September 2: Loved Ones, Maggie Nelson, "It is Light"

239.  But now you are talking as if love were a consolation.  Simone Weil warned otherwise.  "Love is not consolation," she wrote.  "It is light."
                    ---from Bluets by Maggie Nelson

It is raining.  Going to raining all day.  That's okay.  I was going to try to mow my lawn today, but now I will work on a poem, read some, go to church, play the pipe organ for Mass, and then have pizza for dinner.  A sort of lazy day spent with people whom I love.

You know, loved ones can be a great joy.  They can also be the source of great irritation.  Only people who you truly love can get under your skin to the point of distraction.  Sure, coworkers can piss you off.  People at the grocery store who cut the line in front of you can make you glare or swear.  But you can leave work, and, once you buy your groceries and are heading out the door, you forget about the asshole in front of you.

Loved ones, however, with all their insecurities and quirks and mental illnesses and faults, are with you all the time.  Yes, I am being intentionally obscure.  All I want to say is that love IS light, and that light can be a source of great comfort and great distress.

Don't worry.  Saint Marty is surrounded by great, comforting light at the moment.

September 2: Private Parts, Mysterious and Unreachable, Possibilities

Werner Gluck, the young guard, was a Dresden boy.  He had never been in the slaughterhouse before, so he wasn't sure where the kitchen was.  He was tall and weak like Billy, might have been a younger brother of his.  They were, in fact, distant cousins, something they never found out.  Gluck was armed with an incredibly heavy musket, a single-shot museum piece with an octagonal barrel and a smooth bore.  He had fixed his bayonet.  It was like a long knitting needle.  It had no blood gutters.

Gluck led the way to a building that he though might contain the kitchen, and he opened the sliding door in its side.  There wasn't a kitchen in there, though.  There was a dressing room adjacent to a communal shower, and there was a lot of steam.  In the steam were about thirty teen-age girls with no clothes on.  They were German refugees from Breslau, which had been tremendously bombed.  They had just arrived in Dresden, too.  Dresden was jammed with refugees.

There those girls were with all their private parts bare, for anybody to see.  And there in the doorway were Gluck and Derby and Pilgrim--the childish soldier and the poor old high school teacher and the clown in his toga and silver shoes--staring.  The girls screamed.  They covered themselves with their hands and turned their backs and so on, and made themselves utterly beautiful.

Werner Gluck, who had never seen a naked woman before, closed the door.  Billy had never seen one, either.  It was nothing new to Derby.

I remember being that young and inexperienced, when girls and sex were mysterious and unreachable.  I remember the talk in high school gym locker rooms, all of its crudeness and longing, guys bragging about things they had never seen or done.  When I think about those four years, that's what I recall:  the longing of that time.

Me?  I felt that longing, but I wasn't that excited about being an adult.  I liked the freedom from grownup things, like jobs and taxes and college.  Yes, I had my share of teenage angst.  Worried about popularity and dating and grades and the future.  But, there was also a lot of hope about possibility.  The possibility of seeing that girl naked.  The possibility of becoming a famous writer or actor or scientist or singer.  The possibility of having sex.  When there's possibility, there's hope.

Of course, possibility doesn't disappear when you become an adult.  They just become a little less abundant.  When you get married and have children, you HAVE to do certain things.  You have to provide for your family in some way, and most people will do anything.  Shitty jobs.  Shitty wages.  Shitty benefits.  Responsibility limits your possibilities.

I would love to quit my jobs and spend the next year or two writing a book.  But I have a wife with bipolar.  I have a daughter and son in school, taking dance classes, expecting birthday presents and Christmas presents.  I can't just quit my jobs to pursue a dream.  That doesn't mean that my dream is dead.  It's modified.  I carve writing time out of my day.  In the morning.  In the evening.  In the middle of the night. 

That's my reality.

Saint Marty is thankful today for possibilities.

Septmeber 1: Walmart, McNuggets, Maggie Nelson, "Why is the Sky Blue?"

"Why is the sky blue?"  --A fair enough question, and one I have learned the answer to several times.  Yet every time I try to explain it to someone or remember it to myself, it eludes me.  Now I like to remember the question alone, as it reminds me that my mind is essentially a sieve, that I am mortal.
                         ---from Bluets by Maggie Nelson

I stopped my Walmart tonight after work.  There was a beautiful, cloudless sky.  A kind of light blue that reminded me of the malted milk eggs I used to get in my Easter basket.  As I pulled into the parking, I noticed a man standing by the road, holding a sign that said something like, "Working my way west.  Need money."

I went into Walmart and bought my groceries.  Then, I stopped by the McDonald's in the store and bought some fries, chicken McNuggets, and a pop.  I carried my purchases out to my car, and then I took the food and walked over to the man.

He came over to me, slowly.  I held out the bag and pop to him.  "I don't have any money, but here," I said.

He took the bags.  "Thanks, man," he said.  He was younger than me, with long hair and beard.  Looked as if he hadn't slept for a long time.

"God bless," I said, and I turned and went back to my car.

As I was leaving the parking lot, I saw the man hunched down, eating the fries and drinking the pop.

I kept looking up at the sky on my home, thinking about how lucky I am.

Saint Marty is thankful tonight for his life.

September 1: Nighttime Winkings, Teaching and Working, a Little Beauty

One of the true things was his first evening in the slaughterhouse.  He and poor old Edgar Derby were pushing an empty two-wheeled cart down a dirt lane between empty pens for animals.  They were going to a communal kitchen for supper for all.  They were guarded by a sixteen-year-old German named Werner Gluck.  The axles of the cart were greased with the fat of dead animals.  So it goes.

The sun had just gone down, and its afterglow was backlighting the city, which formed low cliffs around the bucolic void to the idle stockyards.  The city was blacked out because bombers might come, so Billy didn't get to see Dresden do one of the most cheerful things a city is capable of doing when the sun goes down, which is to wink its lights on one by one.

There was a broad river to reflect those lights, which would have made their nighttime winkings very pretty indeed.  It was the Elbe.

Billy is in the hospital, recovering from brain surgery after his airplane crashed into the side of a mountain.  He's drifting in-and-out of dreams and reality, jumping back and forth in time.  He can't really tell which is which.

I don't have a whole lot of energy this evening.  It has been a long week of teaching and working.  I'm pretty beat.  I'm sure that I'll be crashing tonight, sitting on the couch, drifting in and out of sleep, like Billy.

This is the last real weekend of the summer.  Labor Day in the United States.  Don't have to go back to work until next Tuesday.  Don't teach until next Wednesday.  Of course, I have a lot of lesson planning and grading to do over the next few days.  I'm going to try to relax a little bit, too.

Tonight, however, I'm going to work on a new poem.  A poem for a wedding that I'm going to on Sunday.  I've been working on the poem for a couple of weeks now.  As usual, it feels as if I'm never going to get it done on time.  But I will.

Saint Marty is ready to find a little beauty tonight.