June 5: Fourth Dimension, William Blake, Odious Tasks

"He was at the top of his class when this happened," said Billy's mother.

"Maybe he was working too hard," said Rosewater.  He held a book he wanted to read, but he was much too polite to read and talk, too, easy as it was to give Billy's mother satisfactory answers.  The book was Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension, by Kilgore Trout.  It was about people whose mental diseases couldn't be treated because the causes of the diseases were all in the fourth dimension, and three-dimensional Earthling doctors couldn't see those causes at all, or even imagine them.

One thing Trout said that Rosewater liked very much was that there really were vampires and werewolves and goblins and angels and so on, but that they were in the fourth dimension.  So was William Blake, Rosewater's favorite poet, according to Trout.  So were heaven and hell.

The fourth dimension sounds like a pretty wild ride according to Kilgore Trout.  Vampires and werewolves.  Heaven and hell.  It sounds like a Twilight fan's dream come true.  Doesn't surprise me that Blake is there, too.  I once took a class in the poetry of William Blake.  I came away from the semester believing that Blake had either been drinking too much lead-based ink or was not of this world.  Trout has answered my question.

It feels like I have been operating in the fourth dimension for the last couple of days.  Grading like crazy.  Writing a new poem.  Reading a poetry manuscript.  Trying to squeeze in some quality time with my family.  I have been operating so far out of time that I thought the Tony Awards were on TV last night.  Turns out I was off by a week.  Either that or I've already watched the Tony Awards next week, and now I'm back to the present.  Maybe I'm unstuck in time.  Wouldn't surprise me.

Tonight, I am going to a meeting of the Marquette Poets Circle.  It's workshop and open mic.  I've been pushing like crazy to get all my work done so that I can attend with a mind free of pressing obligations.  Graded three papers this afternoon.  Just finished an eight-hour shift at the medical office.  Once this blog post is done, I have nothing to worry about but poetry, poetry, poetry.  (Yes, I stole that little anaphora from Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish.")

I am a great believer in tackling odious tasks head-on.  That's why I started my day at 4:45 a.m., correcting essays for my online class.  There's a sense of great relief when the most difficult tasks are completed early.  All the rest of day is a piece of pecan pie (preferable to cake).  Typing this blog post is a pleasure.  Ditto picking a new Poet of the Week.  And going to the workshop tonight.  My conscience is free, and I can indulge myself.

That is the breadth of scope of my wisdom for today. 

Saint Marty is thankful this afternoon for check marks on to-do lists.

June 4: "Wonder Woman," Classic Saint Marty, "Something Better"

It has been a good day.  I went to see Wonder Woman with my wife and kids.  Generally, I hate superhero movies.  I haven't seen an X-Men movie since the first.  Stopped going to Spiderman  movies when Tobey Maguire stopped playing Peter Parker.   

Wonder Woman was different.  It was about a strong woman.  Yes, that strong woman was still in a tight swimsuit with armor, but it was still good.  Even my daughter, who generally eschews the superhero genre, really liked it.

And I just finished grading a whole bunch of papers for my online class.  I am ready for the evening.  I will be watching the Tony Awards.  No Hamilton this year.  But, hopefully, Bette Midler will sing "Hello, Dolly!"  Maybe.

A year ago, I lost a friend who really loved theater.  Tonight's Classic Saint Marty is dedicated to him...

June 4, 2016:  The World Floating, Death of a Friend, Lee

Emerson saw it.  "I dreamed that I floated at will in the great Ether, and I saw this world floating also not far off, but diminished to the size of an apple.  Then an angel took it in his hand and brought it to me and said, 'This must thou eat.'  And I ate the world."  All of it.  All of it intricate, speckled, gnawed, fringed, and free.  Israel's priests offered the wave breast and the heave shoulder together, freely, in full knowledge, for thanksgiving.  They waved, they heaved, and neither gesture was whole without the other, and both meant a wide-eyed and keen-eyed thanks.  Go your way, eat the fat, and drink the sweet, said the bell.  A sixteenth-century alchemist wrote of the philosopher's stone, "One finds it in the open country, in the village and in the town.  It is in everything which God created.  Maids throw it on the street.  Children play with it."  The giant water bug ate the world.  And like Billy Bray I go my way, and my left foot says "Glory," and my right foot says "Amen":  in and out of Shadow Creek, upstream and down, exultant, in a daze, dancing, to the twin silver trumpets of praise.

It's all about living life to the fullest.  Eating the world like a ripe apple floating in outer space.  And giving thanks for everything in life that brings happiness and joy.  That's what Annie Dillard is talking about in this final paragraph of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.  She is giving glory, saying a prayer of thanksgiving, for all the creation around her, big and small.

This morning, I am giving thanks for the life of a friend of mine.  A big friend.  A guy who looked like he could reach up and eat the world like an apple.  Yes, Lee LaForge was larger than life, a Rushmore of a man in stature and joy and love.  Gifted teacher, performer, activist, and friend to everyone.  In the past, I drank with him.  Sang with him.  Laughed with him.  In a musical, I shared a stage kiss with him.  It was a pretty good kiss.

I am not going to become maudlin.  Lee wouldn't want that.  He would want me to tell you this story:

Over twenty years ago, I directed a production of the musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.  Lee was in the show, playing, among other things, a state senator caught in a compromising situation by a news reporter.  The only direction I gave him was, "Do something funny."  Every performance, when the door was opened on Lee's scene, I never knew what I was going to see.  One night, he and his acting partner got creative with a can of whipped cream.  Another night, Lee was on all fours with his partner riding his back like a horse, cracking a whip and yelling, "Who's your daddy?"  That little moment, orchestrated by Lee, always brought the house down.  Every night.  Joy.  Laughter.  Thunderous applause.

That was Lee.  His whole goal in life was happiness, making the most out of the piece of pie that he was served, whether pecan or pumpkin or banana cream.  And he always wanted to share that pie with everybody he loved.  I always knew, when I met up with Lee, he would have a hug and a joke.  And his laugh was thunder.  It rolled and overtook you, shook you, until you were weak and breathless.

Lee LaForge, you took large steps.  On your left foot was "love."  On your right foot was "rejoicing."

Saint Marty doffs his halo to a really saintly man.

A really good kisser . . .

And a poem for 2 Sundays before Father's Day . . . 

Something Better

by:  Martin Achatz

I want something better for my kids,
The way all parents want their offspring
To attend college, law or medical
School.  Do something extraordinary.
We scrub toilets, paint walls, deep-fry potatoes
For thirty or forty years, put everything
On hold until we're sure our daughters
Can study veterinary medicine, our sons
Learn to x-ray broken vertebrae, tibias,
Clavicles.  My uncle drove to the GM plant
For over thirty-five years before he received
His pension, then began to paint oil landscapes
Of places he’d dreamed about in rush hour
Traffic on I-75, places full of waves,
Evergreens the color of Chinese jade,
Places he knew he'd never see,
All so his daughter could study,
Become an engineer at Ford.
I don’t want my children to teach
College English part-time, work
Eleven-hour days in an office,
Scribble poems on napkins, lunch bags,
Margins of graded essays, dreaming
Always of a time when those words,
Cut and polished and set in lines of gold,
Will buy vacations to Stockholm or Rome,
Ballet lessons and birthday parties
In hot air balloons.  I want my kids
To know a life better than mine,
Even if it means I eat bologna
With cheese every day, pretending
My cut of lunchmeat is somehow
Superior to the one my father ate
At work for over fifty years.

June 3: Favorite Poet, Les Murray, "Poetry and Religion"

The poetry workshop I led on Thursday night was wonderful, despite the three hours of panic that preceded it.  When I arrived at the Joy Center, which is a lovely space for artists in the middle of the woods, I found myself immediately calm.  It was the kind of calm I usually experience when I'm writing a poem or praying.

Poetry and religion have always been linked in my life.  I don't know why.  Perhaps it's about creation or beauty.  Maybe it's the spiritual state in which I find myself when I hear a really great poem.  It makes me love the world a little bit more.  And I think that's all that God wants:  for us to love creation.

That may sound simplistic, but it guides my whole writing life.

God is Saint Marty's favorite poet.

Poetry and Religion

by:  Les Murray

Religions are poems. They concert
our daylight and dreaming mind, our
emotions, instinct, breath and native gesture

into the only whole thinking: poetry.
Nothing's said till it's dreamed out in words
and nothing's true that figures in words only.

A poem, compared with an arrayed religion,
may be like a soldier's one short marriage night
to die and live by. But that is a small religion.

Full religion is the large poem in loving repetition;
like any poem, it must be inexhaustible and complete
with turns where we ask Now why did the poet do that?

You can't pray a lie, said Huckleberry Finn;
you can't poem one either. It is the same mirror:
mobile, glancing, we call it poetry,

fixed centrally, we call it a religion,
and God is the poetry caught in any religion,
caught, not imprisoned. Caught as in a mirror

that he attracted, being in the world as poetry
is in the poem, a law against its closure.
There'll always be religion around while there is poetry

or a lack of it. Both are given, and intermittent,
as the action of those birds - crested pigeon, rosella parrot -
who fly with wings shut, then beating, and again shut.

June 3: A Boy Needs a Father, John Birch Society, My Promise

Another fairly long Slaughterhouse section:

Billy heard Eliot Rosewater come in and lie down.  Rosewater's bedsprings talked a lot about that.  Rosewater was a big man, but not very powerful.  He looked as though he might be made out of nose putty.

And then Billy's mother came back from the ladies' room, sat down on a chair between Billy's and Rosewater's bed.  Rosewater greeted her with melodious warmth, asked how she was today.  He seemed delighted to hear that she was fine.  He was experimenting with being ardently sympathetic with everybody he met.  He thought that might make the world a slightly more pleasant place to live in.  He called Billy's mother "dear."  He was experimenting with calling everybody "dear." 

"Some day," she promised Rosewater, "I'm going to come in here, and Billy is going to uncover his head, and do you know what he's going to say?"

"What's he going to say, dear?"

"He's going to say, 'Hello, Mom,' and he's going to smile.  He's going to say, 'Gee, it's good to see you, Mom.  How have you been?'"

"Today, could be the day."

"Every night I pray."

"That's a good thing to do."

"People would be surprised if they knew how much in this world was due to prayers."

"You never said a truer word, dear."

"Does your mother come to see you often?"

"My mother is dead," said Rosewater.  So it goes.

"I'm sorry."

"At least she had a happy life as long as it lasted."

"That's a consolation, anyway."

"Yes."

"Billy's father is dead, you know," said Billy's mother.  So it goes.

"A boy needs a father."

And on and on it went--that duet between the dumb, praying lady and the big, hollow man who was so full of loving echoes.

Vonnegut is making fun of Billy's mother and Rosewater.  Certainly, their conversation appears deep and meaningful.  Billy's mother is being sincere.  Rosewater is simply conducting an experiment in sympathy.  He's attempting to make the world a better place, one "dear" at a time.  But there is an undertone of superficiality about their whole exchange, right down to Rosewater's observation that "[a] boy needs a father."

Yet, I think there is something to be said for that platitude.  A father figure is important in a child's life, boy or girl.  My relationship with my dad is very complex.  We don't agree on a whole lot of things.  He's a Trump Republican.  A former member of the John Birch Society.  Steve Bannon is a moderate compared to my father.  Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon are heroes of his.  I'm not kidding.

But my father worked hard his whole life, supporting a family of nine children.  He left the house in the early morning and spent his days unblocking blocked sewers and installing water heaters and soldering leaking pipes.  He was no stranger to difficult labor.  For that, I admire him.  I never really wanted for anything in my life, and that's an amazing thing.

When I became a father, I promised myself that I was going to have close relationships with my kids.  I wasn't going to be emotionally unavailable.  Above all, I wanted to instill in my children values of love and sympathy and compassion and acceptance and self-sacrifice.  The night before my daughter was born, I remember sitting in my living room, thinking those thoughts.

I'm not sure if I've succeeded with that promise I made to myself over 16 years ago.  My daughter is smart and loving.  She's friends with everybody, even if she doesn't agree with their values.  Her classmates think she's funny and smart, and she falls on the liberal side of the political spectrum (another victory for me).  I've done something right. 

My son is still a little unformed.  I always talk to him about respecting people, being kind all the time.  But he's a little boy.  He likes playing with toy guns and cars.  He wrestles.  Sometimes, he gets into trouble on the playground.  He's the exact opposite of what I was as a boy.  Yet, I have hope.  At Christmas time, his class had a Secret Santa gift exchange.  He bought extra presents.  "In case somebody forgets," he told my wife.  He takes dance lessons and loves reading and writing.  Plus, he has taken to saying "Donald Dump" when he sees Trump on television.  I've done something right.

Children certainly benefit from strong and loving fathers.  I hope that's how my kids see me.

Saint Marty is thankful this morning for his amazing daughter and son.