable to each other. Free and forlorn ‘til death do us part. I’d like to think I know what to do. She’s looking right at me, though.
I’m such a cliche, sitting in a coffee shop, reading Sartre and writing philosophy papers. And it’s not even corporate Starbucks, man, but a totally eclectic neighborhood joint. There’s these little pamphlets from the ACLU (dear God: coffee shop, philosophy, political pamphlets. It gets worse with every moment) presupposing mass roundups of “the wrong kind of people.” Look, I’m not sure I’m on anyone’s side, in particular. I know how I’m likely to vote at any given moment and the sorts of things I’ll support or not, but this polarization that’s been happening is so disheartening. This pamphlet, Jesus:
I’ll say the obvious things, to save you from yourselves: I am not a racist. I am not a bigot. I have a strong commitment to community and tolerance and acceptance. There. Done. And my commitment to those principles is why I hate that pamphlet. You tell me: After reading what I am sure the ACLU and most of this city would say is a very generous and helpful gesture, would a Muslim or a Mexican or other person of color feel more safe and welcome, or less?
That’s all. People like the ACLU and most of the Movement, March, and Protest (MMP) society have a need to sow fear in the service of virtue, and the source of those fears is never in the obvious places. Seems plain enough. Think about the scene in every horror movie where you get “what was that terrifying, sinister, fear-inducing noise? It came from over there, behind that curtain that has an indistinguishable form behind it, and – Oh, phew. It’s just a lamp and a cat and OHMYGOD HE’S BEHIND YOU!” The Huffington Post and NPR and FOX do their reporting on the lamp and the cat. The ACLU and BLM print pamphlets about the indistinguishable shape behind the curtain. And the audience just knows, as we gnaw down our nails and get happy-scared with anticipation, that the curtain will be pulled aside and the shape and the noise will turn out to be Donald Trump wielding a bloody executive order, hijab fibers between his teeth. But it turns out to be just a lamp and a cat and a noise, and when someone finally shouts OHMYGOD HE’S BEHIND YOU! we turn around and it’s finally him. But instead of dining on the victims of his executive orders, he’s still just eating that taco bowl and telling the Hispanics he loves them.
The horror is never where we’re told it is, and sometimes there’s just nothing to be afraid of. I’m not sure why we don’t seem to get that.
In the end, if you’re asking my opinion (or reading this little bit of noise behind the curtain), I’d say that a thing like the ACLU booklet up there increases the fear and instability of a community. That’s all. It isn’t deeper than that.
Sprung Broke
I am less than three hours from my Natural Hazards final exam, and in my comfort zone. Top Pot doughnuts. A maple frosted chocolate cake doughnut and a 16oz americano. The two Washington State Patrol officers (seriously at the doughnut shop) that I sat so close to are probably annoyed because this place is mostly empty otherwise, and I nestled in to the table closest to them. Alas, I know where I like to sit. Admittedly, I would normally bristle at this very thing, but I’ve resolved to be more comfortable with proximity, and that works both ways. They’re talking about asthma inhalers.
I do have a problem, though. It’s the disinterest in studying. Half my problem is that the professor said this is the easiest test of the quarter. The other half of my problem is that if I score a 50% on this test, I still get an A in the class. The third half of my problem is that I have a philosophy paper due Friday. Why is that a problem? because I started writing it and I love it and it’s all I want to do. Sometimes you do work and think that you are making the teacher as happy to have you as you are to have him, and that’s really gratifying. Yesterday he had some nice things to say to me and the girl who thinks I’m smart because I’m old. She asked him for a hug after class, too, and it was the first time in 12 weeks that he looked unsettled. Awkwardest hug I’ve seen. Worse, probably, than Leonardo DiCaprio trying to hug the truth.
I think what I’ve liked most about this philosophy class has been that I’ve been able to be freely creative. The three papers I’ve written have been a combination of clinical analysis and rollicking imagination, and they’ve been successful. For this one it is all about Sartre, and life within all the little details of his philosophy: Negation, pre-reflective and reflective consciousness, anguish, freedom, bad faith, all kids of restrictive categorizations that somehow lend themselves to well to narrative construction. Probably largely because that is, for Sartre, what we do as humans at every moment – affirm or deny our personally crafted narrative of self, by way of a paralyzing totality of freedom. A narrative about built narratives and and our awareness of and belief in them. Being asked to write a paper based on that is like being given ice cream for breakfast in Tahiti. We laughed yesterday at a classmate who asked how strict the page limit was and could she go over it. But seriously, how could you not?
There’s another paper. British Literature. The Lady of Shalott. She is “half sick of shadows,” and I am half sick of that poem. I chose it. I like it. But I’ve been too deep in it for too long and I don’t want to read it again for like a decade. I just have to remember to give that one a last minute once-over tonight and turn it in tomorrow when I take the final. Then the Philosophy paper and then Spring Break.
Ahhh, Spring Break. I’ve booked a flight to Mexico, but nothing too crazy. I’m old, so it’s an all-inclusive type of place that I hopefully won’t have to wander too far from and won’t get too noisy. And of course none of this is true. I’m actually just going to keep waking up at 6:30, making lunches and two trips per day to the kids’ school. I’ll probably use much of my free time to get the lawn in shape for spring – a little moss control, a little overseeding. And at some point I’ll polish the floor. It needs it.
Maybe I’ll write a poem or two.
That’s as much as I’m able to fake it for this morning. It’s time to bring out the notes and the textbook and see how far from failing my final I can come.
They’re All Days Without a Woman
If you come into the house and look closely, but squint a little bit, you might be able to just make out the diminishing line between cleaning up, and throwing things away. Though you’d be forgiven if it all just looked like the latter. Life reaches peak simplicity when the answer to “where does this go” becomes “in the trash.” Try it. You’ll sleep like a rock.
I lie to myself all the time in order to stay afloat. Kids really are a thing that have to be dealt with, such that parenting cannot simply happen as an addendum to other responsibilities. But I lie and say that it’s just another one of the things. The many things that make up a life. That’s kind of nonsense. What parenting is, is absolute proof that it is impossible to multitask. Breaking up a fight while doing dishes while making dinner while doing laundry – crap, I knew I forgot something – is not multitasking. That’s actually all one task. It is all sustained by the same pool of emotional and intellectual investment. To move from one of those things to the next, and back again, then to yet another, requires absolutely no adjustment of my energies or intentions. Fight, dishes, dinner, laundry. That’s four things right there, and it would be miraculous if the list ever stopped at that. But those four things are really all one thing. It is the mode that is your definition, and as long as nothing external gets introduced, it’s neat and tidy. It is the mode of being “parent,” and everything within it is related. Now let’s invite that other task over there. The one that looks hungry and cold on the doorstep:
- Break up a fight
- Do the dishes
- Fold the laundry
- Get dinner ready
- Start writing a 7 page paper for British Literature.
No way, right? You cannot do that and the rest of the job in some sort of tag team symbiosis where everything gets in on the action and builds toward completion. The other 4 items on the list live together in a completely different compartment of consciousness. What does this all mean? What’s the big picture? How does this relate to harmony and value and identity and non-linear social progress? Not sure. But I do know that the “Day Without a Woman” didn’t get us any closer to the answer. I’ve met a few at-home dads over the last few years, and they generally get at least 5 days a week without a woman. They (we) would almost certainly prefer a different arrangement, but then again they (we) understand needs and compartmentalization and utility far better than your au pair does.
And so the mind also compartmentalizes. No matter how much I wanted to be able to start Writing that British Literature paper about the Lady of Shalott yester – GOOD EFFING GOD
Live and uncut – I was typing this because the morning was going cleanly. Dog fed and put outside, kids eating pancakes, things moving along. This is how quickly it goes to hell:
“Papa, can I have a side dish of fruit with my pancakes?”
“You already had some. You want more?”
“Yes, please. But I don’t really like more strawberries and blueberries.”
“That’s all we have, bud.”
Since then he has pulled books off of bookshelves, punched his sister, thrown toys across the house, and refused to get ready for school. Obviously, it’s not really about the fruit. He probably wants Cheetos or something, and knows that I’m just going to say no, and he’s afraid to ask and the whole thing is more than he can handle in his 6 year old mind. It’s hopelessly frustrating for him. Easy as 2+2=4 for us, harder than trigonometry for him. I know this, but no amount of kindness or empathy can change his brain chemistry such that we can resolve the situation with calmness and reason. We board up the windows and ride out the storm, and if we are really running out of time before a change in the winds, then we get a little physical.
The result of the whole thing, in this other little space over here, is that now I can’t write anymore, because I have to close that particular compartment completely, and open the “Dad” compartment. I’m sure as hell not going to be analyzing Tennyson against the backdrop of Victorian England. Before I can do that I have to point the attention of my reader back to that non-linear social progress I mentioned earlier, and say that I can get back to my paper when I get a day with a woman.
The boy has just told me (mind you, because all we have for fruit is strawberries and blueberries) that he wishes I would “go in a trash can and never come out.”
Andy Havens 