July 26: Going Crazy, Too Many People, Fortress of Solitude

While he examined the boy's eyes, Billy told him matter-of-factly about his adventures on Tralfamadore, assured the fatherless boy that his father was very much alive in moments the boy would see again and again.

"Isn't that comforting?" Billy asked.

And somewhere in there, the boy's mother went out and told the receptionist that Billy was evidently going crazy.  Billy was taken home.  His daughter asked him again, "Father, Father, Father--what are we going to do with you?"

Billy is trying to comfort the boy.  The boy has lost his father, who was killed in Vietnam.  Time traveler Billy knows a different kind of reality, not limited by time or space.  Death isn't an ending in Billy's reality.  It's just one moment along a continuum, along with births and weddings and baptisms and graduations.  Billy wants to pass this knowledge along to the boy, so that the boy knows that his father is still alive, and will continue to be alive, forever.

I've written about Vonnegut's concept of time before.  It is quite comforting.  The only problem is that, as a human being, I can't experience all these different moments over and over.  I am on a straight line toward my inevitable end.  I won't ever see my brother or sister again in my lifetime.  Their moments have passed.  I will never hold my infant daughter or son again.  Those moments are gone, as well.  Time takes all things away.

I am not trying to be fatalistic.  I will admit that I'm not in the best of moods.  I've had to deal with too many people today.  I've used up my daily quota of kindness and compassion, and I'm quickly devolving into misanthropy.  I have a couple more days of forced human interaction, and then I will be able to retreat for about a week into the Fortress of Solitude in my mind.  By the end of next week, I'm hoping my batteries will be a little recharged, and I may like people again.  Maybe.

In the meantime, I will try to avoid talking about aliens or time or war or Trump or anything that may require me to be removed forcibly from my place of work.  I will try not to go off the deep end.

Saint Marty is thankful tonight for the solitude of headphones and music.

January 22: Curse of the City, Fearless, Terry Godbey, "Descent"

Self-consciousness is the curse of the city and all that sophistication implies.  It is the glimpse of oneself in a storefront window, the unbidden awareness of reactions on the faces of other people--the novelist's world, not the poet's.  I've lived there.  I remember what the city has to offer:  human companionship, major-league baseball, and a clatter of quickening stimulus like a rush from strong drugs that leaves you drained.  I remember how you bide your time in the city, and think, if you stop to think, "next year . . . I'll start living; next year . . . I'll start my life."  Innocence is a better world.

I love that Annie Dillard says that self-consciousness is a glimpse of "the novelist's world, not the poet's."  The novelist, with a wider canvas and more space and time, lives in a fictional city, surrounded by faces and storefront windows.  More opportunity for reflections.  The poet, however, lives in a cave on top of a mountain.  In a tent on the edge of a volcano.  In a cabin on the banks of Tinker Creek.  Singular.  Alone.  Innocent.

I think I spend way too much time worrying about people's opinions of me.  In the medical office where I work, I feel scrutinized.  Constantly.  How many phone calls I answer.  How many patients I register.  How much money I collect.  How many registration forms I scan.  How much time I spend answering, registering, collecting, and scanning.  At the university, I get observed by a full-time professor every fall; evaluated by students at the end of every semester; ranked by another group of full-timers every winter.  Someone is looking over my shoulder all day, every day.

I think that's why I write poetry.  The un-self-consciousness of it.  I don't have to think about other people.  It's just me and a pen and my journal.  That doesn't mean that audience never crosses my mind.  Of course, I want to publish.  However, I do not live in a poetic city.  I live in a poetic monastery.  A poetic Fortress of Solitude.  It's a smaller, more insulated place.  Poets are fearless.  No subject is too scary or dangerous or outrageous.

It is Friday.  I have a whole weekend of not worrying about work or teaching.  Nobody staring me down.  No cross-examinations.  Tomorrow morning, I will simply get up, go to McDonald's with my wife and son and sister, and do exactly what I want.  I will blog.  Read.  Maybe work on a new poem or draw a cartoon.

Saint Marty is living large and free and fearless for the next three days.

Terry Godbey is pretty damn fearless, too...

Descent

by:  Terry Godbey

          . . . imagine the eyes staring back
               ---Newsweek article on Andrea Yeats
                         July 2, 2001

Was it like gazing into an aquarium,
looking into their eyes,
tendrils of hair still swaying,
as the bubbles stopped,
their legs quit kicking.
Nothing could stop her
as she drowned her five children
one by one, last night's boats
and ducks bobbing nearby,
after sending her husband
off to work with a kiss.
Did she tell the boys she was doing it
for their own good, that worn phrase
from every mother's lexicon,
or was she silent,
though they surely weren't?
As she wrestled
the 7-year-old into the tub
next to his baby sister,
he must have screamed Mommy, no!
but the woman who read him stories
and kissed his skinned knees
was as irretrievable
as his little brothers, lined up on the bed
like dolls.  He must have seen
that her eyes, floating above him,
were already dead.

Somebody's always watching....

August 3: First Day of Vacation, "Ives" Dip, Sharon Olds, "Psalm," Adventures of Stickman

Welcome to the first official day of my vacation.  As with most of my vacations, I have big plans.  This morning, my daughter and I spent two hours cleaning our attic.  Eventually, she wants to have a bedroom up there, so it didn't take much pressure to get her help.  She knows that the sooner we empty that graveyard of old toys and books and clothes and Christmas decorations, the sooner we can start planning her fortress of solitude.

This afternoon, my wife has scheduled a session at the gym with a trainer.  Not really excited about it.  Once I get there and start moving, I'll be fine.  I just don't like the preliminaries--getting weighed, talking about diet, feeling ashamed.  You know, normal gym stuff.  There's way too many hard bodies around that place.  I think it's supposed to be motivating to see a person in really great physical shape.  It doesn't really motivate me.  It makes me want to put on another layer of clothing and find the nearest Dairy Queen.

And this evening, I'm going to finish reading Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe.  It's for my book club, which meets this Thursday evening.  I have less than a hundred pages left, so it shouldn't take too long.

I will be doing a little traveling tomorrow.  I'm spending the day and night in Munising, a little town about 60 miles away.  We're staying at a hotel with a water slide, and then, on Wednesday, we're going on a glass-bottom boat shipwreck tour, weather permitting.  Last week, the temperatures were in the eighties and nineties every day.  This morning it wasn't even sixty degrees at noon.  Depressing.

Sister update:  Things are not going well at the University of Michigan hospital.  Her blood counts are still low.  The tumor in her brain has grown incredibly large.  The doctor said that the MRI of her brain looked normal at the beginning of June.  The one that was done at the beginning of July looked as if some kind of alien had taken over her head.  My sister hasn't spoken or responded to anybody in the last couple of days.  I'm thinking that the goal, at the moment, is to get her well enough to come closer to home.  Then hospice care.

My question for Ives dip Monday is this:

Will my sister be able to come home soon?

And the answer from Ives is:

They waited in the dark together, neither saying for several moments what each thought:  that when the elevator was falling, they might have been killed.

Well, that's not very encouraging,  The only thing in that little passage that gives any hope is the "might" in the statement "they might have been killed."  There's a little hope in that "might" that something else could happen.  Something positive.  Something hopeful.

I have decided, because it's my vacation, to extend Sharon Olds' reign as Poet of the Week for seven more days.  Her book The Father is still speaking to me on a very deep level.

Today is also the debut of my new comic strip, Adventures of Stickman, which will be featured Monday through Friday until I run out of ideas.

Saint Marty needs to get ready for his training session now.  That means he needs to eat a Cosmic Brownie.

Psalm

by:  Sharon Olds

A lot of the time I just sat and held his foot.
The minister came, putting on his violet
stole, looping it over his head
as he walked in, an athlete binding
his wrist without thinking while approaching his event,
he read a Psalm, no longer going
close to my father and reading it next
to his ear, as he had when my father could still
turn his obedient unbeseeching
eyes toward a voice.  You could see he was
beyond all that, The Lord himself is thy keeper,
the Lord is thy defense upon thy right hand, etc., etc.,
So that the sun shall not burn thee by day,
neither the moon by night.  But my father would
stick his elbow out the window of his car, he
welcomed that L of fire on his elbow,
kiss of the god of long-distance drivers.
And he did not fear the heat of the moon, he would
go to the edge of the pool any night
with a cigar, turning it, watching its fibrous
woven fire.  Who knows what he was thinking,
or if he thought,
but he felt at ease with the moon and the sun
and his favorite table at each of his favorite
restaurants.  So don't tell me
he need not fear, as if, now,
death would protect him, The Lord shall preserve
thy going out, and thy coming in,
from this time forth forevermore,
Amen, Goddamnit.  I sat down
and held his foot again, cold
foot of the nearly dead--his feet that had
walked with the weight of me slung on his shoulder,
I breathed small breaths on them, and between each
puff I said my own psalm,
There is no good in this, there is
no good in this.  And yet I had never
held his feet before, we had hardly
touched since the nights he had walked the floor at my arrival.

Adventures of STICKMAN