Tag: Yo Ivanhoe

Am I too old to see the fairies dance?

I cannot find them anymore.

–Langston Hughes, from “After Many Springs”

That the light would last forever.

That a silent abracadabra was the appropriate blessing to be conferred on even the grayest new morning.

That a dog was both a lantern and a life preserver.

That a man could escape from the belly of a whale, even without the help of a dog, a lantern, or a life preserver.

That John Wayne wore his pants pulled up too far for my taste.

That a good baseball mitt was as beautiful an object of pure design as anything ever produced by an Italian.

That baseball was one of the few things in America that made perfect sense.

That a dream deferred accrued interest.

That a goat was a more worthy subject for a tale than a donkey.

That a starving man could live on laughter and conversation.

That a green chair was enchanted.

That Nick Lowe was the most underrated artist in all of rock.

That Roddy Frame was a close second.

That there was always a fish at the other end of the line.

That there was a bobber at the bottom of my throat.

That a man could be the ringmaster, walk the high wire, and both be and tame the lion.

That oblivion was a worthwhile destination.

That hamburgers could be grown in a garden.

That beetles were among the planet’s most spectacular creations.

That impostors almost always wear the crown.

That the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels

That a year in the attendant’s booth of a parking ramp provided a better and more sensible education than Plato’s Academy.

That a heart could not live by breaking.

That desire could cripple a man.

That soup was the perfect food.

That a fingerprint doesn’t prove a fucking thing.

That Wayne Shorter was the most underrated artist in all of jazz.

That Freddie Hubbard was a close second.

That questions had answers.

That one could persist in asking questions, and survive the answers.

That all the moral blather in the world could be boiled down to two words: be careful.

That Sweet’s Desolation Boulevard was a more consistently entertaining record than anything released in 2006.

That a meager body and feeble hands could save a life, could cradle a heart and keep it safe, and could communicate things the mind and mouth could never find the words to say.

That a heretic could speak the truth.

That a parrot could –and should– be taught to recite poetry.

That Funny Bones was one of the top ten movies ever made.

That a man’s soul could survive the wrecking ball.

That if you taught a woman to dance you could kiss her goodbye.

That on a dark night and the right road, Little Willie John could tear out your spleen.

That George Herriman’s Krazy Kat was as inspired as anything in literature.

That the Gilligan’s Island musical Hamlet was better than Hamlet.

That a closet full of suede Pumas was the mark of a stylish man.

That you should never stop expecting people to surprise you.

That all the big, ridiculous things were possible, were tangible, were true.

That there was magic in human hands.

That some form of magic was always at hand.

That this was a world without end.

I was right about some of those things, maybe even most of them.

Go ahead and tell me I wasn’t and see where it’ll get you.

The King deputized for the Queen at many sacred functions, dressed in her robes, wore false breasts, borrowed her lunar axe as a symbol of power, and even took over from her the magical act of rain-making. His ritual death varied greatly in circumstance; he might be torn in pieces by wild women, transfixed with a sting-ray spear, felled with an axe, pricked in the heel by a poisoned arrow, flung over a cliff, burned to death on a pyre, drowned in a pool, or killed in a pre-arranged chariot crash. But die he must. A new stage was reached when animals came to be substituted for boys at the sacrificial altar…

–Robert Graves, The Greek Myths: 1

In man, unlike the apes, the impulse to use some sort of language is overwhelming.

–Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings

This vision of someone, sitting alone in a room somewhere two hundred years ago, something of me moving in his blood, something maybe in the way he squints and puzzles, in the way his mind changes directions, the way words fall from his lips almost unbidden, the way they fly from his fingers like shavings he is whittling from the truth.

A relative, some pause on the long, crooked road leading to this moment, this old aching confusion and these persistent, nagging questions, this huge desire.

You, world, I imagine you sleeping and wish you sweet dreams, wish you love, wish you every wish of your darling heart. May you never find yourself leaning on a windowsill at four a.m., somewhere in the bleary midst of a stretch of sleepless nights you’ve completely lost track of, staring out into the dark streets of your neighborhood and trying to will something to move, if only to prove to yourself that you’re not dreaming.

Can I just tell you how much I hate it when someone says, “On the one hand”? It just means the other hand is coming, and I cannot balance the contents of two hands in my head at one time. How much better when someone –even some old pervert trying to ingratiate himself by offering sweets– offers me the choice of one hand or the other.

This guy in the elevator today, he’s talking into his cell phone, and his face suddenly gets bright red and he erupts in a spasm of almost alarming laughter. “God damn!” he says to the person he’s talking to. “What did I tell you? Show me a man’s weakness and I’ll break him down like a goddamn card table!”

At a dusty roadside stop somewhere in Montana, where there was a statue of the Virgin Mary and vases full of bleached, plastic flowers, an old man, who was leaning against the front of a pickup truck and having a smoke, pointed with his cigarette towards the range that ran all the way down the valley and addressed one sentence to me: “A choir’s rumored to be lost in them mountains.”

Remove one thing, let one thing go missing, and life can become a mighty painful and confusing business in a hurry. We aren’t simple, but we’re full of holes, and this world is full of things that do nothing but make those holes bigger and bigger by the day.

“It makes me feel like messin’ up.” (Lowman Pauling)

Books take me away and break my heart in a way different from the rest of the world. It’s the most beautiful, most wrenching sort of heartache: longing.

Those sad dishes have been sitting there in the sink for months now. Maybe I’ll never get around to washing them.

Anonymous: wanting a name, or so Samuel Johnson decided. And is that ever beautiful.

I did receive my telegram, in fact, and it was a lovely thing. I’ll remember it to the end of my days.

I intend something, dammit.

Why the hell did I put that calculator in the refrigerator?

What happened to that old woman who lived in my basement and made me such elegant and astonishing shoes? Gone, like so much else, without a trace.

The middle of the night, and morning still a long ways off.

It’s later than I think, I think.

Shit, it hurts. It still hurts. It hurts all over.

He took her somewhere. She went willingly. They went together.

It wasn’t exactly as if she were lost, although that description would work for the sake of melodrama or metaphor. She didn’t, though, have any melodrama left in her, and she no longer had any use at all for metaphor. Things exactly as they were were scary enough without trying to read something else into them. She was simply in a place she was never going to come back from.

There were bare trees and a frozen creek and gray skies there, and it snowed every time the world was turned upside down.

Sometimes at night when she craned her neck she could see small spasms of light skidding across the rounded ceiling of the glass globe in which she would spend the rest of her days.

When she shouted, which she did less and less often, her words bounced right back at her. Occasionally they knocked her clean off her feet and she would spend days flat on her back.

It would get murky, then dark, and the snow would finally settle over and around her. She knew that eventually she would no longer even bother to get up.

to be a discoverer you hold close whatever

you find, and after a while you decide

what it is. Then, secure in where you have been,

you turn to the open sea and let go.

—William Stafford, from “Security”

What you cannot hang onto you must let go of –that is the principle on which I operate, on my way to the sea.

—William Maxwell, “What You Can’t Hang Onto”

Be kind.

Keep it in front of you.

Let it come to you.

Where there is not enough faith, there is lack of good faith.

Listen up.

Keep your eyes open.

Count your blessings.

Pay attention to what the moon’s up to.

Hold out hope.

Give joy its proper expression.

Don’t just stand there, do something.

Mix it up.

Raise your voice.

Speak your mind.

Try to say what you mean.

Stand by your words.

Shut your fucking mouth.

Don’t talk with your mouth full.

Risk everything.

Hit it where it’s pitched.

Hit it where they they ain’t.

Take one for the team.

Be there.

Eat something.

Don’t be afraid of the merge.

Signal your intentions.

Play by whatever rules make some moral sense; disregard the others.

Earn respect, and give it where it’s earned.

Go to your station.

Stay in touch.

Call your mother.

Question your motives.

Change your mind.

Answer the phone.

Do not hesitate to show kindness to strangers, etc.

Don’t keep score.

Hold things close.

Let things go.

Wait your turn.

Seize your moment.

Be gracious.

You can’t take it with you.

This is it.

Enough is enough.

Saturday afternoon I was approached outside my house by a down-on-his-luck character who told me he was trying to buy a used car over on Pillsbury Avenue and had found himself fifty bucks short. He’d taken the bus from St. Paul to look at this car, he explained. He’d just gotten a job in Maplewood and was starting on Monday. He was clearly desperate, and seemed almost frantic. If he didn’t get this car, he said, he would have no way to “drive backwards and forewords to work.”

Backwards and forewords. That, I thought, felt like the way I usually come and go from work every day.

I’ll admit, though, that I was a bit skeptical, so I offered to walk over with him to check out the car, figuring this character would balk and that would be the end of that. He didn’t balk, however; if anything he responded with almost alarming enthusiasm to this offer, and we walked the several blocks to Pillsbury without much in the way of conversation passing between us.

And sure enough, there it was, some kind of white, four-door family car in the garage of a townhouse.

I found myself trying to negotiate with the car’s owner. Couldn’t he, I asked, do any better than $800? The man was emphatic. He had already agreed to shave the price down from $1000 to $800. He’d just listed the car on Wednesday, he said, and he was confident he would eventually find someone willing to pay his original asking price.

The potential buyer and I walked down to the end of the driveway and talked things over. Did I think it was a good deal? he asked.

I told him that he was unfortunately asking the wrong guy. It looked like a decent car, I said. He pulled a wad of rumpled cash from his pocket and counted it out. He was, in fact, $48 short.

I gave the guy his fifty dollars so that he would have a car to drive backwards and forewords to work. “Long may she run,” I told him as I handed over the cash.

I left the two guys to complete the transaction, but as I walked away down the sidewalk the buyer scurried after me and asked for my name and address. I wrote this information for him on an index card and handed it over.

Easter afternoon I came home to find an envelope in my mailbox. The envelope contained two twenties, and twelve ones.

The giving of thanks: lip service is easy, but really feeling it, truly giving it away, expressing it from your heart, that’s more difficult.

Where do you even start?

Any fool with a roof over his head, a car to drive, a job that pays the bills, food in his cupboard and refrigerator, a sense of responsibility, a feeling of belonging, of having a family or a community or a tribe that depends on him and perhaps even loves him; who has a leg to stand on, shoes on his feet, a warm bed, clean underwear, hot water, a toilet that flushes, books to read, music to listen to, a chair to sit on, hands and feet and arms and legs and eyes and ears that still work, a cracked and compassionate heart, a brain that is still capable of manufacturing sense (even if only occasionally) and cooperates, however gracelessly, with his tongue and dispatches words to his fingers; any fool whose fingers can still grip a pen, who still has access to blank sheets or scraps of paper and who continues to feel compelled to say something; anybody, in other words, who has lived a good, long while on the planet and feels things ever stirring in his head and heart, any such person should spend at least half of whatever time he has left in the world saying nothing but thank you.

Show me a man who can’t trust, he used to say, and I’ll show you an untrustworthy man.

It was lies that broke his spirit and drove him out of the arms of…what? America? The human community?

The lies of culture and commerce, public and private lies, political lies –virulent dishonesty propagated by sociopaths, a strain so fierce and ubiquitous that you weren’t even safe inside your own skin.

How could you not be infected? How could you really know anymore what was true, including and especially the words that tumbled around in your own head and rolled off your tongue?

Somewhere deep in his childhood he’d concluded that trust was the only solid foundation on which his otherwise shaky identity rested or wobbled. Increasingly wobbled, but he had learned early that trust was sacred and hard to come by, and he’d never been able to just give it away. He had it, though, and it was precious to him.

He had a hard time anymore sorting things out, but something had happened. Or somethings. Nothing all that out of the ordinary, yet there was no consolation for him in that; if anything, in fact, this realization just made it seem all the more tragic, that such huge violations of trust could become so commonplace that they could no longer be seen as the forces of destruction they were.

It was perhaps this simple and this complicated: a basic trust is violated in some intimate human theater –a casual lie, for instance, an act of faithlessness or abandonment– and distrust, hand in hand with a possibly protective but nonetheless almost compulsive deceit, is incubated collaterally. The fracture snakes downward and outward, deeper and deeper all the time, like the roots of a huge tree. Something prosaically tragic like that, there was your Pandora’s Box.

Time is a sputtering lantern, a bruised child, a gray, flat-faced man with fists of concrete and legs like pistons. He has it in for dogs, which is one of his many cruel and inexplicable character traits.

Misunderstood and misrepresented throughout history, gussied up and dumbed down, the snaggle-toothed bastard is frequently outfitted with wings he’d never wear let alone learn to use. He merely smirks at clocks and every other so-called timepiece man has ever devised –foolish abstractions, he’d tell you if ever he deigned to speak, wholly inadequate and far too orderly to ever approximate the real thing.

He is a stutterer, a creature of fits and starts and the long pauses of an unorthodox and not entirely competent chess player. He doesn’t have a rational bone in his body, nor could he be said to have ever had a thoughtful moment. No, he’s as impulsive and reckless and irrational as the day he was born in a maelstrom.

He’s a cold, plodding motherfucker, methodically unpredictable, a mess maker, back breaker, teeth kicker, heart wrecker. A connoisseur of ruins and a ruthless collector of forgotten debts.

He doesn’t heal. He doesn’t mend. He doesn’t forgive. He doesn’t forget. He doesn’t fly. He doesn’t tell. He’s got it in for dogs.

It’s been said that he wiggled out from under the thumb of God centuries ago and has been a lone wolf ever since.

I can tell you from unfortunate personal experience the sort of thing you can expect if you allow yourself to fall under the spell of a poison toad. It’s not good, that’s for damn sure.

You’d think, I suppose, that any reasonably intelligent person would know enough to steer clear of a poison toad that showed up on his doorstep at midnight, particularly when said toad was wearing an ill-fitting top hat, speaking perfect English, and toting what it claimed was a magic lantern.

I’ll admit, though, that I’d had a few belts and was feeling no pain. And the odd thing was that when I opened the door and saw this creature on my front porch I never for a minute doubted my eyes. And I knew for damn sure that a toad wearing a top hat was likely to have something to say. This fellow certainly didn’t disappoint on that count.

Oh, Lord, he had plenty to say, and I fell for it hook, line, and sinker. He was a real smooth operator, a first-rate song-and-dance man. He’d also clearly had his eye on me or done some background research, because he seemed to understand that I was lonesome and dealing with a good deal of personal darkness.

The toad offered to trade me his magic lantern for a head of lettuce and a saucer of Scotch. This seemed at the time like a reasonable bargain, but there was hitch: I had to kiss the toad before he would hand over the magic lantern.

A lonely and intoxicated man, you’ll surely understand, will do all manner of foolish things for a magic lantern, and so I gave the toad his saucer of Scotch and the lettuce –we had to compromise a bit; I buy my lettuce by the bag– and then I did as he requested and got down on my hands and knees and kissed him on the mouth.

At which point the magic lantern, which had been sitting there on my welcome mat, was immediately extinguished and I found myself transformed into a toad and perched on a log at the edge of a dark bog.

I hopped that night until I was exhausted, and when I finally arrived at the edge of my driveway I could see that what I assumed was the poison toad, looking like a much happier and healthier version of myself (he was shirtless, for one thing, and in better physical shape than I’d ever been), was hosting a raging party in my house.

Easy world, you gave it once–

please quietly welcome it back,

that hand.

–William Stafford, from “Going On”

…what is it we are all doing, what is it we are about, pray tell? And why are we gathered here?

–Raymond Carver, “All My Relations”

What the hell do we want? What is our heart’s desire? What are all the dreams we still cling to as realistic and attainable? These, of course, as opposed to those we still harbor as old scars from the people we once hoped we would be and the lives we imagined ourselves living.

For some of us, those old scars –the remnants of exploded dreams and ideals– have left us hobbled and hunchbacked. Still, though we may never be astronauts or artists or pop singers, there are still things we desperately want. We are not finished with desire. Those who would claim to be –and I don’t give a rat’s ass if they consider themselves Buddhists or burnouts– have left themselves for dead. They have shut their eyes. Or they are liars. They may have no waking recollection, but they still dream they are flying. They still climb ladders into the clouds and revisit magic sanctuaries they long ago tried to convince themselves didn’t exist. In their dreams they still feel the consoling touch of human hands.

Such people have forgotten that invisibility was once upon a time a wondrous fantasy rather than a modern malaise, that it was a gift that allowed those to whom it was bestowed the opportunity to see the world and their place in it with absolute clarity. Now, though, it is an easy trick to pull off, an affliction from which we pray –if we are still able to pray– to be delivered.

We may want many things, but what we desperately want is to be seen, and once seen to be recognized; once recognized to be heard, and once heard to be known.