November 10: "Beaver Moon--The Suicide of a Friend," Becoming Unbearable, Christmas Fanatic

Mary Oliver loses a friend . . . 

Beaver Moon--The Suicide of a Friend

by:  Mary Oliver

When somewhere life

breaks like a pane of glass,

and from every direction casual

voices are bringing you the news,

you say:  I should have known.  

You say:  I should have been aware. 

That last Friday he looked

so ill, like an old mountain-climber

lost on the white trails, listening

to the ice breaking upward, under

his worn-out shoes.  You say:

what could I have done? and you go

with the rest, to bury him.

That night, you turn in your bed

to watch the moon rise, and once more

see what a small coin it is

against the darkness, and how everything else

is a mystery, and you know

nothing at all except 

the moonlight is beautiful--

white rivers running together

along the bare boughs of the trees--

and somewhere, for someone, life

is becoming moment by moment

unbearable.

Yes, it is that time of year.  The days are getting shorter and shorter.  I drive to work in the dark, return home in the dark.  The boughs of the trees are bare, and, as Oliver says, somewhere, for someone, life is becoming unbearable.

If you haven't noticed, I have been sporadic in posting blogs recently.  I've fallen out of the habit of daily writing.  There are a few reasons why.  Library busyness.  Exhaustion at night.  Schoolwork.  Library work.  Family work.  I've tried to blog, but I struggle.  A lot.  My thoughts seem to slip through my fingers like a salamander.

Plus, in the past couple years, I tend to experience some pretty dark moments as the holidays approach.  Which is a strange thing for me.  My whole life, I've been a Christmas fanatic.  The day after Halloween would usually find me dragging out my Christmas decorations and decking the halls.  Not so much these days.

I still love Christmas.  The lights.  Movies.  TV shows.  Music.  Peace on Earth.  All that jazz.  However, I've become much more aware of the surrounding darkness.  There's a scene in many of the film adaptations of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol where Marley makes Scrooge look out a window.  Scrooge sees countless specters filling the air with cries of lamentation and sorrow.  That's sort where my holiday headspace has been these past few years.

This month, the Beaver Moon happens on November 27.  I feel myself sliding toward that day like Oliver's friend who looks like "an old mountain-climber / lost on the white trails . . ."  Don't worry.  I'm not thinking of self harm.  However, there's a sort of melancholic black snow falling on my head right now.  Last year, this snow held on and on, finally melting away when June rolled in.  I'm hoping spring comes a little faster this time 'round.

I know I'm not the only person who has these struggles.  I also know most people's lives are a lot more difficult than mine.  As Oliver points out in her poem, the moon is a small coin of light against the coal of the heavens.  This time of year, I am acutely aware of this fact.

So, I try to be kind--to myself and to most people I meet.  Because you never know when that kindness is exactly the live preserver a person drowning in darkness needs.

Saint Marty wishes all of his faithful disciples sunrises in the coming weeks.  

December 1: Blind and Crude and Unspiritual, Most Human Person, Louisa May Alcott

 Merton delves into Eastern mysticism . . . 

The point of his title was this: we cannot use evil means to attain a good end. Huxley’s chief argument was that we were using the means that precisely made good ends impossible to attain: war, violence, reprisals, rapacity. And he traced our impossibility to use the proper means to the fact that men were immersed in the material and animal urges of an element in their nature which was blind and crude and unspiritual. 

The main problem is to fight our way free from subjection to this more or less inferior element, and to reassert the dominance of our mind and will: to vindicate for these faculties, for the spirit as a whole, the freedom of action which it must necessarily have if we are to live like anything but wild beasts, tearing each other to pieces. And the big-conclusion from all this was: we must practice prayer and asceticism. 

Asceticism! The very thought of such a thing was a complete revolution in my mind. The word had so far stood for a kind of weird and ugly perversion of nature, the masochism of men who had gone crazy in a warped and unjust society. What an idea! To deny the desires of one’s flesh, and even to practice certain disciplines that punished and mortified those desires: until this day, these things had never succeeded in giving me anything but gooseflesh. But of course Huxley did not stress the physical angle of mortification and asceticism—and that was right, in so far as he was more interested in striking to the very heart of the matter, and showing the ultimate positive principle underlying the need for detachment. 

He showed that this negation was not something absolute, sought for its own sake: but that it was a freeing, a vindication of our real selves, a liberation of the spirit from limits and bonds that were intolerable, suicidal —from a servitude to flesh that must ultimately destroy our whole nature and society and the world as well. 

Not only that, once the spirit was freed, and returned to its own element, it was not alone there: it could find the absolute and perfect Spirit, God. It could enter into union with Him: and what is more, this union was not something vague and metaphorical, but it was a matter of real experience. What that experience amounted to, according to Huxley, might or might not have been the nirvana of the Buddhists, which is the ultimate negation of all experience and all reality whatever: but anyway, somewhere along the line, he quoted proofs that it was and could be a real and positive experience. 

The speculative side of the book—its strongest—was full, no doubt, of strange doctrines by reason of its very eclecticism. And the practical element, which was weak, inspired no confidence, especially when he tried to talk about a concrete social program. Huxley seemed not to be at home with the Christian term “Love” which sounded extraordinarily vague in his contexts—and which must nevertheless be the heart and life of all true mysticism. But out of it all I took these two big concepts of a supernatural, spiritual order, and the possibility of real, experimental contact with God. 

Huxley was thought, by some people, to be on the point of entering the Church, but Ends and Means was written by a man who was not at ease with Catholicism. He quoted St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila indiscriminately with less orthodox Christian writers like Meister Eckhart: and on the whole he preferred the Orient. It seems to me that in discarding his family’s tradition of materialism he had followed the old Protestant groove back into the heresies that make the material creation evil of itself, although I do not remember enough about him to accuse him of formally holding such a thing. Nevertheless, that would account for his sympathy for Buddhism, and for the nihilistic character which he preferred to give to his mysticism and even to his ethics. This also made him suspicious, as the Albigensians had been, and for the same reason, of the Sacraments and Liturgical life of the Church, and also of doctrines like the Incarnation. 

With all that I was not concerned. My hatred of war and my own personal misery in my particular situation and the general crisis of the world made me accept with my whole heart this revelation of the need for a spiritual life, an interior life, including some kind of mortification. I was content to accept the latter truth purely as a matter of theory: or at least, to apply it most vociferously to one passion which was not strong in myself, and did not need to be mortified: that of anger, hatred, while neglecting the ones that really needed to be checked, like gluttony and lust. 

But the most important effect of the book on me was to make me start ransacking the university library for books on Oriental mysticism. 

I remember those winter days, at the end of 1937 and the beginning of 1938, peaceful days when I sat in the big living room at Douglaston, with the pale sun coming in the window by the piano, where one of my father’s water-colors of Bermuda hung on the wall. 

The house was very quiet, with Pop and Bonnemaman gone from it, and John Paul away trying to pass his courses at Cornell. I sat for hours, with the big quarto volumes of the Jesuit Father Wieger’s French translations of hundreds of strange Oriental texts. 

I have forgotten the titles, even the authors, and I never understood a word of what they said in the first place. I had the habit of reading fast, without stopping, or stopping only rarely to take a note, and all these mysteries would require a great deal of thought, even were a man who knew something about them to puzzle them out. And I was completely unfamiliar with anything of the kind. Consequently, the strange great jumble of myths and theories and moral aphorisms and elaborate parables made little or no real impression on my mind, except that I put the books down with the impression that mysticism was something very esoteric and complicated, and that we were all inside some huge Being in whom we were involved and out of whom we evolved, and the thing to do was to involve ourselves back in to him again by a system of elaborate disciplines subject more or less to the control of our own will. The Absolute Being was an infinite, timeless, peaceful, impersonal Nothing. 

The only practical thing I got out of it was a system for going to sleep, at night, when you couldn’t sleep. You lay flat in bed, without a pillow, your arms at your sides and your legs straight out, and relaxed all your muscles, and you said to yourself: 

“Now I have no feet, now I have no feet ... no feet... no legs ... no knees.” 

Sometimes it really worked: you did manage to make it feel as if your feet and legs and the rest of your body had changed into air and vanished away. The only section with which it almost never worked was my head: and if I had not fallen asleep before I got that far, when I tried to wipe out my head, instantly chest and stomach and legs and feet all came back to life with a most exasperating reality and I did not get to sleep for hours. Usually, however, I managed to get to sleep quite quickly by this trick. I suppose it was a variety of auto-suggestion, a kind of hypnotism, or else simply muscular relaxation, with the help of a little work on the part of an active fancy. 

Near the end of his life, Merton got himself into a lot of trouble because of his interest in Eastern religions.  In fact, he died in Thailand while attending a conference on monasticism and ecumenism.  While he seems more than a little skeptical here--seems even to be mocking the practice of meditation--Merton later embraced worldwide unity and universality.  

I sometimes struggle with these passages in Merton that seem so lofty and removed from anything human and real.  But, of course, that's how most saints and holy people come to God--through their own weaknesses and failings.  Because that's really the only way light enters into dark places--through the cracks and fissures and seams.

I am probably the most human person on this planet.  Every day, I fail at something important.  Working.  Fathering.  Husbanding.  Friending.  Poeting.  Christianing.  Tonight, I am exhausted after a day of trying to be the person everyone expects me to be.  Doing the things everyone expects me to do.  Expectations are exhausting.

I should be in bed right now.  Asleep.  I have another long day of work and grading and forcing my son to do his schoolwork tomorrow.  Instead, I'm sitting on my couch, watching Greta Gerwig's adaptation of Little Women.  It's the fourth time I've watched it since Saturday.  I guess you could call it my latest obsession.  

I find something very comforting in the story of Jo March.  Her messy life makes me somehow feel not quite so . . . alien.  Of course, it's fiction, written over 150 years ago.  A different time.  A different place.  The country recovering from the Civil War.  Women, slave to social customs and mores.  Men, expected to hold down jobs, support their families, be upstanding citizens.  Expectations again.

Louisa May Alcott, and her main character, didn't really care what other people thought about them.  Alcott wanted to be a successful, serious writer, and she succeeded in that ambition.  Wildly succeeded.  In her lifetime, she was one of the most famous writers in the United States (and the world, for that matter).

I have a lot of things I need to get done in the next week, before I can get on with the real enjoyment of the holiday season.  Teaching and work stuff.  Obligations I really do need to meet.  I don't like disappointing anyone.  Never have.  In fact, I like surprising people.  Doing things that actually rise above everyone's expectations.

That's a lot of pressure.  And that's why I'm really tired at the moment.

Charles Dickens used to write all day long and then walk 10 or 20 miles every night.  Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in six weeks.  Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women in three months.  It takes me three or four hours just to pound out one, small blog post.

Dickens wasn't perfect.  Alcott wasn't.  I'm certainly not, either.  Of course, Dickens and Alcott were geniuses.  Me?  I'm a father, husband, friend, teacher, poet, musician, actor, director.  I make mistakes.  Often.  Every day.  But that's okay.  That's how the light gets in.  How God gets in.

Saint Marty gives thanks tonight for the miracle of his failings.

October 18-21: Doing Good, New Job, Abiding Love

 Thomas Merton becomes disenchanted with Communism . . .

My active part in the world revolution was not very momentous. It lasted, in all, about three months. I picketed the Casa Italiana, I went to the Peace Strike, and I think I made some kind of a speech in the big classroom on the second floor of the Business School, where the N.S.L. had their meetings. Maybe it was a speech on Communism in England—a topic about which I knew absolutely nothing; in that case, I was loyally living up to the tradition of Red oratory. I sold some pamphlets and magazines. I don’t know what was in them, but I could gather their contents from the big black cartoons of capitalists drinking the blood of workers. 

Finally, the Reds had a party. And, of all places, in a Park Avenue apartment. This irony was the only amusing thing about it. And after all it was not so ironical. It was the home of some Barnard girl who belonged to the Young Communist League and her parents had gone away for the weekend. I could get a fair picture of them from the way the furniture looked, and from the volumes of Nietszche and Schopenhauer and Oscar Wilde and Ibsen that filled the bookcases. And there was a big grand piano on which someone played Beethoven while the Reds sat around on the floor. Later we had a sort of Boy Scout campfire group in the living room, singing heavy Communist songs, including that delicate anti-religious classic, “There’ll be pie in the sky when you die.”

One little fellow with buck teeth and horn-rimmed glasses pointed to two windows in a corner of one of the rooms. They commanded a whole sweep of Park Avenue in one direction and the cross-town street in another. “What a place for a machine-gun nest,” he observed. The statement came from a middle-class adolescent. It was made in a Park Avenue apartment. He had evidently never even seen a machine-gun, except in the movies. If there had been a revolution going on at the time, he would have probably been among the first to get his head knocked off by the revolutionists. And in any case he, like all the rest of us, had just finished making the famous Oxford Pledge that he would not fight in any war whatever... 

One reason why I found the party so dull was that nobody was very enthusiastic about getting something to drink except me. Finally one of the girls encouraged me, in a businesslike sort of a way, to go out and buy bottles of rye at a liquor store around the corner on Third Avenue, and when I had drunk some of the contents she invited me into a room and signed me up as a member of the Young Communist League. I took the party name of Frank Swift. When I looked up from the paper the girl had vanished like a not too inspiring dream, and I went home on the Long Island Railroad with the secret of a name which I have been too ashamed to reveal to anyone until this moment when I am beyond humiliation. 

I only went to one meeting of the Young Communist League, in the apartment of one of the students. It was a long discussion as to why Comrade So-and-so did not come to any of the meetings. The answer was that his father was too bourgeois to allow it. So after that, I walked out into the empty street, and let the meeting end however it would. 

It was good to be in the fresh air. My footsteps rang out on the dark stones. At the end of the street, the pale amber light of a bar-room beckoned lovingly to me from under the steel girders of the elevated. The place was empty. I got a glass of beer and lit a cigarette and tasted the first sweet moment of silence and relief. 

And that was the end of my days as a great revolutionary. I decided that it would be wiser if I just remained a “fellow-traveller.” The truth is that my inspiration to do something for the good of mankind had been pretty feeble and abstract from the start. I was still interested in doing good for only one person in the world—myself.

Merton is young.  He has some kind of urge to make the world a better place for humankind, but he lacks the skills to do it at the moment.  He's too focused on his own needs and wants to worry about anyone else's.  That's pretty typical for a teenager.  A teenager doesn't see the big picture.  It's too hard to have a broader vision when all you're focused on is your own pain and awkwardness.

I have been preoccupied these last few days myself.  I started my new job two days ago, you see.  I am now the Adult Programming Coordinator for Peter White Public Library in Marquette, Michigan.  That means that I get to sit in an office most days, dreaming up events and readings and concerts and performances.  For instance, today I worked on a program for December that involves a virtual reader's theater of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol.  I spent over an hour just hunting down a good script to use.  And I got paid to do it.

This is sort of a dream job for me--earning money for creating and promoting art.  While, at the moment, I feel a little overwhelmed, I am slowly but surely finding my footing.  For a half hour this afternoon, I caught up with a friend of mine I haven't spoken with in a long time.  We directed and acted in musicals together way back.  I'm trying to involve her in one of my dream projects.  It was a wonderful half hour or so of catching up.  And tomorrow, I get to work at home, sitting at my kitchen table with my laptop, e-mailing and dreaming some more.

In a year that has been marked only by struggle in so many areas of my life (personal, political, parental, professional), these last few days at the library have been quiet and productive and thrilling.  Yet, there are still struggles present.  My son's constant battle with going to school.  My daughter's recent heartbreak and confusion.  My daughter's boyfriend of four years, and his heartbreak and despair.  I just want the world, and everyone I love in it, to be safe and happy.  

So, tonight, I pray for my son--that he will find his excitement for learning again.  I pray for my daughter--that she will know love and peace once more.  I pray for my daughter's boyfriend of four years--that he will realize that he is still loved and that his happiness is inside of himself. 

All of these miracles are about abiding love in some way, and Saint Marty's greatest faith is in the power of love.

August 3: An Illusion, World of Alternate Choices, Mansion on a Hill

Trillian, Ford, and Zaphod trying to come to terms with their current predicament . . .

"Who put all that [gold] there?" yelped Zaphod, goggle-eyed.

"Don't get excited," said Ford, "it's only a catalog."

"A who?"

"A catalog," said Trillian, "an illusion."

"How can you say that?" cried Zaphod, falling to his hands and knees and staring at the ground.  He poked it and prodded it.  It was very heavy and very slightly soft--he could mark it with his fingernail.  It was very yellow and very shiny, and when he breathed on it his breath evaporated off it in that very peculiar and special way that breath evaporates off solid gold.

"Trillian and I came round a while ago," said Ford.  "We shouted and yelled till somebody came and then carried on shouting and yelling till they got fed up and put us in their planet catalog to keep us busy till they were ready to deal with us.  This is all Sens-O-Tape."

Zaphod stared at him bitterly.

"Ah, shit," he said, "you wake me up from my own perfectly good dream to show me somebody else's."  He sat down in a huff.

"What's that series of valleys over there?" he said.

"Hallmark," said Ford.  "We had a look."

"We didn't wake you earlier," said Trillian.  "The last planet was knee-deep in fish."

"Fish?"

"Some people like the oddest things."

"And before that," said Ford, "we had platinum.  Bit dull.  We thought you'd like to see this one though."

Seas of light glared at them in one solid blaze wherever they looked.

Everyone has different dreams.  A planet of gold.  A planet filled with fish.  A planet where Donald Trump was never born.  A planet where cell phones never existed.  A planet designed to be one big Disney World.  A planet where mental illness and addiction could simply be cured by eating a vanilla ice cream cone or a banana split.  I could go on.

Dreams are wonderful things, fueled by imagination and hope and perfection.  Of course, I know that living a life of dreams is not healthy.  No matter how much I want it, I probably will never wake up, get dressed, and go out to breakfast with Charles Dickens, Barack Obama, and Flannery O'Connor.  Not gonna happen.

Yesterday, I was speaking with a very smart person about things that are happening in my life.  At one point in our conversation, this person said to me, "You know, people who say things like 'Well, this is God's will' and 'God has a plan in all this' are full of shit.  There's this little thing called freewill involved in everything.  What God has is foreknowledge of the consequences of each choice a person makes."

Imagine a world of alternate choices.  What if, 2,000 years ago, the Roman centurions hammering ordered to hammer those spikes into Christ's hands and feet had made the choice to set him free instead?  What if Adolf Hitler had spent his whole life as a struggling artist, painting and painting and painting?  What if Eve had never taken a bite of that apple?

I can see the path of the choices I've made, how one decision led to another decision that led to another decision, on and on, leading to where I am at this moment.  Of course, no choice is perfect, unless you're Jesus Christ.  Christ was fully human, with freewill, just like the rest of us.  Yet, he made all the right decisions and went on to save the human race from itself.

This morning, I'm thinking about the perfect world of my choices.  What planet I thought/wish my decisions would have landed me.  My personal Magrathean planet, designed to my specifications.  It would look a lot like the planet I live on now.  The same place--the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (perhaps with milder winter weather).  The same people--my wife, daughter, son, sisters, brothers, sisters-in-law, family, friends.  Because I love the people in my life and where I have chosen to make my home.

Now, for the perfection.  My life and the people in it would be free of mental illness and addiction.  Every day, I would watch my wife and children flourish in healthy, loving ways, our lives simply a measure of the love we have for each other and the world around us.

In the morning, I would get up, wander into my study, and write poetry for several hours.  I would drop these poems in the mail in the afternoon.  In a few days' time, I would receive a check in the mail for those poems, providing enough money to pay my bills, fill my cupboards and refrigerator, and allow me to put some aside for rainy days, which never arrive.

I would teach full-time at the university, and I would have the respect of my colleagues and students.  I would be the poet every student wants as a professor.  Young people would enroll as English majors just because they want to be in my classes.  I would be able to teach courses like "Introduction to Sacred Poems" and "Spiritual Autobiography" and "The Mythos and Poetry of Star Wars."

And, at the end of the night, my daughter will kiss me goodnight; my son will hug me and say "You're the best daddy in the whole world!"; my wife and I will sit in our living room for an hour or so, discussing the day's events; and then, around eleven, we would go to bed, fall asleep in each other's arms, telling each other how much we love each other.

That is my perfect world, the perfect result of the choices I have made in my life, everything scrubbed clean of pain and hurt and illness and disappointment.  My mansion on a hill, as the old gospel song goes.

No person lives in her/his perfect world.  Yet, it's wonderful to imagine it.  Yes, I'm getting a little John Lennon here.  I have found myself imagining it a lot in recent weeks.  It gets me through long days of struggle.  I'm not sure it's a healthy practice, but I also believe a life without hope isn't really a life I want a part of.

And Saint Marty still hopes to find a room in his mansion on a hill.

A picture a friend sent me yesterday that fills me with hope . . .

July 21: Ultimate Question, Chasing Dreams, Fishing

And now a few words from the stupendous super computer, Deep Thought . . .

"Might I make an observation at this point?" inquired Deep Thought.

"We'll go on strike!" yelled Vroomfondel.

"That's right!" agreed Majikthise.  "You'll have a national Philosophers' strike on your hands!"

The hum level in the room suddenly increased as several ancillary bass driver units, mounted in sedately carved and varnished cabinet speakers around the room, cut in to give Deep Thought's voice a little more power.

"All I wanted to say," bellowed the computer, "is that my circuits are now irrevocably committed to calculating the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything."  He paused and satisfied himself that he now had everyone's attention, before continuing more quietly.  "But the program will take me a little while to run."

Fook glanced impatiently at his watch.  

"How long?" he said.

"Seven and a half million years," said Deep Thought.

Lunkwill and Fook blinked at each other.

"Seven and a half million years!" they cried in chorus.

Seven and a half million years for a stupendous super computer to figure out the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.  I don't feel quite so bad that I'm still working out what I'm going to be when I grow up.

When I was my son's age, I was sure I was going to be a full-time writer/movie director.  That was my dream.  I read biographies of famous writers all the time.  Robert Frost,  Charles Dickens.  Ernest Hemingway.  William Faulkner.  I studied the work of directors I admires.  Steven Spielberg.  George Lucas, Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford.  I was committed to this dream.

Of course, as so often happens with dreams, reality intervened.  I graduated from high school and found myself majoring in computer science at college, while stealthily stacking up credits from the English Department.  Eventually, I realized that I didn't want to spend my life communicating with computers (even if they were stupendous super computers).  Then I went to graduate school and stacked up some advanced degrees in English and creative writing.

And here I sit now.  Poet Laureate of the Upper Peninsula.  Contingent English professor at a university.  Full-time medical office worker.  I am NOT Robert Frost or Alfred Hitchcock.  I can barely cobble together enough time to write a little, 500-word blog post every day.  I struggle with depression on a daily basis.  My wife struggles with mental illness and sexual addiction.

Hardly the happily ever after I envisioned as a ten-year-old boy armed with a library card and a boatload of dreams. 

I miss those times when anything seemed possible.  I know that I will probably never direct a Hollywood film like Jaws or Vertigo.  I'm not going to be the next Stephen King or J. K. Rowling.  I still have those writerly aspirations, but they are mostly relegated to daydreams driving home from work.  That's right.  I have become Walter Mitty, imagining myself as a world-famous writer, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, owning a mansion with a swimming pool and library. 

Last night, my kids went fishing.  They landed a couple big ones.  My kids are full of dreams right now.  The future is a wide sea, and they have the fishing rods in their hands.  I hope they never give up or settle.  I hope they keep chasing their dreams until they come true, whatever they are.  I hope they continue to land the big ones.

Saint Marty will be happy if he lands a nap sometime this week. 

December 19: Slept Better, Charles Dickens, Christmas Cards

I turned in, and never slept better in my life . . .

Ishmael is sleeping well.  I. on the other hand, have not been.

Welcome to the other side of end-of-semester grading.  I survived.  Barely.  In the past 48 hours, I have slept a total of seven hours.  Eight, if you count the hour-long nap I took this afternoon.  And now, it's time to settle into the preparations for Christmas.  Shopping.  Writing Christmas cards.  Rehearsing music.  Baking cookies, if I'm lucky.  Watching It's A Wonderful Life.  Trying not to feel like George Bailey on the bridge, staring down at the roiling black water.

To say that I feel unprepared for the coming holiday would be an understatement.  My Christmas essay is written.  My Christmas poem is not.  I have bought a total of three or four presents and can't really afford to buy any more at the moment.  Right now, as I'm typing this post, I'm watching The Man Who Invented Christmas, a film about Charles Dickens composing A Christmas Carol.  And worrying over his constant money troubles.

For those of my disciples who've been reading this blog for any length of time, you already know my affinity for Dickens.  My habit of reading a 1200-page Dickens biography every year or so.  If I believed in reincarnation, I would say that I am Charles Dickens.  His energy speaks to me.  The 20-mile midnight walks.  Constant state of creative frenzy.  Gregariousness.  He's a guy after my own heart.

Of course, Dickens worked himself to death at a very young age.  A stroke at his writing desk when he was 58 years old.  That's only a few years away for me.  It does seem that I'm always working, always worried about money and bills.  I certainly have that in common with Boz, as well.  And those worries are what have been causing me some sleepless nights these last few weeks.

Tonight, my task is Christmas cards.  Have to get them addressed and mailed.  About 75 of them.  Yes, 75.  The list keeps getting longer every year.  I do love the process.  Thinking about friends and family that I haven't seen in a long while.  Imagining them opening the envelope, reading the letter inside, staring at the enclosed photo.

I have no time to spare.  Tomorrow, I head to Calumet for two days of rehearsal.  A show on Friday night.  No rest for this Dickens.

Saint Marty is trying to be thankful this evening for Christmas and cards and presents and carols.  Trying really hard.

June 15: Greatest Efficiency, Writing Practice, Charles Dickens

A word concerning an incident in the last chapter.

According to the invariable usage of the fishery, the whale-boat pushes off from the ship, with the headsman or whale-killer as temporary steersman, and the harpooneer or whale-fastener pulling the foremost oar, the one known as the harpooneer-oar. Now it needs a strong, nervous arm to strike the first iron into the fish; for often, in what is called a long dart, the heavy implement has to be flung to the distance of twenty or thirty feet. But however prolonged and exhausting the chase, the harpooneer is expected to pull his oar meanwhile to the uttermost; indeed, he is expected to set an example of superhuman activity to the rest, not only by incredible rowing, but by repeated loud and intrepid exclamations; and what it is to keep shouting at the top of one's compass, while all the other muscles are strained and half started- what that is none know but those who have tried it. For one, I cannot bawl very heartily and work very recklessly at one and the same time. In this straining, bawling state, then, with his back to the fish, all at once the exhausted harpooneer hears the exciting cry- "Stand up, and give it to him!" He now has to drop and secure his oar, turn round on his centre half way, seize his harpoon from the crotch, and with what little strength may remain, he essays to pitch it somehow into the whale. No wonder, taking the whole fleet of whalemen in a body, that out of fifty fair chances for a dart, not five are successful; no wonder that so many hapless harpooneers are madly cursed and disrated; no wonder that some of them actually burst their blood-vessels in the boat; no wonder that some sperm whalemen are absent four years with four barrels; no wonder that to many ship owners, whaling is but a losing concern; for it is the harpooneer that makes the voyage, and if you take the breath out of his body how can you expect to find it there when most wanted!

Again, if the dart be successful, then at the second critical instant, that is, when the whale starts to run, the boatheader and harpooneer likewise start to running fore and aft, to the imminent jeopardy of themselves and every one else. It is then they change places; and the headsman, the chief officer of the little craft, takes his proper station in the bows of the boat.

Now, I care not who maintains the contrary, but all this is both foolish and unnecessary. The headsman should stay in the bows from first to last; he should both dart the harpoon and the lance, and no rowing whatever should be expected of him, except under circumstances obvious to any fisherman. I know that this would sometimes involve a slight loss of speed in the chase; but long experience in various whalemen of more than one nation has convinced me that in the vast majority of failures in the fishery, it has not by any means been so much the speed of the whale as the before described exhaustion of the harpooneer that has caused them.

To insure the greatest efficiency in the dart, the harpooneers of this world must start to their feet from out of idleness, and not from out of toil.

In this entire chapter, which is one of the shortest in the book, Melville is talking about efficiency.  He tries to point out the utter foolishness of a common practice in whaling boats--making the harpooneer not only throw the harpoon at the unfortunate quarry, but also help row out to the whale before he unleashes his weapon.  The practice, Melville argues, almost insures that the poor harpooneer will either miss or not have enough strength for the killing throw.  The traditional practice in whaling boats is, therefore, wildly stupid and inefficient.

I have always hated it when someone provides this argument when asked for the reasoning behind doing something a certain way:  "Because that's the way we've always done it."  With that line of thinking, then, slavery should still be alive and well in the United States, and bloodletting should be a common medical treatment for smallpox and epilepsy.  Just because a practice is common doesn't mean that it's either the best or most efficient.

This afternoon, I revised a poem that I've been working on.  I'd like to say that I went off by myself to a nice quiet room and spent three hours scribbling in my journal, crossing out and staining my fingers black with ink.  Of his writing habits, Leo Tolstoy said, "I must write each day without fail."  Here's a description of Charles Dickens' typical day:

Dickens’s working hours were invariable. His eldest son recalled that “no city clerk was ever more methodical or orderly than he; no humdrum, monotonous, conventional task could ever have been discharged with more punctuality or with more business-like regularity, than he gave to the work of his imagination and fancy.”

He rose at 7:00, had breakfast at 8:00, and was in his study by 9:00. He stayed there until 2:00, taking a brief break for lunch with his family, during which he often seemed to be in a trance, eating mechanically and barely speaking a word before hurrying back to his desk.

On an ordinary day he could complete about two thousand words in this way, but during a flight of imagination he sometimes managed twice that amount. Other days, however, he would hardly write anything; nevertheless, he stuck to his work hours without fail, doodling and staring out the window to pass the time.

Promptly at 2:00, Dickens left his desk for a vigorous three-hour walk through the countryside or the streets of London, continuing to think of his story and, as he described it, “searching for some pictures I wanted to build upon.” Returning home, his brother-in-law remembered, “he looked the personification of energy, which seemed to ooze from every pore as from some hidden reservoir.” Dickens’s nights, however, were relaxed: he dined at 6:00, then spent the evening with family or friends before retiring at midnight.

That is what Dickens did almost every day of his life, with little fail.  It worked for him, obviously.  He's considered the greatest novelist of the Victorian era.  Wrote 29 books in his lifetime, many of them considered classics.

Very few people could follow Dickens' writing process.  Just reading it exhausts me.  Working on my poem today, I followed my normal daily writing routine, which I would describe as fits and starts.  I work a full-time job, Monday through Friday, eight hours a day.  During the school year, I teach some afternoons and evenings.  To be able to write anything, I am stealing moments.  Today, I was scribbling in my Moleskine in between phone calls from patients.  A line here.  Phone call.  An image there.  Another phone call.  Another line.  Phone.  You get the idea.

This process probably wouldn't work for a whole lot of people.  But, like Dickens, I have crafted the way I write to fit my life.  Dickens had a houseful of children and a large group of friends, so he had to escape from them.  I have to work a lot to pay the bills, so I think and write on the job at times, even if I don't have a pen in my hand.  This afternoon, a coworker noticed I was staring off at the ceiling with a strange expression.  "Is something wrong?" she asked.  I looked at her, a little dazed, then said, "Oh, no, I was just writing a poem."

On the weekends, my writing habits change.  If I'm on vacation, my writing habits change.  Sometimes I write in the morning.  Other times, I sit down with pen and paper in the evening, after everyone has gone to bed.  What produced a poem for me today won't necessarily be fruitful for me tomorrow.  As Melville points out in the chapter above, the harpooneer doesn't HAVE to row the boat every time.

The only writing rule I try to follow religiously is this:  Write every day.

Saint Marty is thankful this evening for the practice of writing, in all its shapes and forms.

May 3: The Fiery Hunt, Really Big Fish, Bigfoot and Christmas

Nor is it, altogether, the remembrance of her cathedral-toppling earthquakes; nor the stampedoes of her frantic seas; nor the tearlessness of and skies that never rain; nor the sight of her wide field of leaning spires, wrenched cope-stones, and crosses all adroop (like canted yards of anchored fleets); and her suburban avenues of house-walls lying over upon each other, as a tossed pack of cards;- it is not these things alone which make tearless Lima, the strangest, saddest city thou can'st see. For Lima has taken the white veil; and there is a higher horror in this whiteness of her woe. Old as Pizarro, this whiteness keeps her ruins for ever new; admits not the cheerful greenness of complete decay; spreads over her broken ramparts the rigid pallor of an apoplexy that fixes its own distortions.

I know that, to the common apprehension, this phenomenon of whiteness is not confessed to be the prime agent in exaggerating the terror of objects otherwise terrible; nor to the unimaginative mind is there aught of terror in those appearances whose awfulness to another mind almost solely consists in this one phenomenon, especially when exhibited under any form at all approaching to muteness or universality. What I mean by these two statements may perhaps be respectively elucidated by the following examples.

First: The mariner, when drawing nigh the coasts of foreign lands, if by night he hear the roar of breakers, starts to vigilance, and feels just enough of trepidation to sharpen all his faculties; but under precisely similar circumstances, let him be called from his hammock to view his ship sailing through a midnight sea of milky whiteness- as if from encircling headlands shoals of combed white bears were swimming round him, then he feels a silent, superstitious dread; the shrouded phantom of the whitened waters is horrible to him as a real ghost; in vain the lead assures him he is still off soundings; heart and helm they both go down; he never rests till blue water is under him again. Yet where is the mariner who will tell thee, "Sir, it was not so much the fear of striking hidden rocks, as the fear of that hideous whiteness that so stirred me?"

Second: To the native Indian of Peru, the continual sight of the snowhowdahed Andes conveys naught of dread, except, perhaps, in the mere fancying of the eternal frosted desolateness reigning at such vast altitudes, and the natural conceit of what a fearfulness it would be to lose oneself in such inhuman solitude. Much the same is it with the backwoodsman of the West, who with comparative indifference views an unbounded prairie sheeted with driven snow, no shadow of tree or twig to break the fixed trance of whiteness. Not so the sailor, beholding the scenery of the Antarctic seas; where at times, by some infernal trick of legerdemain in the powers of frost and air, he, shivering and half shipwrecked, instead of rainbows speaking hope and solace to his misery, views what seems a boundless churchyard grinning upon him with its lean ice monuments and splintered crosses.

But thou sayest, methinks that white-lead chapter about whiteness is but a white flag hung out from a craven soul; thou surrenderest to a hypo, Ishmael.

Tell me, why this strong young colt, foaled in some peaceful valley of Vermont, far removed from all beasts of prey- why is it that upon the sunniest day, if you but shake a fresh buffalo robe behind him, so that he cannot even see it, but only smells its wild animal muskiness- why will he start, snort, and with bursting eyes paw the ground in phrensies of affright? There is no remembrance in him of any gorings of wild creatures in his green northern home, so that the strange muskiness he smells cannot recall to him anything associated with the experience of former perils; for what knows he, this New England colt, of the black bisons of distant Oregon?

No; but here thou beholdest even in a dumb brute, the instinct of the knowledge of the demonism in the world. Though thousands of miles from Oregon, still when he smells that savage musk, the rending, goring bison herds are as present as to the deserted wild foal of the prairies, which this instant they may be trampling into dust.

Thus, then, the muffled rollings of a milky sea; the bleak rustlings of the festooned frosts of mountains; the desolate shiftings of the windrowed snows of prairies; all these, to Ishmael, are as the shaking of that buffalo robe to the frightened colt!

Though neither knows where lie the nameless things of which the mystic sign gives forth such hints; yet with me, as with the colt, somewhere those things must exist. Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.

But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange and far more portentous- why, as we have seen, it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian's Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind.

Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows- a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues- every stately or lovely emblazoning- the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge- pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?

So ends Ishmael's contemplation of the color white.  The Albino whale has taken on all of the qualities discussed in this chapter, aptly titled "The Whiteness of the Whale."  By these concluding paragraphs, Moby Dick represents all that is holy AND unholy in the universe.  He's the wing of an angel and the thought of annihilation.  Salvation and damnation.  In the final paragraph, he becomes a "monumental white shroud" that blinds anyone who dares to look at him for too long.  He is a a god.

I don't know how to follow this chapter with any kind of measured commentary.  What Melville does in these lines is all ecstasy.  He falls in love with the color white.  Poet Maggie Nelson does the same thing over 125 years later with the color blue.  She writes an entire book on her color of choice.  She chases her blue Moby Dick all over the world, in rapture and horror of its different states.

I think that's what most writers do--they fall in love with subjects.  They chase them through ocean and over mountaintop. Much like Melville, Ernest Hemingway did it with a really big fish.  Emily Dickinson did it with Death.  Charles Dickens with London.  Right now, I'm reading Pachinko by Min Jin Lee.  Lee's passion is Korea and Korean people.  Writer Franz Kafka advised, "Follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly."  That's pretty much what I'm doing right now.

My obsessions at the moment are twin--Bigfoot and Christmas.  I have a book of Christmas essays that I've been compiling for the last couple months, and I am so close to being done with it that I can taste the eggnog on my tongue.  This summer, I am also following Bigfoot, wherever he leads me.  I've been living with the big guy for almost two years now.  It's time I make a commitment to him.  Marry him, at least May through August.

I don't care what other people think about my obsessions.  At the moment, I'm sitting in my office at the university, wearing a Bigfoot tee-shit and listening to Christmas music,  If anyone chooses to knock on my door, they will be witness to the spectacle of me, in all my obsessive glory.  I think I'm even wearing Bigfoot socks.

Poets and writers are allowed these eccentricities.  They're expected.  If I wasn't obsessing about my large furred hominid friend while whistling "White Christmas," I'd probably be doing something equally obsessive--like transcribing the entire manuscript of Moby-Dick into a blog and writing life reflections on it.

Saint Marty is thankful this afternoon for giant, white, hairy, tinseled obsessions.

February 28: X Mark, Being Queequeg, Past Life

As we were walking down the end of the wharf towards the ship, Queequeg carrying his harpoon, Captain Peleg in his gruff voice loudly hailed us from his wigwam, saying he had not suspected my friend was a cannibal, and furthermore announcing that he let no cannibals on board that craft, unless they previously produced their papers. "What do you mean by that, Captain Peleg?" said I, now jumping on the bulwarks, and leaving my comrade standing on the wharf.

"I mean," he replied, "he must show his papers."

"Yes," said Captain Bildad in his hollow voice, sticking his head from behind Peleg's, out of the wigwam. "He must show that he's converted. Son of darkness," he added, turning to Queequeg, "art thou at present in communion with any Christian church?"

"Why," said I, "he's a member of the first Congregational Church." Here be it said, that many tattooed savages sailing in Nantucket ships at last come to be converted into the churches.

"First Congregational Church," cried Bildad, "what! that worships in Deacon Deuteronomy Coleman's meeting-house?" and so saying, taking out his spectacles, he rubbed them with his great yellow bandana handkerchief, and putting them on very carefully, came out of the wigwam, and leaning stiffly over the bulwarks, took a good long look at Queequeg.

"How long hath he been a member?" he then said, turning to me; "not very long, I rather guess, young man."

"No," said Peleg, "and he hasn't been baptized right either, or it would have washed some of that devil's blue off his face."

"Do tell, now," cried Bildad, "is this Philistine a regular member of Deacon Deuteronomy's meeting? I never saw him going there, and I pass it every Lord's day."

"I don't know anything about Deacon Deuteronomy or his meeting," said I; "all I know is, that Queequeg here is a born member of the First Congregational Church. He is a deacon himself, Queequeg is."

"Young man," said Bildad sternly, "thou art skylarking with me- explain thyself, thou young Hittite. What church dost thee mean? answer me."

Finding myself thus hard pushed, I replied, "I mean, sir, the same ancient Catholic Church to which you and I, and Captain Peleg there, and Queequeg here, and all of us, and every mother's son and soul of us belong; the great and everlasting First Congregation of this whole worshipping world; we all belong to that; only some of us cherish some crotchets no ways touching the grand belief; in that we all join hands."

"Splice, thou mean'st splice hands," cried Peleg, drawing nearer. "Young man, you'd better ship for a missionary, instead of a fore-mast hand; I never heard a better sermon. Deacon Deuteronomy- why Father Mapple himself couldn't beat it, and he's reckoned something. Come aboard, come aboard: never mind about the papers. I say, tell Quohog there- what's that you call him? tell Quohog to step along. By the great anchor, what a harpoon he's got there! looks like good stuff that; and he handles it about right. I say, Quohog, or whatever your name is, did you ever stand in the head of a whale-boat? did you ever strike a fish?"

Without saying a word, Queequeg, in his wild sort of way, jumped upon the bulwarks, from thence into the bows of one of the whale-boats hanging to the side; and then bracing his left knee, and poising his harpoon, cried out in some such way as this:-

"Cap'ain, you see him small drop tar on water dere? You see him? well, spose him one whale eye, well, den!" and taking sharp aim at it, he darted the iron right over old Bildad's broad brim, clean across the ship's decks, and struck the glistening tar spot out of sight.

"Now," said Queequeg, quietly, hauling in the line, "spos-ee him whale-e eye; why, dad whale dead."

"Quick, Bildad," said Peleg, his partner, who, aghast at the close vicinity of the flying harpoon, had retreated towards the cabin gangway. "Quick, I say, you Bildad, and get the ship's papers. We must have Hedgehog there, I mean Quohog, in one of our boats. Look ye, Quohog, we'll give ye the ninetieth lay, and that's more than ever was given a harpooneer yet out of Nantucket."

So down we went into the cabin, and to my great joy Queequeg was soon enrolled among the same ship's company to which I myself belonged.

When all preliminaries were over and Peleg had got everything ready for signing, he turned to me and said, "I guess, Quohog there don't know how to write, does he? I say, Quohog, blast ye! dost thou sign thy name or make thy mark?

But at this question, Queequeg, who had twice or thrice before taken part in similar ceremonies, looked no ways abashed; but taking the offered pen, copied upon the paper, in the proper place, an exact counterpart of a queer round figure which was tattooed upon his arm; so that through Captain Peleg's obstinate mistake touching his appellative, it stood something like this:-

Quohog.

his X mark.

Melville is indulging in some comedy here again, mostly at the expense of Peleg and Bildad.  The two captains hold Queequeg suspect because of his tattoos and color of his skin.  They must somehow be assured that Queequeg has abandoned his pagan ways and converted to Christianity.  I suppose they want to be confident that they don't hire a cannibal who is going to (one-by-one) consume the other members of the ship's crew.  Of course, the fact that Peleg can't even get Queequeg's name right ("Quohog" is very near to the "quahog," which is, according to Dictionary.com, a "large, rounded edible clam of the Atlantic coast of North America").

The biggest joke of the passage is that Queequeg is a very experienced whaler, and the two owners of the Pequod fall all over themselves trying to hire him, even offering him a larger stake in the profits of the voyage.  Christianity goes right out the window when it comes to money.

I suppose it's all about judging a person by appearance.  Queeqeug is dark-skinned with pointed teeth.  He's covered in tattoos from head to foot.  He carries a harpoon wherever he goes and sells shrunken human heads.  Not to mention the little wooden idol that he worships.  All these things mark him as questionable.  In the United States today, Queequeg would have been picked up and deported by the FBI a long time ago.  He wouldn't have lasted one week in Trump America.

I've been thinking about otherness quite a bit today.  I think we all have a little bit of Queequeg in us.  I know I do.  In my family, I pretty much stand out like Dorothy in the Land of Oz.  I teach at a university and write poetry.  I'm very liberal-minded in a family of conservatives.  I think my dad voted for a Democrat for President just once in his life--John F. Kennedy.  I'm a musician and performer.  Directed a few musicals in my years, as well.  Totally comfortable in a crowd of theater geeks and artists.

If there are such things as past lives, I think I could have been Charles Dickens.  I've always been drawn to his writing and life.  I have a 1200-page biography of Dickens on my bookshelf.  Every year or so, I reread it.  I stopped counting how many times I've made my way through its pages.  Well over eight or nine times.  Dickens was an actor and writer.  He had a huge family, but he didn't really "fit in."  Had a complicated relationship with his dad.  Was passionate and driven in everything he did.  He existed on the fringe of normal, but he was well-loved by everyone who knew him.

Charles Dickens was a Queequeg.  Tonight, after I'm done with these blog posts, I have to finalize my plans for a poetry workshop that I'm leading tomorrow night.  After that, I think I may work on a new poem.  Tomorrow afternoon, I'm meeting someone from the university where I teach.  We are planning a poetry reading for the month of April.  Poet Laureate stuff.

It's not so bad being a little Queequeg-ish.  As a matter of fact, it allows me quite a bit of freedom.  I don't have to live up to anyone's expectations.  Instead, I create my own expectations.  Success for other people may be a large bank account.  Vacations twice a year.  A nice car.  Nice house.  Right now, I'd say that my idea of success would be publishing a collection of Bigfoot poems.

Different expectations, yet I will put my X mark on the world.  Just like Queequeg.

Saint Marty is thankful this evening for everything that makes him different.

September 13: Kilgore Trout, Books Make Good Friends, Sharon Olds

Nothing happened that night.  It was the next night that about one hundred and thirty thousand people in Dresden would die.  So it goes.  Billy dozed in the meat locker.  He found himself engaged again, word for word, gesture for gesture, in the argument with his daughter with which this tale began.  

"Father," she said.  "What are we going to do with you?"  And so on.  "You know who I could just kill?" she asked.

"Who could you kill?" said Billy.

"That Kilgore Trout."

Kilgore Trout was and is a science-fiction writer, of course.  Billy had not only read dozens of books by Trout--he has also become Trout's friend, to the extent that anyone can become a friend of Trout, who is a bitter man.

Billy read Trout's books when he was in the hospital after his nervous breakdown.  The guy in the bed next to him had almost everything written by Trout.  So, before he became actual friends with the author, Billy became friends with his books. 

I have become friends with an author through his/her books many times.  For instance, I'm really good friends with Charles Dickens.  I've read most of his novels, some of his letters, and a 1200-page biography about him.  I KNOW Charles Dickens.  I've done the same thing for Sharon Olds, Phil Levine, Stephen King (although it's hard to keep up with King's writing), and John Irving.  Books make good friends.

Out of that list, I've actually met only one of those writers:  Sharon Olds.  I was lucky enough to take a week-long writing workshop with her in Big Sur, California.  It was a sun-filled six days of journal scribbling and being in her presence, listening to her talk about poetry.  I was pretty damn lucky.

Of course, we have not kept up a correspondence.  Olds didn't come to my son's baptism, and I don't send her yearly Christmas cards.  Our friendship remains page-bound now, although I still have those sun-drenched memories of Big Sur .

Perhaps there is somebody reading this blog post right now who doesn't really know me and wants to be my friend.  If you are that person, I want to say that I'm pretty social.  As long as you compliment my writing or give me chocolate, I'm all yours.  I'm a pretty cheap date, as writers go.

Saint Marty is thankful tonight for all the friends he has on his bookshelves. 

June 16: Friendless and Despised, Charles Dickens, Imperfections

With  regard to the whereabouts of Kilgore Trout:  he actually lived in Ilium, Billy's hometown, friendless and despised.  Billy would meet him by and by.

Kilgore Trout lives in Billy's home town.  He's not quite a celebrity, despite that fact that he has written a lot of books.  A lot.  And Vonnegut promises that Trout will show up later in Billy's story.

There have been a lot of people I would like to meet in my life.  Stephen King and John Irving, for instance.  Billy Collins.  I've met a few of my idols, as well.  I was twice in the same room as Maya Angelou.  I actually shook Kurt Vonnegut's hand once.  I've talked about poetry with Sharon Olds.  I had a picture taken with Alec Baldwin.

There are also people that I would have liked to meet, but never had the opportunity.  Katherine Hepburn.  Robin Williams.  As a teenager, I always thought that I was going to be friends eventually with River Phoenix.  He was going to read something that I wrote, and he would just call me up or show up at my front door.

There is something about certain public figures that just draw me in.  I have read a thousand-page biography of Charles Dickens not once, not twice, not three times.  I've read it five or six times.  Most of the time, the people who I find the most fascinating--the ones with whom I want to be friends--are really flawed.  People who have a lot of light and dark in them.  I feel a kinship with individuals like this.

I like the idea that people, despite their incredible limitations, can do really great things.  Robin Williams had mental health and addiction issues.  Charles Dickens was most certainly bipolar.  River Phoenix was a heroin addict and alcoholic.  Yet, look at the great things these artists did in their respective fields.

All this gives me hope.  I am not perfect.  I gravitate toward darkness.  Some of my acquaintances may be surprised by this admission.  For the most part, I'm fairly gregarious in public.  I like making people smile and laugh.  Just today, a coworker told me, "You're the most positive person I know."  I appreciate that observation.

Charles Dickens loved throwing lavish parties for his friends, but his temperament was quicksilver.  After he was done writing at night, he would sometimes go for a 20-mile walk.  River Phoenix would sneak up on his friends from behind and engulf them in bear hugs, but he would go on drug-binges for weeks at a time.

Nobody is perfect.  I think that my greatest creative achievements come from my greatest faults.  And, in a way, that's a gift.

Tonight, Saint Marty is thankful for his imperfections.

November 23: Holiday Ghosts, Miller Williams, "A Tenth Anniversary Photograph, 1952"

I think back around the holidays.  To Thanksgivings past, Christmases past.  Those times always seem to be sweeter, happier, warmer.  Sometimes, it's because of the people I've lost.   Other times, it's the yearning for something youthful--my infant daughter or son.  My mother used to be the general of the holidays, cooking the turkeys and hams, kneading the breads, dropping the oranges into the Jell-O, cutting out the cookies.  These days, she doesn't remember what day it is.

This morning, I was thinking about my sister, Sally.  She died last August.  Sitting at my desk at work, I actually found myself wanting to hear her voice.  It wasn't just a passing thought.  It was something physical.  Deep inside my chest.  It hurt.

Charles Dickens was right.  There are ghosts all around us this time of year.

Saint Marty isn't sad.  Just a little haunted.

A Tenth Anniversary Photograph, 1952

by:  Miller Williams

Look at their faces. You know it all.

They married the week he left for the war.

Both are gentle, intelligent people,

as all four of their parents were.

They’ve never talked about much

except the children. They love each other

but never wondered why they married

or had the kids or stayed together.

It wasn’t because they knew the answers.

They had never heard the questions

that twisted through the jokes to come

of Moses and the Ten Suggestions.

They paid their debts and never doubted

God rewarded faith and virtue

or when you got out of line

had big and little ways to hurt you.

People walked alone in parks.

Children slept in their yards at night.

Most every man had a paying job,

and black was black and white was white.

Would you go back? Say that you can,

that all it takes is a wave and a wink

and there you are. So what do you do?

The question is crueler than you think.

October 6: Everything and Anything, Post Saint Marty's Day, 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature

The world is full of creatures that for some reason seem stranger to us than others, and libraries are full of books describing them--hagfish, platypuses, lizardlike pangolins four feet long with bright green, lapped scales like umbrella-tree leaves on a bush hut roof, butterflies emerging from anthills, spiderlings wafting through the air clutching tiny silken balloons, horseshoe crabs . . . the creator creates.  Does he stoop, does he speak, does he save, succor, prevail?  Maybe.  But he creates; he creates everything and anything.

Dillard is writing about God, the creator of everything that crawls and flies and swims and oozes under the sun and moon.  God doesn't get tired of creating.  God is creating.  However, Dillard could just as easily be describing herself or Toni Morrison or William Faulkner or Ernest Hemingway.  Writers create worlds, as well.  They creates stories about ghosts and bear hunts.  An old man battling an immense fish in the middle of a unforgiving ocean.

I am now in the doldrums of post Saint Marty's Day.  The celebrations aren't over.  My family is having a Saint Marty's Day party this Sunday, filled with bratwurst and tapioca pudding and gifts.  As Charles Dickens wrote in A Saint Marty's Day Carol, "I will honor Saint Marty's Day in my heart, and try to keep it all the year."

Always around Saint Marty's Day, another event takes place.  Every year, the Swedish Academy in Stockholm announces the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature.  I happen to know that, as the Swedes discuss and debate with each other, they eat bowls of tapioca and sing traditional Saint Marty's Day songs.  Now, some of the greatest writers who ever lived have won the Nobel, all under the influence and grace of Saint Marty.

This year, the prize will be announced on October 13.  Reporters will gather in the Grand Hall of the Swedish Academy at the appointed hour.  The gold and white doors will open, and the Permanent Secretary will step into the camera lights.  Then, speaking in Swedish, she will announce the name of a writer.  One lucky writer. 

It may be my year.  Saint Marty.  Poet.  Teacher.  Blogger.  I'm sure that I have made the short list already many times.  The only reason that I have not won already is that the Swedes are highly superstitious academics.  They don't like mixing religion and literature.  That's what cost Tolstoy the prize.  However, I have a feeling that this year, drunk of their feast of Diet Mountain Dew and tapioca, the Permanent Secretary, in a hushed voice (almost a prayer), will say those words that the entire world has been longing to hear:

"The Swedish Academy is pleased to announce that the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded to Saint Marty, who in essays and poetry and blog posts characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential part of spiritual reality." 

The Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, and a big Saint Marty fan

September 29: Breast of Thanksgiving, Book Club, William Wordsworth, "Minstrels"

There is the wave breast of thanksgiving--a catching God's eye with the easy motions of praise--and a time for it . . .

Yes, there is a time for thanksgiving, and that time is coming.  It is six days until Saint Marty's Day.  Yes, less than a week.  If you haven't sent out your Saint Marty's Day cards yet, you still have a little time.  I think all post offices in the United States are staying open until midnight this evening in order to accommodate all the late card senders.

Tonight, I will be watching one of my favorite Saint Marty's Day television specials--How the Grinch Stole Saint Marty's Day.  It just warms my heart when the Grinch sits down with Little Cindy Lou Who at the end of the show to share a bowl of hot tapioca and sing "Welcome, Saint Marty, come this way / Fahoo fores dahoo dores / Welcome, Saint Marty, Saint Marty's Day."

Also tonight, my book club is meeting at my house.  In honor of Saint Marty's Day, we read a classic--Charles Dickens' A Saint Marty's Day Carol.  Ebenezer Scrooge haunted by the Ghosts of Saint Marty's Day.  And don't forget little Tiny Tim, eating his mother's tapioca pudding, and saying, "God bless us!  Everyone!"

So, this evening, I am giving thanks for good books, good friends, good food, and good Saint Marty's Day cheer.  Huzzah!

Minstrels

by:  William Wordsworth

The minstrels played their Saint Marty's tune
To-night beneath my cottage-eaves;
While, smitten by a lofty moon,
The encircling laurels, thick with leaves,
Gave back a rich and dazzling sheen,
That overpowered their natural green.

Through hill and valley every breeze
Had sunk to rest with folded wings:
Keen was the air, but could not freeze,
Nor check, the music of the strings;
So stout and hardy were the band
That scraped the chords with strenuous hand.

And who but listened?--till was paid
Respect to every inmate's claim,
The greeting given, the music played
In honour of each household name,
Duly pronounced with lusty call,
And "Happy Saint Marty's Day" wished to all.

Saint Marty's Day in Beijing

June 18: Charles Dickens, Adonis, "New Testament"

Emily Dickinson only published a few poems during her lifetime.  In fact, I've published more poetry in my life right now than Dickinson ever did while she was alive.  Walt Whitman just kept on revising the same book over and over and over.  It worked for him. 

I'm always fascinated by the lives of writers.  One of my favorite things to do is read biographies of famous authors.  Peter Ackroyd wrote a 1200-page biography of Charles Dickens.  I've read that book six or seven times.  I've read about Flannery O'Connor, Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, James Joyce, and e. e. cummings.

It's kind of a sickness, I think.  I like learning about the struggles these artists faced.   Alcoholism and mental illness and drug addiction.  Flannery O'Connor's battle with lupus.  Robert Frost's lifelong bouts of depression.  Hemingway and bipolar.  All of these great writers faced incredible life challenges, and, through those challenges, they created amazing things.

I suppose it has to do with facing human failings.  Every great writer that I've read about has dealt with some incredible hurdle.  I find that a little comforting.  These great poets and novelists and short story writers are incredibly flawed human beings, and they transform these flaws into works that shed a little light into the dark places of the universe.  Each of these people created their own testaments for the world to read.

That gives Saint Marty a great deal of hope.

New Testament

by:  Adonis

He doesn’t speak this language.
He doesn’t know the voices of the wastes—
a soothsayer in stony sleep,
he is burdened with distant languages.

Here he comes from under the ruins
in the climate of new words,

offering his poems to grieving winds
unpolished but bewitching like brass.

He is a language glistening between the masts,
the knight of strange words.

Everybody's a critic . . .

February 6: Sweet Dreams, Tyrannosaurus Poem, Lenten Promise, Confessions of Saint Marty

Finally I saw some very small children playing with a striped orange kitten, and overheard their mysterious conversation, which has since been ringing in my brain like a gong.  The kitten ran into a garden, and the girl called after it, "Sweet Dreams!  Sweet Dreams!  Where are you?"  And the boy said to her crossly, "Don't call Sweet Dreams 'you'!"

Annie Dillard describes the conversation she overhears between the little boy and girl as "mysterious."  There is something profound in the little boy's admonition, "Don't call Sweet Dreams you!"  Sweet Dreams is Sweet Dreams, not "it" or "he" or "she" or "you."  Certainly, the little girl did not mean to demean the little kitten in any way, but the little boy (perhaps because he's been called "you" in not so kind terms, as in "You better clean your damn room!" or "You are a pain in the ass!") attaches something negative, even threatening, to his friend's words.

Kids are a mystery, in what they say, the way they view the world.  My son can play outside for hours by himself.  When he returns, he's full of stories about fishing and aliens and zombies.  Last Sunday, when he came inside, he held out his hand to me.  I extended my palm to him.  He dropped a dollar bill into my hand.  "I found it," he said.  My daughter, when she was five, did the same thing, except she dropped a dead bird into my outstretched hand.

I've always believed that kids are born poets, seeing things that adults simply overlook or ignore.  There's a natural wonder in young people that, over time, is lost or forgotten.  Adult wants and needs and worries overtake things like zombies and aliens and dead birds.  Sweet Dreams isn't a kitten for an adult; it's a phrase you say to a child heading off to bed--as in, "Good night!  Sweet dreams!"

Every time I sit down to write a poem, I feel like I'm chasing my younger self, trying to recapture a wonder-filled way of looking at the universe.  When I was a kid, I had no problem in believing that I was going to be Charles Dickens or Sherlock Holmes.  It wasn't a huge leap of faith.  Now, I have difficulty believing in anything beyond the confines of my limited life and work.  I read stories of people who discover the bones of a tyrannosaurus in their backyard or an original Picasso in their attic, and the stories seem like fairy tales.  I have no room for wonder or mystery in my day-to-day existence.

Of course, I experience moments of inspiration.  In church.  In the classroom sometimes.  When I'm listening to certain music.  I feel my heart lifting, cracking open a little bit, letting escape a little bit of the child I used to be.  Lent starts this Wednesday, and I have been casting around for something I can do for those 47 days that will lend meaning to the Easter season.

In the past, I have done things like writing a poem a day (pure insanity) to praying for people who've hurt me (headache inducing, but rewarding).  I don't want to commit to anything that is doomed to failure (writing a novel or memoir in 47 days).  Maybe another poetic exercise of a smaller scale.  Something that tries to recapture that sense of child-like wonder and awe.  On every Sunday in Lent, I will write a poem about something strange, weird even.  Something that makes me feel like a kid again.  A tyrannosaurus poem.  A Picasso poem.

That is Saint Marty's Lenten promise.  Amen.

Confessions of Saint Marty