Upsoaring wings: Indefinable and one

The philosopher Laozi (Lao Tzu) may or may not be an actual historical figure, but the followers of Taoism, and place him somewhere in the Sixth Century BCE. He may have written the Tao Te Ching, or he may have compiled the writings; or he may not have existed at all. Nonetheless, there are poems ascribed to him, and we’ll have a couple today.

Perhaps because my own experiences have been so unbalanced, I find it hard to embrace the serene detachment of Taoism; I find Zen challenging, as is trying to meditate. I mean—grasping the intangible, and all. Viz:

“Look, It Cannot Be Seen”

Look, it cannot be seen - it is beyond form.

Listen, it cannot be heard - it is beyond sound.

Grasp, it cannot be held - it is intangible.

These three are indefinable, they are one.

From above it is not bright;

From below it is not dark:

Unbroken thread beyond description.

It returns to nothingness.

Form of the formless,

Image of the imageless,

It is called indefinable and beyond imagination.

Stand before it - there is no beginning.

Follow it and there is no end.

Stay with the Tao, Move with the present.

Knowing the ancient beginning is the essence of Tao.

Laozi was a proponent of small government, so anti-authoritarians and libertarians down the ages have espoused his principles, on left and right. I can’t say I agree with it, but it’s telling that his explanation for human poverty is still cogent more than two millennia on.

“Why Are People Starving?

Why are people starving?

Because the rulers eat up the money in taxes.

Therefore the people are starving.

Why are the people rebellious?

Because the rulers interfere too much

. Therefore they are rebellious.

Why do people think so little of death?

Because the rulers demand too much of life.

Therefore the people take life lightly.

Having to live on, one knows better than to value life too much.

Upsoaring wings: Motionless and speechless

Haitian-American poet Hébert Logerie wrote “Violence on the Steps of Notre Dame of Paris” in response to an incident in June 2017, when police shot an attacker armed with knives and a hammer at the cathedral.

I’m sharing it today after being transfixed by appalling images of Nôtre Dame engulfed in flames. As of Monday afternoon, EDT, the roof and spire had collapsed and the wooden interior was gutted, although apparently the structure and artwork have been saved.

This is all I can say, because this is violence of another kind, and my heart is broken.

“Violence on the Steps of Notre Dame of Paris”

These days, even in the Holy Cathedral,

We are not safe. What a sad world!

At the shrine of the immaculate virgin of our soul,

We are not at peace. What a scandal!

The fools are everywhere, the criminals are everywhere.

Sometimes, we're motionless and speechless out there.

We can haphazardly measure our actions, our moves, and our steps.

Sadly, we're living where the villains know the ropes and the assets.

Violence is savageous, brutal, inhuman, and even bestial.

We are waiting for the Mighty God to perform many miracles.

The undesirables respect neither the altar nor the tabernacle.

Nevertheless, the pitiful morons will lose the final battle.

Upsoaring wings: Drop by drop upon the heart

We know Aeschylus as a tragedian and a poet, but he was also a soldier—veteran of the battles of Marathon (against Darius I) and Salamis (against Xerxes). So even when he wrote of mythical wars and warriors, he drew on his own experiences and knew what he was talking about.

The characters in Aeschylus’ plays are not, on the whole, happy. This is particularly true of the Oresteia trilogy, focusing on the family of King Agamemnon of Mycenae, one of the leaders in the Greek war against Troy. Not to put too fine a point upon it, everything we know about Agamemnon (starting with Homer’s Iliad) tells us that he’s a complete shit: arrogant, boastful, bullying, petty, inflexible and greedy. Yes, he came from an unhappy family (the House of Atreus), and there was that curse, but still—he really got up my nose when I was reading the classics.

Agamemnon is not the sort of guy who engages in introspection, and his ego prevents him from ever learning. This is a serious flaw, particularly in a head of state. And it leads to his violent murder, followed by the destruction of his family.

The observation about wisdom emerging from pain that Aeschylus makes in Agamemnon, the first play in the Oresteia, was not absorbed by the title character. Big cheeses typically don’t take instruction from poets. But these lines were chosen by Robert F. Kennedy in April, 1968, when he announced to the citizens of Indianapolis that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.

God, whose law it is

that he who learns must suffer.

And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget

falls drop by drop upon the heart,

and in our own despite, against our will,

comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.

Here’s video of Kennedy's speech that day.

He barely outlived King by two months. We don’t learn.

Gratitude Monday: taxes paid

I’m feeling a tad tetchy on this Gratitude Monday, having had to fork over a couple large to the Feds in addition to taxes withheld regularly from my pay checks. I’m not one of those people who view big refunds as a windfall; my preference is to be within a couple hundred on either side of the total owed. But this year, with only a moderate increase in my annual salary, all of a sudden my liability shot up. Primarily because I all of a sudden lost most of the deduction for mortgage interest and property taxes.

I am not happy about that. And I am not grateful that I’m subsidizing the Billionaire Boys’ Club with my contribution.

However, I have a job, making enough to owe taxes; I can make my mortgage payments and put petrol in my 18-year-old car; and my taxes are paid. And with my taxes, I've contributed to the wellbeing of the polis.  So that’s what I’m grateful for today.

Upsoaring wings: People did not like it here

I was introduced to Kurt Vonnegut by Chuck Mitchell, Joni’s ex-husband, at a performance by him at The Ice House in Pasadena. Mitchell spoke this passage from Slaughterhouse-Five as an introduction to one of his songs. I don’t recall the song, but this image has never left me:

“It was a movie about American bombers in World War II and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

“The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers , and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans though and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

“When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.”

Vonnegut drew on his own experiences in World War II—as a soldier and a prisoner of war—to describe the firebombing of Dresden in February 1945 by British and American air forces. He lived through the bombing because the POWs had been herded into the eponymous slaughterhouse. The book is a bit of a challenge to read, because it’s non-linear; you have to focus on both nonsensical and heartbreaking topics.

You know—like life.

I was reminded of this when I read a piece by Alex Horton, a reporter for The Washington Post, this weekend. Horton used Vonnegut’s non-linear construct to frame his own experiences as a soldier in Iraq 12 years ago (nearly six years into America’s longest war). He weaves some research into his account to give context, and readers are left with the sense of fragmentation that combat veterans carry back into the world.

Like Slaughterhouse-Five, it’s a hard read. Here’s another (now more than ever), Vonnegut’s “Requiem”, published in 2005, two years before his death.

“Requiem”

When the last living thing

has died on account of us,

how poetical it would be

if Earth could say,

in a voice floating up

perhaps from the floor

of the Grand Canyon,

“It is done.”

People did not like it here.

Upsoaring wings: Waters of the Nile

Since it feels as though we’ve all fallen down the rabbit hole, I think it’s time to have a couple of poems from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I don’t think they need much of an introduction from me; I’ll just point out that Lewis Carroll’s silliness makes more sense than politics these days.

“Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Bat”

Twinkle, twinkle, little bat

How I wonder what you’re at!

Up above the world you fly,

Like a tea tray in the sky.

Twinkle, twinkle little bat!

How I wonder what you’re at!

“The Crocodile”

How doth the little crocodile

Improve his shining tail,

And pour the waters of the Nile

On every golden scale!

How cheerfully he seems to grin,

How neatly spreads his claws,

And welcomes little fishes in,

With gently smiling jaws!

Upsoaring wings: Breath is money

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the grand old man of the Beat generation—poet, artist, bookseller and publisher—celebrated his 100^th birthday last month by publishing an autobiographical novel. He doesn’t consider himself a Beat poet, but he certainly captured those times.

As owner of City Lights Bookstore and Publishing, he published many of the Beats; he was arrested on obscenity charges for publishing Allan Ginsburg’s Howl. The subsequent trial was a landmark First Amendment case, which Ferlinghetti won when the judge ruled the poem had redeeming social value.

Seems odd that this happened in San Francisco, but it was the 50s.

Ferlinghetti identifies as a philosophical anarchist, and he has opposed totalitarianism all his life. In 2006, in the midst of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the rise of the Tea Party and other bad juju, Ferlinghetti wrote a poem echoing Khalil Gibran’s “Pity the Nation”. It’s appalling that the update was needed 73 years after Gibran, and that it’s even more needed 13 years on.

“Pity the Nation”

(After Khalil Gibran)

Pity the nation whose people are sheep

And whose shepherds mislead them

Pity the nation whose leaders are liars

Whose sages are silenced

And whose bigots haunt the airwaves

Pity the nation that raises not its voice

Except to praise conquerers

And acclaim the bully as hero

And aims to rule the world

By force and by torture

Pity the nation that knows

No other language but its own

And no other culture but its own

Pity the nation whose breath is money

And sleeps the sleep of the too well fed

Pity the nation oh pity the people

who allow their rights to  erode

and their freedoms to be washed away

 My country, tears of thee

 Sweet land of liberty!

Upsoaring wings: Trumpeting and hooting

When I was a teenager, Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet was all the rage. I confess I did not read it, but my lack of support notwithstanding, Gibran is the third-best selling poet of all time. (Shakespeare and Lao Tzu were ahead of him, if you’re asking.)

Gibran was born in Lebanon when it was part of the Ottoman Empire and moved with his mother and siblings to the United States around the turn of the last century. He was a gifted artist as well as a poet; another of those super-creative types.

Today’s entry for National Poetry Month, “Pity the Nation”, was published in 1933, two years after Gibran’s death. I think you’ll agree that it is heartbreaking, and that we are living that heartbreak today.

“Pity the Nation”

Pity the nation that is full of beliefs and empty of religion.

Pity the nation that acclaims the bully as hero,

and that deems the glittering conqueror bountiful.

Pity a nation that despises a passion in its dream,

yet submits in its awakening.

Pity the nation that raises not its voice
save when it walks in a funeral,

boasts not except among its ruins,

and will rebel not save when its neck is laid

between the sword and the block.

Pity the nation whose statesman is a fox,
whose philosopher is a juggler,
and whose art is the art of patching and mimicking.

Pity the nation that welcomes its new ruler with trumpeting,

and farewells him with hooting,

only to welcome another with trumpeting again.

Upsoaring wings: Turn away your eyes

Dorothy Parker is high on my list of favorite American poets. She wielded words equivalent to a Medici with a sword. Never a wasted syllable; unerringly the blade went straight to the heart. Like a Medici’s, Parker’s skill did not come without loss of her own blood. Her preferred analgesic against an unhappy life was alcohol, and she could put it away, sadly.

In addition to being a brilliant writer of poetry, prose and screenplays, Parker was a lifelong activist for civil liberties and social justice. Her membership in the Communist party and her anti-fascist and pro-union activities earned her a place on the Hollywood blacklist, and she was a supporter of Martin Luther King, Jr. She left her estate to him on her death in 1967; upon his murder a year later, his family bequeathed it to the NAACP.

I really wonder what Parker would have had to say about today’s world. Twitter would have been a great medium for her, because of her ability to thrust deep with few words. What words would she have had for the Kleptocrat and his mob, I wonder?

Today’s entry for National Poetry Month wasn’t intended to be political, but rereading it, I feel like she’s captured the death of the dream of the American promise.

“A Dream Lies Dead”

A dream lies dead here. May you softly go

Before this place, and turn away your eyes,

Nor seek to know the look of that which dies

Importuning Life for life. Walk not in woe,

But, for a little, let your step be slow.

And, of your mercy, be not sweetly wise

With words of hope and Spring and tenderer skies.

A dream lies dead; and this all mourners know:

Whenever one drifted petal leaves the tree-

Though white of bloom as it had been before

And proudly waitful of fecundity-

One little loveliness can be no more;

And so must Beauty bow her imperfect head

Because a dream has joined the wistful dead!

Upsoaring wings: Wings grow tired

First of all, you have to understand that some of the most boring moments of my life were spent at baseball games: one major league, one AAA minor league. Baseball decidedly not been berry berry good to me.

However, when I brought up WaPo yesterday afternoon and saw the red BREAKING NEWS banner that the arse in the White House has canceled the deal for Major League Baseball (MLB) to sign Cuban players, I flipped out. I didn’t even have to read the story (although I did) to know that this is just a mean-spirited, bloody-minded, petty, vindictive willie-waving exercise and bogus stunt to show everyone in the country who’s the boss.

This little, little putz is still pissed off that he wasn’t allowed to buy a NFL team and that his only listing in the sports history books is going to be as the fool who tanked the WFL. And he’s taking it out on Cuban ball players. Because. He. Can.

If you want to laugh, consider that an administration mouthpiece apparently said with a straight face that MLB payments to the Cuban baseball federation amount to “human trafficking”. Like 1)that’s remotely the case or 2)this crowd gives a flying fuck for human trafficking (except where the Kleptocrat gets a cut of the fees).

So today we’re having a couple of poems from the 20^th-Century Cuban Dulce María Loynaz. Loynaz actually trained as a lawyer, but I don’t hold that against her. Her husband went into exile for some time after the Revolution, but Loynaz remained, and went into seclusion.

Someone asked her why she didn’t also leave. She replied, “I was here first.” Batista, Castro—no importa. She followed her own path.

I’m sharing two of her poems, in Spanish and in English.

“Viajero”

Yo soy como el viajero

que llega a un Puerto y no lo espera nadie;

Soy el viajero tímido que pasa

entre abrazos ajenos y sonrisa

que no son para él…

Como el viajero solo

que se alza el cuello del abrigo

en el gran muelle frío.

“The Traveler”

I am like the traveler

Who arrives at a port where no one waits for him;

I am the shy traveler who walks

Among other people’s embraces and smiles

Which are not for him…

Like the lone traveler

Who turns up the collar of his overcoat

In the chill of the great wharf.

tr: Judith Kerman

From her Poemas sin Nombre (Untitled Poems):

Poema CII

Pajarillos de jaula me van pareciendo a mí misma mis sueños.

Si los suelto, perecen o regresan. Y es que el grano y el cielo

hay que ganarlos; pero el grano es demasiado pequeño y el

cielo es demasiado grande..., y las alas, como los pies, también

se cansan.

“My Dreams”

My dreams are starting to look like birds in a cage.

If I let them go, they either die or return.

I know that the great sky and the tiniest grain

are things we must earn, but the grain is too small

and the sky is too big, and wings, like feet, grow tired.

tr: Paul Weinfield