Three Books from Another Time
Recently, Sewall Oertling, one of the artists showing work in our Fall Invitational, asked me what got me to where I am. How did I move toward the shadows and light career of a practically useless, non-gifted expressionist? I gave him the usual schpeel about my arrival to college a hyperactive ham and American idiot; the story of how I became a business major because my future roommate was first to declare it to the admissions counselor at our high school guidance office round table. I didn’t even know what a “major” was, so called out “business” when it was my turn. It took a couple semesters, the hell of accounting, and a move to California and back before I read my first book on purpose, On the Road by Jack Kerouac. Then the next one, Voltaire’s Candide, got me to change majors to History and be hungry for reading inspiration from published dead authors. History led to some literature courses, where I got confused about who to believe. T.S. Eliot or Walt Whitman? Because I chose the latter, my bad poetry got submitted regularly to the college art magazine.
I was deep into rock and roll. The energy of riffs, mood of melody and dreams exposed by lyrical poetry. I boosted and boasted for the underdog. I despised power. I became a father, graduated college, and got a job as a pizza maker and then a dishwasher. I began journal writing. A lot of journal writing.
And I read, and read, and read. Then I discovered the College of Henry Miller. Another dead author. His syllabus would take me the rest of my life to complete. At some point early on he suggested I take up painting to confront ennui during lulls of writing. What a gift! Immediate reward. Creations to be shown, hung on a wall for all and sundry. No need to edit repeatedly and send off to business suits for approval in the publishing industry. So what if nobody was interested in my writing or painting— Who was going to tell me to take the latter off my wall? Democratizing free expression would be a noble cause, a few rungs up from the wet lettuce drains of dishwashing, then line cooking, then sous chefing. History got me thinking about legacy. Wrong or right, something must be left for posterity, else I do these dishes and sauté these chickens like a squirrel seeks nuts year after year and then dies.
Eventually, I stopped sending prose and poems to big city addresses in The Writer’s Market. I would save the money to self publish. Back then the propaganda wing of the industry called it the “Vanity Press”. Writers with self-respect avoided the degrading label: self-published author. Ironically it made better sense to beg to businessmen—to hope and pray some wise editor would see the genius of my writing and invest thousands of dollars to promote a stranger.
No way. I knew I wasn’t very good. Not for a mass market anyway. Probably not for any market. And I didn’t want to waste more time begging to an establishment to let me join the ranks of the world’s champions. As aspiring line cook, I trimmed tenderloin in a rinky-dink restaurant, not the Russian Tea Room. That didn’t mean I shouldn’t cook, though I shouldn’t expect the movie star to order carpaccio from our kitchen either. Writing, like cooking, was a means to self-liberation. (Later I would realize that homeschooling and raising a family was too). No more samples sent to publishers. I would continue to journal, labor in a restaurant for 50 hours a week, homeschool my daughter, and find free time to picnic and make contentment with my new love.
Then the Internet came and I found a very small press in cyberspace—a woman working out of her garage in the middle of Nowhere, NY. I had three manuscripts ready to go, messy and poorly edited, yet full of life—which I thought then, and think now, was art, no matter how “good or bad”. I had her print all three at once, 100 copies a piece. I sold a few to friends and family, and we never spoke of them again. I would drive around Central New York and leave books on park benches and library steps with my address card tucked between the pages. A year later a high school girl wrote to me stating that she loved the book she found because it told the truth, my truth, which was wonderful she said because it made her feel.
This week I’ll offer a sample from each book that I believe reflects a state of mind shared by all sensitive twenty-somethings (and high schoolers) who have ever lived, or crave to.
A Larry Letter. A big fat letter full of juice. I will write to you a letter of season, of summer. Expect it to be finished by October and I will hand deliver it to you in all of my mad excess. But for now a quick letter—for the sake of spring...
I remember writing to you about the same time last year from Red Creek where I was living the same day in a different habitat. A year has gone by and oh, what a year it has been! From forest and garden, to alcohol and concrete jungle and no more than fifty cents in my pocket, back to the country and a worn-out relationship—back to alcohol, to Scott’s tomb, to winter’s nausea and lethargy, back to cooking, to excess, to immortality, to raising Rachelle. Now to the same sun, new sun, warmer sun, and probably after that, burnt out sun. The life of poverty, the cook’s life, the cook’s literary life!
I remember our walks to Central Park in the grayness. I remember the stoop, your stairs, in the urban night time—the yuppie chatterboxes wafting by (a bad smell). I remember my mad walk down Broadway to the Battery. I remember our walk with Hazra through the dead leaves. All the thoughts that were stuffed inside me, the sadness of separation, my lack of courage, my very personal battle against the human zombies, my desire to be a dad and a poet... And you there the whole time my friend watching Ron torture himself. Nothing has changed. I am still torturing myself. I know that it’s torture. To live, but to live better because a beautiful girl smiles at you on the stairs. To live simply for the wildness of the unknown, and wildly for the simplicity of life.
Last night was very bad, a mortal night. I looked in the mirror, I looked through it with the understanding that I may never love again. God, how frightened I was of death! My bones ached; that was something new. “Will I slave like this for the rest of my life without love? Can I possibly torture myself more without dying? How much can I stand?”
I have to keep putting my dream world off to the future. This is the medicine that saves my life every night. Do you realize how agonizing this is? Especially since I have lived my dreams many times before? Usually in New York City, but once or twice along the rocky shores of Oswego. The fact is that I cannot live my dreams in callous town. I am no Thoreau. It is either too small or too big. Can it be possible that I am equally attracted to farmland/woodland and to the monsteropolis? I need space and both extremes provide that space, depending on my mood which is always changing. My wallet must remain empty. That is very important. I’m in a constant flux of temperament. Not content, wholly content, indifferent, depressed, lit up like a Christmas tree with joy, immersed into a deep pool of sorrow and drowning...
Oswego is cold now. Probably because I am living the destructive side of solitude. A life of confusion and alcoholism.
“How does one know that one day he will take wing, that like the humming bird he will quiver in mid air and dazzle with iridescent sheen? One doesn’t. One hopes and prays and bashes his head against the wall. But ‘it’ knows. ‘It’ can bide ‘its’ time. ‘It’ knows that all the errors, all the detours, all the failures and frustrations will be turned to account. To be born an eagle one must get accustomed to high places; to be born a writer one must learn to like privation, suffering, humiliation. Above all, one must learn to live apart. Like the sloth, the writer clings to his limb while beneath him life surges by steady, persistent, tumultuous. When ready plop! He falls into the stream and battles for life. Is it not something like that?” —Miller
Yes it is! I’ve fallen from my limb. I find my sanity under the restaurant tree, but then I leave it and walk out into life—a life that I’ve created! The power to choose and change has escaped me. I feel that I am suffered to this life eternally, or at least until my liver falls through my bowel. Then I might get some incentive to change. This is the life I am practically forced to live because there are no kindred spirits, save for you— but you keep yourself a letter or a phone call away, and frankly, that is a useless dose, maybe an aspirin, at a time when I need Larry, the 10,000 mg amphetamine, to sway my appetite away from alcohol. Does that make sense? I need a human face! I don’t need the booze with my booze buddies. I don’t want it that way. For now my life is a catalyst in the ongoing experiment with the human time bomb. I will explode. It’s only a matter of time...
Your call woke me up too early this morning. You are certain that I’ll be coming down in June for an extended vacation. I cannot say for sure, but the way things are going, you may be right. Work is preventing me from enjoying the “good life.” I would like to say that I am the reason, then there would be some hope for change. The boss has it in his head though, that he can pay people more to make him richer. I have never met a man so empty of life. His liver controls him now. His self is locked inside a vodka coma.
You should have been there on Saturday night. Over and over in his drunk talk, his words blowing right over my head, “I’ll pay you more money... Whatever it costs... But you have to be here... For three months gross triples... I’ll pay the money, but you have to be here..!”
My God, what in the world was he talking about?
On a lighter note, I am the depressed owner of a dilapidated motor vehicle and Rachelle is sleeping with Crazy Marty. The car is without any struts and the daughter is without a father. The car sits and stares at me while I write this to you. I don’t know what to do with it. I can’t drive it. Brian says that I can launch myself (and the car) into the air anytime over the speed of 45 mph. Not yet.
Brian is back in the kitchen. I think he has been hired again to protect my mental health. He had his lobotomy during the winter. Now he’s ready to cook.
John is on his way over to help with the car. I am going to ask him how to sue for custody while he takes apart the engine and puts it back together again.
How are you my friend? On the verge of complete self-annihilation? I am. More about that in my next letter.
A beautiful spring afternoon! Presently I am overlooking the Great Lake Ontario. I am lying next to the Fort where two-hundred years ago men woke at dawn to ready themselves for battle. English ships were anchored in the harbor. A summer of fighting. A national pastime.
Down the hill at port floats a Russian ocean liner. A hundred men unloading plutonium and light switches, the captain in his loft drinking vodka from the bottle and chewing on a piece of stale bread...
Gnats surround me. The day is glorious, so much cooler than I thought at first. This doesn’t stop the buds from sprouting, nor does it silence the gulls who chatter tirelessly about the coming summer and the new fish. I am ready for some great change. Last May you were expecting the same for yourself, and now look where you are! Endless work and my wide open alcohol intake valve have made me weaker in spirit. When I get well in spirit I get angry. When I get angry I do foolish things. Not a day goes by when I don’t feel the urge to dismember myself, to self-destruct and send my body parts flying through the air... That used to be because of happiness. Now what is it? Brian says I need a hobby. Work and late night drunkenness, are these not hobbies?
What is this change? What is happening?
The gnats are sunning themselves on my coat. I count fifty of them. Time to go.
Under the restaurant’s tree. Will you send me the negatives of the photos that we took on Glenn’s pond last year? I want to decorate my living room.
The clouds are coming. Snow is predicted for the weekend. Each time the wind blows, a wave of gnats spray my face. I am phasing Larry. I am tripping through a phase. No doubt another horrible one. It feels like a prison sentence from God. I am condemned to loneliness. (Presently Fred the seagull is barking for a piece of the quiche that Jeff just threw to me.) God did not want me to be lonely, alone maybe, but not lonely. It’s a scary thought wondering if everyone is like this. If this be true, just imagine the number of nuclear technicians typing their misery into reactor cores this minute. Fred just walked within three feet of me, took up my offering and flew into the wind. Fred is a beautiful bird.
The snow from Northern Alberta is falling on the Russians unloading pantyhose hand-stitched in the Ukraine. Tonight they’ll sit at the end of the bar and laugh big horse laughs. The Captain will ask Brian to get him through to Moscow on the telephone. A hundred rubles to Vickie for a tip and then off to Chicago.
Lying in the park with my wits about me, but my body approaching grave sickness. I haven’t had a drink in three days.
I just woke up from a nap in the grass. I feel that the more I get myself outside, the better my chances for good health. Good mental health. Falling asleep in the park is a good start. The sky is blue and the children are singing at the playground. Another beautiful day! A day when I am so happy to be alive. Shouldn’t that be everyday? I think the spring sprang from nowhere, and that forced me off the road to ruin. I am finished with the moonshine whiskey, smoky pitiful bars, and the many despairing drunken walks in the wee hours. Nature overcomes. In the grass I will find peace and give my body a chance to clean out its innards.
On this day I am ready to dress and leave. How appropriate that I am feeling a bit “under the weather.” The change is now taking over my whole being. I am hungry and ready to eat. I will stroll over to Scott’s and hit him up for a few bucks. I am famished.
Under the restaurant’s tree. I was shaking at the bakery, so I brought my lunch here. This has got to be the best lunch I ever had the strength to swallow. A thick vegetable sandwich made with fresh baked whole wheat bread, two monster chocolate chip cookies, a blueberry croissant... And I’m still not completely full. The shakes have disappeared, the sleeping sickness too. I feel like I could swallow a watermelon whole and drink apple juice from a fifty gallon drum. I am strong. Gargantuan good health. Thank God!
I cannot stress enough my need to have those negatives. They are a tribute to us (granted it is our own), and I need to look at them now while I’m still alive. So, about this change that I am expecting... What do you think? I was reading over your letters from last winter. A lot of your words were spent on my problem. Very nice. What you wrote about my predicament made sense, or nonsense. Always so difficult to tell which. Yes, I can do anything, and it is useless to try to plan a way, I know. But in all of your wild talk about my moving to God knows where—Paris, Holland, the Far East—in all of that talk, even you could not separate me from Rachelle. Your advice was clear: Go away. Find happiness (what?). Then after you have faced God stark naked, come back to Rachelle a better man. You say that she’ll be waiting for me, that she will stand there with the innocent, understanding, loving look of an angel. She would understand someday. Yes, I am sure of that. Of course! After she abandoned her own child.
I agree with you Larry that Oswego is no longer the place for me. I have not been creative here. I know a trade. I cook and I am a louse. But I think I have some insight into why I am so unhappy.
I have no kindred spirit, nor do I have a muse to diffuse my madness. I am alone and hungry. I am always hungry. I need a human being to cut up and stir fry and serve over rice. I need to sink my teeth into human flesh, but this is French fry town; no one is willing to make themselves look edible. Here it is not polite to eat each other.
In New York I was at peace with everything and everyone. Except for despair; I had no peace whenever I thought about Rachelle. You provided food, shelter and sanity. With your help I found the courage to call myself an artist. How wonderful! To be just what you want to be. I wasn’t always so hungry. I fed myself on the senses and was often very content with their nourishment. I’ll agree that the afternoon hours we well nigh sunk into hell’s own despair, but I was stronger then, more resilient because of the do or die situation I was in. Now I am just plain weak. Not weak like the saint, but infirm like the slave who is beaten, dogged, not manly.
Read a little Walt and go forward. Song of the Open Road. So many times I have read through it for inspiration, and how often it has lifted me! I see with right vision when I am with Walt. I see with the right wisdom of the heart and soul. All is well for the strong and the weak. Who is to understand strength and weakness?
My voice is myself. I have left the rigmarole. Dang it, I gots purpose! Ize caint be tamed!
The world is open to me. The roads are endless. I must turn off the road to become the road. The answer is simply that there is no answer. An answer to what? To life? Am I God? No. I am an angel, a creation. If that isn’t enough fact to send a lightning bolt through my veins and make flutter off my tongue the flight of a million and one thanks, then I should jump in front of a truck. Life is chaos. It is exploding everywhere always, without an end. I turn a deaf ear now on any jack ass who has something to say. Especially myself.
The change I’ve been expecting my dear friend, is me. I am! And the sun rises and sets, the earth is turning and I’m a-turning and a-walking. That is enough happiness. About as much as I can stand.
What else is there to mention? About a billion more things I’m afraid. Please send Mysteries and/or Plexus, Sexus if you get the chance. I need to read more and spend less. Right now I am into Pan for obvious reasons. Glahn and Edvarda—“Their pride is the human pride that aspires to happiness and then flees from it.”
I imagine myself as Glahn watching Oswego come into spring like he did in the north when he fell in love. My solitude is enormous. I am staring out over the harbor from a little grassy spot in East Park. Six years ago, while lying in my truck in this same park, I had the presence of mind to dream about the day. Six years ago! I am happier now. No more crazy. No less. Still wandering and wondering. Where will my sanity take me?
Looking out over this lake I know damn well that there is nothing to aspire to. One cannot climb to love as if love was to be found on the mountain top, and the only way left to go be down. Love is this precisely. Right here, right now. We strive for everything but love. All pursuit destroys love. I am certain of this. I will stand by this conviction forever. Pursuit is strong, but love is weak. It is not human for the strong to trample the weak. Human nature is the epitome of weakness. We take the lead in that affair. What is it that goads us into crushing happiness, tossing love aside as if it were nothing, but, in reality it being the only something we need besides life and the bare minor necessities to sustain life?
Just some minor thoughts to while away my laundry time. Mama’s babies are poppin’ up all over the grass. Dandelions.
Love Ronald
One Supremely Melancholic Evening in Oswego With Cricket Finishing Poem Rose Began on Larry’s Stoop
Last night your blushing arms,
this morning, right now,
with your fair arms and freckles...
I see you sleep with the loveliness of children
A face to torture the blackest soul
with long friendly dreams of you.
And there you sing in a choir of angels
songs to caress the sleeper’s dreams
with bright light visions of earth’s joy...
Right now your fair arms and freckles on me
in Larry’s little room,
Tonight under the lights the two of us
in God’s little place
singing songs about the great peace
before we fall asleep touching...
But wonder, the science of love!
What of that remarkable nerve of a story you told about the social scientists and their very unholy displacement of, believe it or not, love (which means the supreme gift of desirous giving). When you stood right here on Larry’s red stoop last night with your eyes shining mist, how in the beginning you offered me your tiny hand surprisingly with all its connections—the dry bones and the wet ones—how your face and its constant changing expressions of sheer friendliness, betrayal, and shooting firelight, (which means devotional lies), lit up New York like a mad medieval firmament, and never the other way around—how your eyes all too ancient reaction gave an explosion to shatter our minds before time, from an outpost in the first universe, from a small orange ball resting on a wave of many sparkling suns—a place where scientists and jackasses were as incomprehensible to true time as beauty is here, love was fixed meaningless in beauty’s great star quiet... Just like their empty fixed elemental world to examine love like it was a dead brain in a jar!
At dawn our train rocks you to sleep
I forgot about the others so I make love with you
in a barn for the pigs and chickens and asses
Beginning with your longest toe
I never-end my kisses
at your mouth and ears and swimming hair,
sparkling ripples in autumn’s stream
Here my fingers glide effortlessly through happiness...
To watch you sleep I’d say now
that our never-end has begun.
Like the sun ends! I want to know Mr. Science how she could confess her love to me when just a moment ago in sun-time you popped out of your mother’s arse a full grown animal with the audacity, (which means absolute, uncompromising stupidity), to record in certain number, theory, and fact the lifeline of passion like it was sedimentary rock or dinosaur bone. Listen Mr. Science, you better tell me before my blood boils over and I step out of this hovel to ring your neck, just why you cannot understand and won’t leave alone, the incomprehensible. Why, after a lifetime of counting meteors and avoiding the plague, you had to pick out her watery eyes with your bird-beak tweezers. Fool! She had her head resting on my lap in trust with me for once and for all. Now look at her. She bleeds little hot bags of plasma. Aren’t her tears wonderful saltwater proof that she was once a loveless fish in a clear, deep blue sea? These are tears from fish eyes which cannot be miracles to you of course. I could kill you for all the damage you have done to her miraculous new born eyes.
My darling you will wake up
with lap marks on your cheek
finding scientific ways to get rid of me
Love is a fraud
and yesterday morning with a sheet round your thigh
I watched while your wet mouth opened and closed
with the lingering hope of love swirl in your eyes,
and invisible happy birds fed inside me.
But an article on love
has turned you sour overnight
Your eyes became round black stones
and locusts leapt from your lips.
According to some proofs there’s a limit to your touch
and a time when I will cease
to stop my endless moving to say
“My God how beautiful you are!”
At this very awkward moment I see right under the rain light of the city with the eyes that I keep in my eyes. I see there is a way to die without having to live through it at all. I will be in the undying between miraculous truths like light and nothing, (which means I will be in love with her). Mr. Science says with certain pompous gravity that love dies, we die, just look at the flowers that shrivel up and die. Everything will die and stay dead because an unfeeling brick says that anything touchable is impossible eternally. But there is bread on the table beside her eyeball dried up on a glass slide, and I am laughing at him because God laughs at him, because even the impossibility of God and children believe in loving something spoiled and rotten like him. I laugh while the train chug-a-chugs past gravel yards and lime pits, laugh quietly so not to wake her, with my fingers on her mouth and breast—laugh past the factories and the endless stream of wire and smokestack filth that all thank God was born an unfathomable long time after that forgotten sun we wake up to each day once put a mysterious glow under his mother’s ass. I mean the great humble light, the one he will never truly come to know, which stretched her right leg to the moon and the other to itself, (which means the moon and sun, his first and last real incomprehensibles), a glow bright and hot enough, launched from God’s bow a stream of twisting arrows that took a frantic scamper through her great wild, each arrow intent on creating another freak of nature, another son of God, or that monkey that was a fish that was a rock that couldn’t love...
No, he cannot believe in love or anything precisely because he forgot he was born. He sits on the air to examine the earth I walk upon, corrupting the world I create for her, for ever, and for things like that which never end.
Hate It When You Leave
I believe there is a time in most people’s lives when nothing appears to be what it once was. The changing moment comes at an all encompassing, obvious time, or it can be gradual, periodically dreadful, until one day a man luckily breaks all of the bones in his body and miraculously finds the minutes during his paralysis to ask the eternal questions, “Why?” and, “What the hell was I thinking?” Many have to wait a lifetime, until their warm and cozy deathbeds maybe. I don’t know. I am too young to know. Some lucky few are homicidal maniacs and have the sensitivity that an ant feels for an elephant. They are saved. So are the clinically retarded and the religious zealot. They are selfish beyond fix.
However, the rest of us cannot always delay it to the end.
I have had that time come often. I am one of the graduals. It has come to me in a thousand unwritten poems to nobody. I have expressed its passing in my anger, confusion, and despair. I have talked about it to my friends using the image of fingerprints on a mirror in an empty room. (That one always gets to me). What is the “it?” What is the “why?” What is the “What the hell was I thinking?”
Zen calls it, “Perfect and unsurpassed awakening” I like Zen’s nonsense. I like it a lot. But Buddhism is wrong. Gautama had a wife, child, riches and status. Not only did he renounce the riches, the status and the wife, which might have given him a good head start in truth’s direction, but he made the single most enormous boo-boo and renounced his child as well. At that moment he put an irreparable kink in a major cog of the great birth and death machine. He screwed up big time.
“I want to find out the truth. I am possessed by this one thought. Go away little Gautama, and take that ball with you. Play with someone your own size. I don’t love you. I must love nothing!”
Great big Buddha, the awakened one. Bah! The tower of truth, of peace, of reality. Bah, bah! “Perfect and unsurpassed awakening is your everyday life.” There! So he left his child to figure that one out by himself. Brilliant. And he befriended the buffalo boy and the milk maid. or, more likely, he went out and got drunk. His child cried, ran away from home, became a great scholar, a rat, street vendor, or maybe even a Buddha himself. You can bet he became one who also abandoned his own children to their cruel fate. That is the real wheel. There is suffering because Gautama Senior was a spoiled bastard. Not because of Karma. Karma is chimera. It is punishment from wrong deeds. Reward for the good ones. Bah! Generals think that they can spot a good deed. A judge can identify the wrongdoing of another. Bah, bah!
Oh I shouldn’t pick on Buddha. I went out and got drunk too. I read about the great men. Ah, so many great men and women I read about! The creators, the authors I revered. My teachers. I stole countless hours alone trying to figure things out. Anywhere. Under a tree, in the back of a bus, by the lake. How good it felt to be alone. I wasn’t ready for a child. I was going to be a writer, a wanderer, a thinker, a great man (what the hell is that?), anybody besides a father. Or, if I had to be one sometime, it would just happen that I would be great at that too. I didn’t think about it. I was me, and that was always going to be the best, for me.
The Me’s. Must I name the most famous? Are there any parables about children? At least one that carries any weight? Was Jesus a father? (Probably to more than we know). I could relate to him if he was just a mediocre savior but a great father. If he gave me some helpful advice about what to expect after Rhiannon was a fetus, boy would I have been grateful! Nope. Nothing. Jesus’ talks are very good and inspiring for single guys on the run. They’re good for prisoners and drunks after addiction. We know how good they are for greedy churches that all need indoor plumbing because the parishioners forget that Jesus pooped in the sand. So, why do Jesus and Gautama, and all the smelly yogis of India for that matter get three thousand years of saintly attentions? A million hopeful monks can meditate on nothingness. Because of the many wonderful improvements in religious technology, a city of frantic Italians can hear the Pope fart at Mass. And India? The gods will never starve. They are loved and adored like children on the lush side of the palace gate. But the real children, the living ones, the staving child in my house? Dirty beggars on the streets of Calcutta.
The great ones didn't give us any help raising sensitive, responsible, healthy, active, smiling, bright, happy, peaceful children. Why?
Because they were shitty daddies.
Oh there is a poem somewhere in this house. It is one of those misty-eyed poems about children not belonging to their parents.
I found it, and it’s worth writing down:
Your children are not your children
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite
And He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as he loves the arrow that flies,
so he loves also the bow that is stable.
—Kahlil Gibran
From what I am to make of this, the poet thinks somebody else is taking care of things. That’s the capital H in “His". Those little legs running around the adobe aren’t for daddy. The invisible warrior with the magical bow and arrow; now he’s got it all under control. He has the power, eventually. You can tell by the semi-colon. So why bother? The little legs will grow into big legs and do whatever the hell they want anyway because God is insane. So believe in a higher power and teach them selfishness by example. Go write poems under trees. When the little legs leave from time to time, don’t get sad. Do not feel empty. Why allow any voids to sneak into the building? The little legs are just running swiftly and far, far away. They’re not yours. They are God’s. Your semen, her egg? Not the least bit important. The woman was a surrogate mother to the archer. He might have taken her by force, but that would have looked bad for posterity. (Even the most devout desert scribe would have a hard time sugar-coating that one.)
So he got the poet to do it. A guy who didn’t want a child anyway. He wanted poetry. Well, here was his chance.
“The archer will make you a respected and revered poet if you write some little ditty about what the archer thinks love is. I don’t know. Throw in some subservience to a higher power. They love symbolism. Keep the archer image. That’s good. State the obvious. Tell them that their children have their own thoughts, although those thoughts are directed by me, the great and all-powerful archer, life, God, what have you... If you print it in some fancy script, they might forget temporarily that the little legs get hit by cars, or have bombs dropped on them while they’re sleeping. Oh yes, here’s one. Tell them they have a soul, but every soul is separate and alone in a hateful world. That is helplessness! That’s exactly what we’re shooting for! If you can do that, I’ll have your poem printed on page 59 of 100 of the World’s Favorite Poems”.
The poet explains away his progeny. But that doesn’t amount to two diddlys for me!
What is important is coming to terms with the intangibles. I don’t care if you’re a doctor, rock star, gambler, thief, supervisor, cook, TV man, minister... However you choose to embarrass yourself throughout life’s game is fine. Sometimes it might even be necessary to choose a profession. But if you make a child and afterwards aspire to any level of respect in your field, get out while the time is ripe. That is, quit, or get demoted immediately. Otherwise, tack up that destructive poem on a pegboard above your desk and glance at it from time to time. Illusions are rapidly breeding parasites. Leave the world turning to the single, ambitious, unloving freaks of human nature. The planet can still be ravaged without your hand in it. There is plenty of killing that you need not be responsible for. Remember, the archer assumes all responsibility.
No need to drop out completely. Play the game, but by your own rules. Your child needs your support. That is unavoidable whether you wash dishes for a living or collect camel dung as fuel. But realize first that you are not money. That money is food, shelter and warmth. That’s it! And in a stable economy, that’s really easy to come by. Anything else is just a waste of time until you establish yours and your child’s love. In my world love is a confusing verb. You better hope for your sake mister that your baby agrees outright when you say, “I love you”, make sure no such phrase rings hollow in her heart. However, don’t take my word for it until your own eyes and ears are opened. You won’t anyway.
When she bundles up to leave with her mother, and her big coat and hat tuck in our time together for another week, then I know every “why” that has ever queried. There is no evil, and definitely not any good outside of my control. I am a king. I love a queen and my princess daughter. That is world. Because, as Kenneth Patchen wrote when he wanted to become a parent, “The word is the way a child thinks...” The word is world to me. I am grateful to my life that I know this truth. I can charge anything to my will because I am the king of this land and family. There are no gods greater than us. Today I feel like Japan. It is mine and my queen’s. It is for our daughter. She plays on a mountain and it is her laughter that rains down from it. I am the king of this land. I have given her that time to play and dream. For now that can be her only escape from my loving care. That is her freedom. For time being almost finished every second, there isn’t a moment that should escape unnoticed. I am so fond of her mountain. For that is where her laughter rains.
Do you know what a small voice is? When Rhiannon speaks there is hope for every pisspot in the world who thinks he knows something. She speaks the language of wonder. And wonder is finding something small or big without searching. Wonder is hide-and-unseek. A small voice tells me over the phone what she heard at the firehouse, where Freddy the cat runs to, how Morely and her built a snow fort in the storm. That is the small voice of wonder when she is away from me. When she is away I can feel helpless, and the archer thinks he has another. Because her mother can accept the bow theory and find herself in some thing beside her child, she becomes the archer’s kill. She can never be a god like me. That is the horror, because her belief is out of my control. She will fear and respect monsters, and teach their only potential destroyer to accept man’s law, morality, and righteousness. Man built Buddha and Jesus. Man built New York City. Man built prisons and churches and schools. But man had no hand in the building of my daughter! And no pisspot poet is going to fool me into thinking that Rhiannon is the daughter of life’s longing. That is life’s garbage. I am the giver of life! This giver ain’t gonna plant his ass in a cloudy mist after planting his seed. Nor pray to the sunrise with my stinky robe and staff while his little girl struggles through the most degrading of lives.
There is no poetry in abandoning your children. One does not have to go very far to abandon them.
I hate her leaving. Kaput!
Thanks for reading!
Ron