September 9: "Spring," Wordlessness, Searching for Meaning

Mary Oliver reflects on the bear in all of us . . .

Spring

by:  Mary Oliver

Somewhere

     a black bear

          has just risen from sleep

               and is staring

down the mountain.

     All night

           in the brisk and shallow restlessness

               of early spring

I think of her,

     her four black fists

          flicking the gravel,

               her tongue

like a red fire

     touching the grass,

          the cold water.

               There is only one question;

how to love the world.

     I think of her

          rising

               like a black and leafy ledge

to sharpen her claws against

     the silence

          of the trees.

               Whatever else

my life is

     with its poems

          and its music

               and its glass cities,

it is also this dazzling darkness

     coming 

          down the mountain,

               breathing and tasting;

all day I think of her--

     her white teeth,

          her wordlessness,

               her perfect love.

Oliver loves the world.  Her poems are psalms to waves and birds and foxes and bears.  To read a poem by her is like taking a walk in the forest, a drink from Blackwater Pond, a flight into a sky choked with blue.  Oliver's love is filled with language and music and words.

Unlike the bear, whose love is wordless and dark and full of teeth.

As a poet, I depend on words.  Words help me sort out the world and my place in it.  When I'm confused or sad or joyful or angry, I assign words to what I'm feeling, create images and lines that put order into the chaos of life.  That's the job of a poet--to search for meaning in meaninglessness, light in darkness, and darkness in light.  

That bear, with her silent claws and red fire tongue and leafy ledge body, is the epitome of artless, ravenous, dark, wild love.  A love that doesn't mediate the world with words or music.  The bear wakes in the spring, hungry to taste the green glory all around her.

Human beings spend too much energy searching for the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.  According to Douglas Adams, the answer to that question is 42.  According to Facebook, the answer is to post pictures of your dinner or children or significant other or a sunset to prove how blessed your life is.  According to Mary Oliver, the answer is the dazzling darkness of the bear coming down from the mountain in spring amazement.

Every once in a while, I experience something that fills me like a puddle in a rainstorm.  I'll feel the impulse to take out my phone to snap a photo to post on Facebook or Instagram.  Or dig out my pen and journal to write a poem.  Or go home and write a blog post about it.  Instead of just standing there, letting myself drown in the moment.

This morning, after dropping my wife off at work, I drove to Lake Superior to watch the sunrise.  It was a glorious, clear morning, and the sun climbed into the heavens like an orange turtle.  Yes, I stopped.  Yes, I took a picture.  And, yes, when I got home, I jotted some lines down in my journal.

Mostly, however, Saint Marty allowed himself to be the bear, standing on the shore of the lake, lapping up the light with his thirsty ursine eyes after a long, dark winter's nap.  

October 3: Saint Marty's Day Festivities, Wild Cheers, Self-Serving

I woke up this morning and realized that I haven't spoken about Saint Marty's Day yet this year. 

For those of you who are new to Saint Marty's Day, it is a high holiday that happens every October 5, and it is celebrated all around the world.  It's celebrated in Sri Lanka . . .

And Hong Kong . . .

And even Tibet . . .

So, it's time to set up your Saint Marty's Day tree, bake some Saint Marty's Day cookies, address your Saint Marty's Day cards, and sing some Saint Marty's Day carols.  Because Saint Marty's Day is almost upon us!  Don't get caught unprepared.  (Also, don't forget the traditional Saint Marty's Day dessert--a warm bowl of tapioca, fresh off the stove!)

Me?  I'm headed to Calumet, Michigan, in about an hour to perform in the Red Jacket Jamboree radio show tonight at the Calumet Theatre.  My bags are packed.  After I'm done typing this post, I'm going to go wake up my son, get the suitcase into my vehicle, and take off.  I'm interested to see how Calumet is preparing for Saint Marty's Day.  Hmmmmm.  Let's see . . .

Nice.  So you see, if you have never celebrated Saint Marty's Day, you've been missing out your whole life.  But it's never too late to start.  It is one of the most festive, joyous, holiest days of the year!  And don't forget to leave some gifts for Saint Marty on your front door step before you go to bed on October 4.  Saint Marty will travel the world on Saint Marty's Day Eve, collecting presents from all the peoples, spreading peace and good will.

Well, it's almost time to rouse my son.  Calumet is going to be a great way to kick off my Saint Marty's Day celebrations.  Even Douglas Adams wrote about Saint Marty's Day in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy . . .

Wild cheers broke out among the crowd.  Flags, streamers and wolf whistles sailed through the air.  The narrower streets looked rather like centipedes rolled over on their backs and frantically waving their legs in the air.

So you see, even in the fictional universe of Hitchhiker's, Saint Marty's Day is a big thing.

Saint Marty hopes you all haven't been too offended by this incredibly self-serving post.  (But, really, aren't all blog posts a little self-serving?)

January 1: Western Spiral Arm, House in Disarray, Florida Bound

Welcome to 2019, or, as it shall from henceforth be known, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Year.

That's right.  This year's book is Douglas Adams' sci-fi comedy classic.  I was looking for something a little lighter after spending a year chasing a white whale aboard the Pequod with Ahab and company.  I like to think of Hitchhiker's Guide as the anti-Melville.

It starts out like this:

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

This planet has--or rather had--a problem, which was this:  most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time.  Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place.  And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.

And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place.  This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to be nailed to anything.

Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terrible, stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost for ever.

This is not her story.

But it is the story of that terrible, stupid catastrophe and some of its consequences.

It is also the story of a book called The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy--not an Earth book, never published on Earth, and until the terrible catastrophe occurred, never seen or even heard of by any Earthman.

Nevertheless, a wholly remarkable book.

In fact, it was probably the most remarkable book ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor--of which no Earthman had ever heard either.

Not only is it a wholly remarkable book, it is also a highly successful one--more popular that the Celestial Home Care Omnibus, better selling than Fifty-three More Things to Do in Zero Gravity, and more controversial than Oolon Colluphid's trilogy of philosophical blockbusters, Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes, and Who Is This God Person, Anyway?

In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitchhiker's Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects.

First, it is slightly cheaper, and second, it has the words DON'T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.

But the story of this terrible, stupid Thursday, the story of its extraordinary consequences, and the story of how these consequences are inextricably intertwined with this remarkable book begins very simply.

It begins with a house.

So, there you have it.  The beginning of a new year.  And it really all begins with a house.  My house, in a disarray of packing for Florida.  It's late at night.  My son is sleeping fitfully, dreams of castles and magic wands and Mickey Mouse dancing in his head.  My wife is making a list and checking it twice.  And I am doing some last minute computer work.

The next post you read on this blog will be coming from a much warmer place, probably after some fireworks.  I'm determined to make this Hitchhiker's Guide year happier, funnier, less stressful.

Saint Marty is tired of chasing white whales.

September 13: Duck Pond, Writing Life, Stephen King

When I'm up to my knees in honeysuckle, I beat a retreat, and visit the duck pond.  The duck pond is a small eutrophic pond on cleared land near Carvin's Creek . . .

Dillard has many places to which she beats retreats.  There's the log at Tinker Creek.  A cabin located near a dam.  The woods near her own house, where she finds snake skins and cocoons.  And, of course, the duck pond, "choked with algae."

I'm not sure what else Dillard does with her life besides beat retreats and write astounding reflections on life, the universe, and everything, to life, the universe, and everything, if I may borrow from Douglas Adams.  Her existence, at least for the duration of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, seems very . . . unrushed.  A year-long meditation.  And I envy her for it.

Indeed, from what I've read, Dillard was living the life of a full-time writer at the time she published Pilgrim.  She basically took her journals and transformed them into a book.  The closest I've every come to living the life of a full-time writer was when I was in graduate school, getting my degrees.  Even then, I was teaching all the time.  There were no beating retreats in my life.  Ever.

I'm not complaining.  I'm dreaming.  There are some people who somehow live the writing life.  Getting up in the morning, sitting at a desk with a journal or notebook or laptop, and just writing for four or five or six hours.  That's their job.  I've read that is exactly what Stephen King does.  He sits at his desk every day, taking only his birthday (September 21--don't ask me why I know this) and Christmas off.  Other than that, it's all possessed cars and time-traveling English teachers.

I'm not saying that Dillard or King don't have their share of troubles.  I'm sure they do.  However, I would like to try the writing life for a while.  Fully commit myself to writing something that I wanted to read.  That would make me really happy.  That's my dream.

My reality is that I'm the primary income-earner in my family.  One of my jobs provides health insurance.  My weekly checks are sort of necessary, even though they don't always pay all the bills.  Almost, but not always.  I can't live the writing life because my family needs me.

So what is the compromise?  I already rise at quarter to five in the morning every weekday so that I can get to work by 6 a.m.  I can't see myself getting up any earlier in order to write.  I'd probably end up falling asleep at the wheel of my car and becoming a dead writer.  I already stay up late, but that's to grade papers and create lesson plans (you know, the stuff that I can't get done during the rest of the day).  I get between five (on a good night six) hours of sleep every night.

At the moment, the writing life remains a lovely dream for me.

Maybe, some day, Saint Marty will join Annie Dillard at the duck pond.