August 16: I Had Escaped, Brain Dead, "Starfish Have No Brains"

Merton trying to find himself:

I started out from Hyères again, this time more weary and depressed, walking among the pines, under the hot sun, looking at the rocks and the yellow mimosas and the little pink villas and the light blazing on the sea. That night I came down a long hill in the dusk to a hamlet called Cavalaire, and slept in a boarding house full of somber retired accountants who drank vin-rosé with their wives under the dim light of weak electric bulbs, and I went to bed and dreamt that I was in jail. 

At Saint Tropez I had a letter of introduction to a friend of Tom’s, a man with t.b., living in a sunny house on top of a hill, and there I met a couple of Americans who had rented a villa in the hills behind Cannes and they invited me there, when I came that way. 

On the way to Cannes, I got caught by a storm, towards evening, in the mountains of the Esterel, and was picked up by a chauffeur driving a big fancy Delage. I slung my rucksack off my shoulder and threw it in the back seat and settled down, with the warmth of the motor seeping up through the boards and into my wet, tired feet. The chauffeur was an Englishman who had an auto-hiring business in Nice and said he had just picked up the Lindbergh family off the liner at Villefranche and had taken them somewhere down the road here. At Cannes he took me to a very dull place, a club for English chauffeurs and sailors off the yachts of the rich people who were wintering on the Riviera. There I ate ham and eggs and watched the chauffeurs politely playing billiards, and grew depressed at the smell of London that lingered in the room—the smell of English cigarettes and English beer. It reminded me of the fogs I thought I had escaped.

Merton is running from something.  His past?  The loss of his mother and father?  England?  God?  He's recently suffered a near-fatal illness, where he came face-to-face with his unbelief in anything divine.  He's lost, it seems.  Not sure where he belongs, or if he wants to belong anywhere.  So he keeps moving.

I felt a little lost today myself.  Trying to plan for a semester at college that is simply unstable.  I have to be ready for just about any teaching possibility--face-to-face, online, a mixture of both.  I spent six hours today getting ready for the impending first class.  Finishing touches on syllabi.  Lesson planning.  Reading.  E-mailing.  Revising.  I'm too exhausted to really put together a coherent blog post tonight.  I'm brain dead.

I will say, though, that it's work I enjoy.  The challenge of how to teach a group of young people to feel as much passion as I do for a subject.  It satisfies something inside me that my other jobs don't.  It's soulful and energizing, like writing poetry in a way.  I come alive in a classroom like no other place.  I belong there.  I know that.  Merton is lost, and I am found.

And for that miracle, Saint Marty gives thanks.

A poem about being brainless and lost . . .

Starfish Have No Brains

by:  Martin Achatz

Starfish have no brains, so they can't assemble pieces to create a whole picture.

They live on image and instant.  Emerald sea.  First kiss.  Coral.  Parrot fish and salt.  Long embraces, arm in arm in arm in arm in arm.  Moonlit beach, tide.  Bark of seal.  Coming together.  Collision of heavenly bodies.  Seagull shriek.  Crab scuttle.  Separation.  Moan of whale under black skies.  Emptiness.

If the starfish had a brain, he would throw himself into barracuda jaw, cormorant beak.  Allow himself to bake in sun.

Instead, he just counts waves.  One wave.  One wave.  One wave.  One wave.  Never getting to two.