Soggy Saturday

The weather outside is pretty shitty in my corner of Connecticut, so I have decided to stay inside, and skip the gym.

The first two issues of my new subscription to Sky and Telescope showed up and there are some interesting articles on the new Mega telescopes being proposed. One with an astonishing 42 meter mirror! I imagine with a machine of that size cosmologists will move from counting stars to combing them out of the beard of God.

As for me, since the stars are destined to be invisible tonight, I am going to do a little laundry, a little reading, maybe a little writing. I may crank up the Victrola in the dining room. I’ve left two steaks on the counter to thaw, and I have two large celery roots in the fridge, aching to be boiled and turned into celery root mashed potatoes. And then, there is also that bottle of sake that I bought on my way home from Grand Central which needs finishing. I must attend to THAT.

In case you were wondering, I put out the second steak out for you. On a rainy day, feeling a bit cut off from humanity, one is apt to grow a little melancholy. A little lonely.

That's why I'm glad we're going to have dinner.

Until then, in honor of skies and telescopes, here is a little Auden...

The More Loving One

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

Parade's End

One of the things I do, apart from writing poetry, or blogging, or studying Japanese, or day-dreaming, while I am at work, is legal research. Usually this is a pretty dull affair, consisting as it does of finding cases, legislation, past legislation, pending legislation, proposed legislation, pertinent legislation, peculiar legislation, articles, bill-jackets, treatises, SEC Filings, researching the legal history, and histrionics, of individuals, corporations or other entities duly constituted and incorporated in the U.S., Canada, the UK, EU, Mexico, Mongolia, Mars, the Lesser Magellanic Clouds, and M-31.

Most days I leave my desk at 5:30 with a hideous headache.

Even so. Beastly as these headaches sometimes are, collective life in the corporate cube is not all bad. You do have access to oxygen, elevators, emergency stairs, windows, computers, cafeterias, and highly corrosive coffee and tea. And sometimes you stumble across something curious in the course of your work. In one of the cases I was copying from the New York Law Journal this morning, I came across the surname: Tietjen. And for some reason, in the the back of my brain I heard a little bell tinkle. Where had I heard that name before?

...

Actually, there was no bell. In fact, if the truth be told (which it occasionally is in this blog), I knew exactly and instantaneously where I had heard that peculiar name, or at least an echo of it, before: Parade's End, by Ford Maddox Ford. I quote from Wiki:

Parade's End is a tetralogy (four related novels) by Ford Madox Ford published between 1924 and 1928. It is set in England and on the Western Front in World War I, where Ford served as an officer in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, a life vividly depicted in the novels.

The novel chronicles the life of Christopher Tietjens, "the last Tory," a brilliant government statistician from a wealthy land-owning family who is serving in the British Army during World War I. Tietjens may or may not be the father of the child of his wife, Sylvia, a flippant socialite who seems intent on ruining him. Meanwhile, Tietjens' incipient affair with Valentine Wannop, a high-spirited suffragette, has not been consummated, despite what all their friends believe. Much of the novel is spent following Tietjens in French trenches as he ruminates on how to be a better soldier and untangle his strange social life.

...

"Much of the novel is spent following Tiejens in French trenches as he ruminates on how to be a better soldier and untangle his strange social life."

I work in an office, and I know very little about the trenches of France, only what I have read in the work of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, but I do know something about entanglements. I wake up with knots in my shoulders all the time. Still, I wonder if it is wise to conceive of life in general, or your life in particular, as a novel--or worse, a poem--even from the safe and sanitary distance of Art?

What happens if you want to put your goddam book down and just get some sleep?

A Practical Banana Promotion

Yesterday's post about Orpheus left me feeling rather miserable last night, and after my 900 calorie cardio session at the gym, I collapsed in a heap in one corner of the 8:07 on my way home. My boyfriend, Yasu, was in Hiroshima last week visiting the Peace Memorial, as a part of his dissertation research, and I think that's how that particular thread of thinking unravelled into a poem.

I am not sure if you noticed in the poem, but Orpheus plucks his lyre 3 times, which is an extremely oblique reference, I think, to the Trinity test site, New Mexico, where the first atomic test was conducted in July of 1945. I don't believe that was the test where they built a small town to observe the effects of the bomb on cities. Evidently, I am conflating those two events. No wonder I had such a headache last night. But I was recovered enough this morning to make a few changes to Orpheus.

Now, what does all of this have to do with bananas? Besides the (generally--though by no means universally) well recognized insanity of nuclear war? Well, I will tell you.

...

As I slumped in my seat in the train, I somehow found the energy to scroll around the selection wheel on my iPod, flpping by: The Clash, Elgar's Cello Concerto, Gorecki's 3rd Symphony, Kindertotenleider, I ran across Anna Russell's exegesis on the fine art of selling bananas: A Practical Banana Promotion, and I started silently to smile. Did you know that your typical banana has 88 calories--the same number of keys as your typical grand piano?

It's true. It's one of those odd numerical coincidences—like the number of plays by Shakespeare equalling the number of more or less complete extant Greek tragedies (37). Or cheetahs and chairs each having four legs. I'm not making this up you know.

Well, as my smile started to broaden a bit, and various jingles for encouraging the consumption of bananas were proposed by Mrs. Russell, and the obvious associated dangers, I recalled a poem I had written for a writing seminar a few years ago--a sort of loose, vanitas piece--making fun of my weakness for bleakness.

Still Life


You know that big bunch—
those long, green bananas
I bought for my Wheaties—
just sat there on my cracked
countertop for days—

uneaten—yellowing—
not seeming to mind
being left alone: until

I went to peel one—and
then all of them
suddenly turned black.

I must do a better job eating my fruit, I thought. Not only is it good for the bowels, it is an egregious waste of money to let it sit around and rot. Besides, I have no desire to wind up my days wearing white flannel trousers, running my tongue along my dentures, wondering if I dare to eat peaches, or not. Do you?

Yasu returns from Japan on Sunday. And I move in with him in Queens. And we are going to spend the whole month eating bananas, peaches, apples, and other immemorial fruit.

See you tomorrow!

Orpheus

As a poet, I have often wondered what it must have been like to be Orpheus, the great Greek granddaddy of rhapsodes, bards, and beatniks everywhere. I wonder what kind of a person he was like? Was he as amorous as Ovid, for instance, or more of a family man like Nabokov? Did he dress up and get drunk, like Dylan Thomas, for Halloween? When I picture Orpheus, for some reason, I can never get the picture of Harpo Marx out of my head. To each his own, I guess.

Although anybody beating on a pickle drum in Union Square Station could induce a few felicitous souls already on drugs or disposed toward motion to dance, it takes something extra special, I think, a little bit of latent madness, or maybe malice, to coax a Megalith to move, or a cliff to clap. I have a feeling Orpheus was such a man. I wonder if he and I would have been friends?

An Anthem for Orpheus


Some animals were gathered in a ring
Around a poet, playing with a song;
He sighed and plucked a solitary string,
“It’s music. What could possibly go wrong?”

The lion lying there, beside the lamb,
Drifted off to sleep in the tall grass;
Brooks trickled in, and so did boulders, and
Humanity stood up, as if at Mass.

He handled his equipment with such skill
He held a brief monopoly on sound.
He plucked another string, and then another—til
A mushroom cloud erupted over town.

Some say this was the first experiment
Mixing religion, politics and art.
The town was made of music, not cement:
Construction in cement had yet to start.

Catching a cold.

I have that creaky feeling I always get when I have been invaded by a foreign body bent on doing something malicious to my person.

Either that, or I don't feel like memorizing 20 new kanji for my Japanese test on Wednesday.

Or maybe I over did it at the gym yesterday. I went up 10lbs in every category and I ache in every joint like a sinner in the hands of an angry God. I guess that's what I get for skipping church.

Anyway, here is an old poem that seems to fit with my dissipated mood. I hate Sundays.


Pipe Dreams

It seldom takes more than a toke, just a whiff,
To start my tongue reeling off stories of you;
On our naughtier nights we might split a spliff,
Surrounded by haloes of smokiest hue.

God only knows how I lost my huge honey!
Through railroad investments, a cyclone, a ring?
Ten carats of coal I once hocked for money
To pay for potatoes? I replaced it with string.

The calamity came from Switzerland—Berne—
A skiing instructor, I forget on which Alp.
His mittens said Matt, and I said I can turn
A blind eye to that. Hard liquor and whores, they help.

But now only cads will attend my cotillions!
Now, only cockroaches and creditors call!
Mostly cockroaches—I seem to have billions—
All poking forks in my nerves through the wall.

So, I sit in a corner, just nibbling my knuckle.
The party is over, and my place is a sty,
And I think of five fingers once torn from my buckle.
“Darling, don’t hurt me,” you said. “Don’t cry.”