Politics & the English Language Revisited

(Yet another essay for my school paper, the Volante. Find the published version here.)

Reading Matt Hittle’s column last week, I found myself nodding in agreement. Writing and speaking well are valuable skills, not only in the business of passing exams, but in the businesses of the world outside these college walls as well. Unfortunately, they are also skills to be had at a premium among many college students. However, I believe that being able to write and speak well are important for other reasons as well.

In his seminal essay “Politics & the English Language”, George Orwell argues that sloppy writing is reflective of sloppy thinking. Although the essay was written in 1946, Orwell’s thesis remains valid today, perhaps in the current age of Twitter more than ever.

Allow me to use a metaphor familiar to many college students to illustrate Orwell’s point. When I pour a can of condensed soup into a saucepan, lurking amidst the amorphous chunks of potato and reprocessed meat lumps may be a host of preservatives and trans-fats of which I am totally unaware. If I had read the label carefully, I would have known all about the soup’s nefarious contents. But I was too lazy to do so, and now all those nasty chemicals are going into my body.

So it is with writing. Take a common word like “democracy”. Most of us would probably agree that democracy is a good thing, that our political system is democratic to one degree or another. But what precisely does democracy mean on an etymological level? On a practical level? Does it just have to do with elections? With the rule of law? Is capitalism a necessary part of democracy? Does it mean the same thing as “freedom”? If not, why not?

These are all important questions. Yet many people uncritically use democracy as a catch-all, without considering what it is they might actually be saying. And if we do not really understand our own words, how much more difficult is it for others to understand us?

That is not the end of the story though. “If thought corrupts language,” Orwell wrote in 1946, “language also corrupts thought.” To use another metaphor, if you want to become a professional accordionist, you cannot practice diligently every once in a while and muddle through the rest of the time. You must practice diligently every day. If you leave off practicing for, say, six months, when you return to the instrument, you will have to work twice as hard now to bring your skills back up to snuff.

So also language. When we allow ourselves to indulge in poor writing, we not only dull language’s usefulness in communicating with our fellow human beings; we dull our own ability to think critically and meaningfully about the concepts language expresses.

This insight was the basis of Newspeak in Orwell’s classic 1984. By trimming down English to a few hundred words and reducing complex notions to mere slogans, Big Brother used language itself to destroy people’s critical thinking skills and, thus, their capacity for resistance. By forbidding people from talking about things, the government forbade them, in a very real way, from thinking about them.

In this age of instant messaging especially, we have become our own Big Brother. Our digital conversations consist of monosyllables punched mindlessly into a cell phone keypad, if they consist of words at all. The fact of the matter is that critical analysis is not so easy when we confine ourselves to 140 characters. When even our politicians – people we expect to have thoughtful discussions, seeing as how they are running our country and all – begin to Tweet, we know something has gone drastically wrong.

By using muddy, unthoughtful language, we become muddy, unthoughtful thinkers. And when that happens, it becomes all too easy for others to use language to manipulate and dominate us. When we force ourselves to write well, on the other hand, we force ourselves to really think about what we want to say. We become not just better potential employees (although that we do become), but better citizens and better people as well.

Less Debate, More Dialogue

(Another article I wrote for the campus newspaper at the University of South Dakota, the Volante.)

Election Day 2010 has come and gone, and South Dakota has dispatched a new congressperson to aid in the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives. Regular readers might be able to guess my feelings about the election results. However, this is not a screed about how Republican rule will destroy America. Truth be told, the changeover in the House will not greatly affect politics in this country. Government will not all of a sudden become more efficient or less corrupt. Problems like poverty and war will not miraculously vanish. And our leaders will still bitch at each other instead of finding real solutions to our problems.

For proof of this, look no further than our very own campus. A week before the election, the Political Science League held its annual party debate. Neither the College Republicans nor College Democrats offered any novel answers to problems such as education and health care. Instead, they mostly spent their time regurgitating party slogans and attacking each other. If these are the leaders of tomorrow, I see little reason to believe that a transient alteration in the makeup of the House is going to change anything.

It doesn’t have to be like this though. Author and peace activist Louise Diamond draws a marked contrast between debate and dialogue as two different modes of communication. When we debate, she explains, we focus on positions, which are usually mutually exclusive. When we dialogue, however, we peel away the vituperative veneer of opinion to focus on the needs and concerns, the hopes and the fears that underlie our politics. The former is adversarial and antagonistic, whereas the latter is respectful and constructive.

Being something of an amateur linguist, I decided to look into the roots of these two words, to check if Ms. Diamond's distinction was appropriate on etymological as well as conceptual grounds. It turns out the word debate originally comes from the Old French verb debatre, which means "to beat, to batter". Dialogue, on the other hand, derives from the Greek dialogos, which consists of the Greek dyo "two" and logos, familiar to any Biblical scholar as "word" but here meaning "speech, discourse".

That makes sense. Instead of coming together to talk, to engage in a productive dialogue, our leaders seem bent on battering one another into submission. If we take the word at face value, there is no such thing as a “healthy” debate.

As citizens and students, we are far from guiltless in perpetuating this culture of discord. How often do we embroil ourselves in a heated wall-to-wall on Facebook, knowing full well that neither party is going to budge? Therefore – as ever – any change in the government is going to have to start with us. When we discuss the latest news with our friends, or with our enemies for that matter, we must learn to be respectful of differing opinions. Reconciling deeply held opinions is not terribly important. Recognizing the needs that undergird those opinions is.

As I face the disheartening prospect of members of the Tea Party in Congress, however much I may disagree with them, I must recognize that they are not raving lunatics; they are real people with real concerns. Because I believe their policies to be misguided does not detract from the intensity of their passion and the reality of their fears. They are not acting out of spite. They are acting out of genuine concern for the well-being of themselves and their loved ones. They are afraid that their families, their religion, and their livelihoods are being threatened. They need to know that they have control over their own lives, just the same as I do.

Our task, not just in the political sphere but also in our everyday lives, is to find ways to address those needs and desires, shared by us all alike. What we need is dialogue, a conversation where the participants are more concerned about finding a solution than getting their way, where doing the right thing means more than being right. That means we have to start listening for what lies beneath the surface. Once we learn to do that, we may discover, much to our surprise, that we have more in common than we would ever have thought possible.

An Ode to the Ode to Joy

The Ode to Joy from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony has been played so often, in so many different guises, that we sometimes lose sight of how beautiful it is. Featured in countless films and television shows, rearranged for a thousand middle school concert bands, appropriated as the international anthem of the European Union, perhaps no other snatch of classical music has so deeply penetrated the consciousness of listeners the world over. The opening bars of Beethoven’s own Fifth Symphony are the only rival I can conceive for it, but even then I would give the crown to Ninth. Whereas that famous three-note phrase is laden with doom, the Ode to Joy is a, well, joyous expression of all that is good and noble in the human soul.

Maxim Gorky once related an anecdote about Vladimir Lenin:

“I know of nothing better than the Appassionata and could listen to it every day… But I can’t listen to music very often, it affects my nerves. I want to say sweet, silly things and pat the heads of people who, living in a filthy hell, can create such beauty. One can’t pat anyone on the head nowadays, they might bite your hand off. They ought to be beaten on the head, beaten mercilessly…”

Lenin could choose not to listen; he could choose not to let the attraction continue beyond the final bars. But while that music lasted, he was constrained, by the laws of his humanity, to face up to the essential beauty at the heart of humankind. So am I constrained by the laws of my humanity when I hear the Ninth. I listen to the fourth movement, about five minutes in, as the orchestra takes off into the development after the first major statement of the Ode to Joy. As the strings strain up, I am, without fail, reduced to tears. I have no more choice in the matter than does a rubber ball to feel the gravitational pull of the Earth below it.

A Critique of Western Civilization

Below the bluffs,
across the street
from the white-washed condominiums

A crumpled McDonald's cup,
slick industrial polypropylene
beside a tire-flattened Tallboy,
Keystone Light

Popping off the plastic top
reveals a Lifestyles condom--
expended,
expendable

Across the highway,
across the spine of railroad-tracks,
vanish into black walnut
and golden corn.

September 2010

Migration

Driving north on I-29

the telephone poles recede out of sight,

marching to vanishing point,

infantrymen in a ninth-grade perspective study

Waves of wheat stain orange-gold

beneath a pink-plumed sky

shortly after the Equinox

Franck’s Sonata in A,

pound out racing passages,

fly up under the wings of geese. South-flying,

they cartwheel to straining strings,

barrel-rolling

past the recapitulation into the coda,

south for the winter.

September 2010

Updating Obsolescence

(A column I wrote for the school newspaper at the University of South Dakota, the Volante. You can read the original at the Volante's website here.)

Upon returning to USD for the fall, I discovered that the library had purchased all-new computers for the Academic Commons. My first thought was, “Ooh, shiny!” However, as I began to use these new computers – my first encounter with Windows 7 – I began to have other thoughts, specifically, “How the hell do I draw a table?”

Once again, Microsoft had rearranged the toolbars for the new edition of Word, along with a myriad of other “improvements.” They did not reinvent the wheel entirely, of course. They left it in a shape familiar enough that I could still use it, but not so familiar that I could accomplish my goal without a lot of needless confusion and frustration.

This is a great example of planned obsolescence, an idea pioneered by General Motors during the 1930s. GM discovered that if they released new models every year, instead of waiting five or ten years until they had actually made substantial improvements to automotive design, they could make a lot more money. GM made so much money, in fact, that other car companies got on the planned obsolescence bandwagon, followed by the rest of the manufacturing community.

Today, planned obsolescence is an integral part of our consumer culture, from the cars we drive to the computers with which we design them. Obstinate as I am, I continue to use Microsoft Office 2003 on my laptop. However, laptop is also pre-programmed to download the latest Microsoft auto-updates, updates designed for the latest versions of program. It is at this point that the computer gets confused: “Wha-wha-what? What is this ancient software doing here? Does not compute!”

In the titanic struggle that ensues, more than one computer has been laid low (e.g., mine). In effect, you have to upgrade in order to continue using Windows, whether you (or your computer) like it or not. Obsolescence is not merely planned; it is forced.

In the JFK assassination of planned obsolescence, however, Microsoft is far from a lone gunman. For example, my iPod recently decided to go haywire on me. This would not bother me so much – sometimes technology just malfunctions, after all – if it weren’t for the fact that I bought the thing two months ago, in order to replace my last iPod, which was itself a replacement for another failed piece of hardware.

One would think that, given the technological wizards employed there (and the prices we are expected to pay for their creations), Apple could make mp3 players that function for longer than half a year. Then again, if Apple will have a new, more expensive iPhone ready to sell next quarter, why would they want the product they release today to last any longer than that?

Another, well, textbook example of the inanity of planned obsolescence is the college textbook. How much do I really gain when I have to spend a hundred dollars on the eighth edition of a research methods textbook, when the seventh edition is identical in almost every way and costs ten dollars? I have aced more than one course, all the while using the earlier, inferior, and vastly less expensive version of the book.

My complaint is with no one company, nor with any one industry. My complaint is with the culture of consumerism that undergirds the release, every two years, of yet another “upgrade” to a perfectly serviceable system. The examples above, all too familiar to the modern student, beg the question: how much is that revised introduction worth, anyway?

It makes more sense to me to wait five or ten years, until most of us have figured out how to use the wheel in the first place, until manufacturers have had time to work out the kinks and actually make meaningful, useful adjustments, before we go about reinventing it. It’s less wasteful of time, talent, and resources, not to mention less frustrating for you and me.

Then again, that’s not the point. The point is to get us, as consumers, to consume more. And consume we do indeed, as people are forever drawn by the allure of the new. It matters little whether anything is actually better than before. It’s newer; therefore, it must be better. For my part, I’m happy with Microsoft Office 2003.

Checkmate

The rook,
last soldier standing in an interminable chess match
between Neo-Confucian bureaucrats
The mandarin leans in,
runs a thoughtful hand through his beard
Liquid Eastern eyes survey the battlefield
and with fingers like skittering spider-legs
he makes his move
Checkmate!

Clunk.

Fast-forward
to a late September 4th of July--
we got rained out this year, we had to reschedule--

Pile into a blue Ford pickup from 1984,
baby backpacks and yellow Labradors
and head for the hills

Winding up through a fireworks display,
shower of autumnal sparks,
multicolored spurs in a game of
psychedelic jacks,
through the Roman candles and Catherine-wheels
to see him
See him standing there,
out of time and out of space:
a castle in its corner in a medieval game,
a north woods Steely Dan allusion
or an oblique Wild West reference
to Le Morte d'Arthur

The Labrador shakes himself,
muscular trunk rippling,
water-droplets flying
He's been entertaining himself
in a spring nearby
while the rest of the pack ascends
the spiral staircase and gazes
out through the looking-glass
onto a wide green country.

September 2010

Phonebanking

I recently received an email from the Young Democrats at my university, enjoining members of the group to come out tomorrow night and help make campaign phone calls to other South Dakotans.

I do not, in principle, have a problem with this. I'm all in favor of getting out the vote and raising civic awareness, although sometimes I do wonder whether, instead of asking people to vote for their candidate, campaigners ought maybe to spend their time helping people and, y'know, giving people a reason to vote for their candidate instead.

What bothered me about this email was the following sentence: "Scripts will be provided so do not worry about not knowing enough about the candidates."

If you're going to make phone calls for a candidate, it seems to me you ought to know enough about that candidate to explain your support to someone else in words that aren't, "Well, she's a Democrat." (You can replace that with "Republican", "Libertarian", or whatever other party identification you like. The song remains the same.)

Old Black Lightning

Old Black Lightning, where are you a-going now,
feeling yourself to be a lion?
Hey now Old Man, Mane of Midnight!
Why be you a-roaring now?

There are tubers in this place,
succulent gourds, teardrops to
keep us from the heat of the day,
shimmering like a translucent curtain
of sandy glass

But in that great old voice of yours
you call upon the spirit of Lion-that-is
and Lion-that-has-ever-been
and Lion-that-will-ever-be,
their plenipotentiary, in thundering embassy

In that great old voice you impart to me
there is game nearby,
eland and honey-dewed desert antelope
Feeling yourself utterly to be a lion,
you let me know that Life is near.

September 2010

The sky is a linen bedsheet

The sky is a linen bedsheet
It was new once, crisp and white,
but now greying, fading
from excessive agitation,
rumpled on a bed hastily made up--
Jesus, is that the time?
My professor is going to kill me!--
wrinkles pregnant with precipitation
The air is full of that selfsame smell
that detergent manufacturers try so
hard to reproduce
with names like Clean Breeze
and Renewing Rain
But no compound concocted
in a laboratory in New Jersey could
compete with that bouquet,
fragrant with rain
and je ne sais quoi,
as if all the life in the world were,
at that precise moment,
being born again.

September 2010

The Emperor of Glenn County Takes a Bride

Paper lanterns and candy-canes

enwrapped in lightning bugs

An oriental sky in pinks and powder blues

presides over four hundred waiters

They cross the square in synchronized formation,

pirouetting like porpoises

diving through a sea of floral-print brocade and white linen,

claret and Chardonnay bubbling in their fish-tale wakes

The Son of Heaven descends from the pavilion

with his empress, newly-minted

The waves perform the three obeisances

and nine kowtows

as wine-white carbonation effervesces skyward.

August 2010

The Sack of Rome

Deep sienna pillars

marbled, mottled, polished smooth

uphold a vault of translucent green jade

Aisles dappled with green gold,

vault so high the moon glides between the eaves

on his way to morning

But,

like so many temples,

built on the blackened foundations

of a shrine more ancient still

Idols of the old religion ground down,

mortar and pestle,

and mixed into the glaze of a newly-fired pot

Here and there,

in places,

the architect declined

to clear away the detritus of iconoclasm—

mismatched cornices of ancient colonnades

incorporated into the overall edifice

The bases don’t quite fit,

Running mortar applied much too liberally,

setting in tendrils trailing

to the floor

But seeming haphazardness

belies a blueprint more meticulous.

August 2010

A Planxty

Above the shifting tendrils of white noise

that fill the valley like wisps of mist

that linger of an autumn morning,

there is a place

where terraces of granite and of concrete run back

in jumbled, geometric patterns

into the wooded defile

There, where the stone steps become

lost amongst the trees,

set apart from his compatriots

a stone stands newly-fashioned,

emblazoned with the interwoven insignia

of the people from across the sea,

my own people

And below, two names.

His breathes still, open-ended

like a poem unfinished

Hers does not, book closed by a

hyphen between two dates

Two chocolate Labradors pelt,

pell-mell,

through the gaps between the trees in a forest of firs

The first passes through without remark

and streaks forward,

tongue wagging,

tail wagging too

A moment elapses

before the first dog recognizes his companion

has not followed

He turns and gazes into the foliage

in the sad-eyed confusion

of which only a dog is capable

The look in those liquid brown eyes

is the sound his heart makes

knowing that his hand must conjoin those two dates

because hers cannot.

August 2010

The Laundry Line

Once there was on old woman who lived in a little village in the mountains. She was not wealthy, but neither was she entirely destitute. Her most cherished possession was the wedding tunic of her husband, who had passed away some years previously. He had come originally from Lebanon,and his wedding tunic was an inheritance from his grandfather. It was of the finest green silk that had found its way to Lebanon along the Silk Road, embroidered in gold thread and red rubies that flashed in the sun. Amongst her humble possessions, it was easily the most valuable, and certainly the one she treasured most of all.

Now, her husband being dead, the old woman had little enough reason to bring the tunic out, except sometimes to look at it and think back to younger, and in many ways happier, days. But it just so happened that her youngest son had recently taken a bride, and she had insisted that he wear his father's wedding garment for the ceremony. This he did, and after the wedding he returned it to his mother, who had tears in her eyes - for her son was the very image ofhis father.

When she returned to her village, straightaway the old woman went out into her garden to clean the garment in the old wooden washtub that sat in the shade beside her cottage. She washed it with the utmost care, and when she had finished, hung it out to dry on the line she had strung between her gutter and the sycamore that grew facing the lane that passed by. Then she went inside to take her afternoon nap.

Traffic in the lane was never congested, and this afternoon only three people passed by the old woman's house. The first,a young man with dark hair, saw the green silk flashing like the leaves of the sycamore as he passed by, and he felt a sudden desire to have that lovely tunic for himself. Scanning the lane, he saw that no one was about – the old woman was sleeping, and the street was deserted. If he wanted, all he had to do was lean over the garden wall, and there would be no witnesses...

All of a sudden he caught himself."No," he said to himself, "that would be wicked of me. I don't know who lives here, but if it were me, I certainly wouldn't want anybody to steal from me. I should only do to others as I would have them do tome, as the Bible says." And he went on her way, smiling that he had overcome temptation.

Next came another young man, this one with fair hair. He saw the gold embroidery, shining like so many gold coins,and felt a sudden desire to have that lovely tunic for himself. Scanning the lane, he saw that no one was about – the old woman was still asleep, and the dark-haired young man had already turned out of the street. If he wanted, all he had to do was lean over the garden wall, and there would be no witnesses...

All of a sudden he caught himself. "No," he said to himself, "nobody would leave such a valuable object hanging there unattended. There must be some sort of trick; the owner is probably watching from the windows, to call the police the minute I take it off the line." And he went on his way, wiping his brow that he had escaped from the trap.

Finally there came a young woman carrying her own laundry. She saw the red gems, flashing like fire in the sun, but she felt no desire to have the tunic for herself, it being a man's garment. She scanned the lane and saw that no one was about – the old woman was still asleep, and the light-haired young man had already turned out of the street. Then she put her hands on her hips in indignant surprise.

"Doesn't the owner of this tunic know that just anyone could come along and steal it?" she said to herself. "This is a wicked world, full of wicked people. One shouldn't be so careless! Whoever's tunic this is, I think I'll teach him a lesson in caution..."And with that she leaned over the garden wall, removed the tunic from the line, and wrapped it surreptitiously in her own laundry. "I will return it in a few days, after the owner has had time to reflect on his foolishness." and went on her way.

The young woman had no sooner returned to her own cottage and set her washing down on the table that than she heard a knock on the door. Answering it, she found herself face-to-face with the old woman.

"Can I help you, grandmother?" the young woman asked.

"I believe you have taken something that belongs to me," her elderly counterpart said. Her voice was firm, but not angry.

Caught in the act, the young woman replied in a level voice, "I don't know what you could be talking about, grandmother." But she threw a nervous glance toward the pile of clothes on the table. Following her gaze, the old woman (who was not, of course, actually the girl's grandmother, but who she called that on account of respect for her age) did not wait for another word, but strode into the cottage and retrieved her husband's tunic from its hiding place.

"That belongs to you?" the girl asked in surprise, for it was after all a man's garment.

"It belonged to my husband," the widow answered matter-of-factly. "And you stole it from me."

The youth blushed at her neighbor's use of the past tense "belonged". "Alright, maybe I did," she said defensively, "but it was only to teach you a lesson! I was going to return it in a couple of days. You shouldn't leave valuable things like that sitting out where just anybody could up and walk away with them! This is a wicked world, full of wicked people – you, of all people, should know that by now!"

The old woman did not answer immediately, but fixed the girl with a penetrating glance. When she spoke, her voice was once again forceful, but without anger. "Perhaps," she said coolly, "if people were less concerned about teaching other people lessons and more concerned with doing the right thing, there would be less wickedness in the world." And with that she took her husband's tunic and exited the cottage without another word, leaving the young woman standing puzzled and ashamed in her wake.

The Chinese Model

In a recent speech to Young Americans for Freedom, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich asked rhetorically, "Do you want to create jobs as rapidly as China? The Chinese pay zero capital gains tax. If we had zero capital gains tax in the United States, we'd be building factories, founding companies, creating jobs, we'd be dramatically better off."

I believe we should emulate the Chinese model more extensively: let's have millions of Americans work in sweatshop conditions, pay them wages far below the poverty line, refuse to allow them to unionize, pack them into dormitories that make the Projects look like the Upper East Side, and cause anybody who objects, quietly to "disappear." After all, when you're earning 30 cents an hour, you won't have many capital gains to report anyway, so you might as well get rid of the tax.

There are two kinds of music: good music and bad music. And then there's Death Cab for Cutie...

Good art, it is said, elicits a powerful response from the observer. However, the converse need not necessarily be true: that something which elicits a powerful response qualifies as good art. After all, my response to rap music is quite powerful - powerfully negative. I can tolerate it in small doses, but tolerate is all the ground I'm willing to cede on the subject; I would never call it "good art". I'm not one of those who holds that rap isn't art at all - it is, in its way. I don't like it, but I am forced to admit that, at the most basic level, it is as valid as is the music to which I listen. I'm sure a hip-hop aficionado would find the Divine Comedy (to name a band of which I am especially fond at the moment) as objectionable as I find rap.

But at least I can pinpoint, with a tolerable degree of accuracy, what it is I don’t like about rap. And I can guess, again with a tolerable degree of accuracy, what fans find so attractive about it. I don’t agree, but at least I get it. And I get why they don't like the music I like.

What really irritates me is boring music. Watching them perform on a rerun of the Daily Show this evening, the example that leaps to mind is the Arcade Fire. Here is a band that is not in any particular way obnoxious. On the hand, they're not in any particular way memorable either. I wouldn't necessarily object to listening to THE SUBURBS; but at the other end of that hour, it makes no impression. I come out feeling, well, nothing really. It doesn't move me at all, even in the negative sense of having provided the necessary contrast to the music I enjoy. I can't find anything to actively dislike, but I cannot fathom why anybody would love this band. And then friends talk about the Arcade Fire as if they were the greatest thing to happen to rock music since the Beatles, and my only response is, "Huh?"

Another example is Death Cab for Cutie. I'll Follow You into the Dark excepted, I cannot call to mind a single Death Cab song, despite multiple listens. I want to get it, I really do. And after having given the band numerous chances to impress me, to figure out what people like about them so much, it all - just - sounds - the same! To hear my friends rave about a band and to fail completely to hear the attraction is, in its way, far more frustrating than to hear the attraction and to reject it. As Warren Zevon once put it, "I'd rather feel bad than not feel anything at all."

Rackham Limbs

When in Egypt new mountains rose above the sands of Memphis,

You lifted your head above the playa

At Abu Simbel god-men sat in silence,

Hands on knees like the Lushan Buddha

You crouched here, bent against the onslaught

Of a mountain thunderstorm

Did you learn the trick from Katschei,

To gain the world and lose your soul?

Is your heart locked in a babushka doll somewhere?

Or do Rackham limbs conceal still

The pulse of life?

August 2010

Western Polyptych

I. Weeping wall

Tearstain on a western hillside,

the carbonized imprint

of a Jurassic willow.

II. Outside Salt Lake City

Riddled with holes,

some towering red Swiss cheese

with little patches of scrubby mold here and there

Give me a knife to scrape the sky

and I’ll carve you off a slice.

III. Distant lakes

Rorschach lakes crawl

across stone sky-fields

like shadows on the surface of the moon.

IV. Lichen at High Altitude

Undifferentiated grey mass resolves itself

into rectangles, rhomboids,

a hundred million polygonal forms

all hard-edged and grainy-faced

Green patch in a sea of slate,

oasis opening onto infinity,

waving semaphore arms

Is there anybody out there?

V. The world is quiet here

The world is quiet here

Clouds so close you can snatch

handfuls of candy floss

and devour them greedily,

a famished Ming soldier on the Long Wall

The world is quiet here,

save the buzzing of a persistent fly

What brings him to this place?—

errands from worlds below

or an accidental updraft,

vaulted into the dome of heaven.

VI. Heathaze

A black river with green banks

bisects a sea of white salt

Heathaze holds up the promise of sanctuary,

vanishes like a dream half-remembered

and then forgotten

in the space between sleeping and waking.

VII. Iris

Blue pupil amidst a green iris

Granitic carunculae

A million points of light coalesce into

one twinkle in your eye,

shining at the prospect of a bath

or something less savory.

VIII. Condemned (Sutter Buttes)

Subterranean wrecking ball

razes to the foundations

Icelandic turf house in the blazing heat

The mind can fill in the missing lines,

bay windows and high gables

Now just two bony jaws,

open just wide enough

to swallow the sun.

August 2010

Buzzard's Roost

Castellated cliff-face,
limestone battlement
The rocks climb up to the ramparts,
piling on top of one another
as if to dare the next in line:
Jump! Jump!
Then finally they plunge away,
five hundred feet at a leap

From here everything
falls away in green gulches
and pine-tree precipices
and spires of stone
I wave to the nearest tower,
greetings to the eagle! He keeps watch there
His amber eye misses nothing—
quintessential watchman,
suited by nature to his sentinel-station

Smoke tendrils like lazy grey ribbons
from the lodge in the valley below
At this height the vapors dissipate,
cartwheeling on a thousand zephyrs
Zeus and Aeolus
keep company in this place

Where two kingdoms meet
I look down from the top of the world,
Or what seems like it at least—
for I can see in the distance
heights even higher than these.

August 2010

Elegy for Mr. Adams

North woods obelisk,

red weather-scars weeping blood

The name has washed away from your pedestal—

Julius? Frank? The characters aren’t clear,

half-discernable forms of laurel-leaves

etchings in stone

meant to last forever

Were you a man of distinction,

a personality to be put on by a high-school drama student

for the historical society’s Christmas play?

Or did you find your way to Potter’s Field

or even far Peking?

Did your children come this way

and lay roses on your grave?

The woods will honor you

bachelor’s buttons and cinquefoils

amidst the colonnades

August 2010

White Rocks

Three teeth in a grandmother’s mouth

yawning skywards

First molar, flat-topped,

amalgamated fillings—

a patina of pine-needles,

stained here and there with traces

of manganese oxide

Second bicuspid, massy, white,

undercut, the work

of a giant’s tablespoon

Scrawny firs cling tenaciously in the fissures,

root-arms wrapped tight

like a sea-snail adheres to the coast

when a diver comes questing

for its iridescent shell

Lateral incisor,

jagged to crack the sky

a natural turret

And here, smeared

orange with lichen,

foundations of a tower from long ago

August 2010

Orpheus & Eurydice

Oppressive heat

Airless underground

Belabored grunting and the suffocated exhalations of earth,

the twitter of a distant finch,

accompany your progress

Shoomp—clink—shoomp!

The piston enters the solid rock

Slide in the charge

Two, four, six

trinitrotoluene

and stand back—

Now,

Tears pool at the corners of your eyes,

oppressive air rushing past

a mosquito in a windstorm

A distant square of white

growing all the time bigger,

ever faster, ever nearer

Brace yourself—

Overtop the shaft

and roar into the sunlight

Orpheus escaping from the bowels of Hades,

but Eurydice didn’t get left behind this time.

July 2010

CBQ

Child of Bessemer and Fulton,
a dynamo of mechanical volition
With coal-smeared hands you bore
the bones of the earth
from the grave to the crematorium,
to search for a yellow glint amongst the ashes

A shady shelf along a trail
discovered on a summer’s afternoon
Walked for years this way
but only now do the pine-wood bones emerge from the underbrush of
a path trodden ten hundred times
You took on water here
and men in brown breeches and scally-caps
fed you like a king

A log on the stone and a pipe, ruddy iron,
a dull metallic glint amongst the gravel:
your sole survivors,
the only reminders of how,
once,
you were king

Where now the distant steam-blast
And the clink-clank, clink-clank,
a chugging Chicago blues combo?
Ozymandias, where are you now?

July 2010

Peace Linguistics

An interesting linguistic note I noticed recently while reading The Peace Book by Louise Diamond. Referring to civility (or the lack thereof) in public discourse, Ms. Diamond draws a contrast between debate and dialogue as two different modes of communication: the former adversarial and antagonistic, the latter respectful and constructive.

I understood the difference intuitively. But writers - especially in the peace movement, or do I just notice it more as a member of that movement? - can sometimes make somewhat arbitrary distinctions about certain words. So, being something of an amateur linguist, I decided to check into the etymology of the two words, to check if Ms. Diamond's vocabulary was appropriate.

It turns out the debate originally comes from the Old French verb debatre, which means "to beat, to batter". Dialogue, on the other hand, derives from the Greek dialogos, which consists of the Greek dyo "two" and logos, familiar to any Biblical scholar as "word" but here meaning "speech, discourse".

That's appropriate, especially given that our public discourse in this country – hell, in every country – is not usually referred to as political dialogue but, you guessed it, political debate. They say there’s nothing wrong with a little healthy debate; but if we take the word debate at face value – as do most of our public figures, seemingly – there’s nothing particularly healthy about it at all. Instead of coming together to talk, to engage in a constructive dialogue, our leaders seem bent on battering one another into submission. What we need is dialogue, a real conversation where the participants are more concerned about finding a solution than getting their way, where doing the right the thing means more than being right.

Maybe high schools should have speech and dialogue teams instead...

Pas de deux

A plains thunderstorm breaks over the hills.
Rainwater quenches bones of stone
Spattering at first
Then trickling
Then tumbling in torrents.
As David lay hidden in the marble
So this streambed lay hidden in the earth,
Awaiting rain’s purifying rush
To hew it from the living rock.
First the water rushes frantically over the ground
Splashing in puddles and seeping into pore space.
But with time the elements themselves will learn the lovers’ dance.

* * *

In the valley,
Redolent of pine-resin and birch-bark,
Swift stream caresses smooth stone.
Nature’s alliteration bubbling in rivulets,
Wild cascade somersaults
Pry loose a pebble here,
Shear away a shallow bank there—
But it’s all in the dance.

But as the water works loose the stone
So also the streambed breaks the flow.
Catapulting over rapids,
Eddies like Persian dervishes,
Leaping on wings of foam.
Spray exploding in air—
But it’s all in the dance.

The stream is pressed close now.
Feel the heartbeat of the water,
The gentle breathing of the earth.

With ore-riven organs and draconian drums,
Eight Skilled Gentlemen could make no finer water-music—
Monotonous at first
But on further inspection a symphony of light and shade.

Sunlight’s bold unison reaches its crescendo
And bursts in a thousand glittering trills,
Laughing over rapids and rills,
Coursing down the hills it goes,
Tripping head over heels for joy,
And pebbles follow after—

Chaotic? Perhaps.
But they are in step,
The water and the earth,
Acting out the figures they have learned through long acquaintance
In a lovers’ dance delirious.

July 2010

The Franz List

My Top 10 Men Named Franz:

1. Franz Liszt (composer, 1811-1886)

2. Franz Schubert (composer, 1797-1828)

3. Franz Kafka (author, 1883-1924)

4. Franz Josef Haydn (1732-1809)

5. Franz Josef I (Emperor of Austria-Hungary, 1830-1916)

6. Franz Ferdinand (U.K. rock band, 2002-present)

7. Franz Ferdinand (Archduke of Austria, 1863-1914)

8. Frantz Fanon (Algerian revolutionary, 1925-1961)

9. Franz (brother of Hans, 1988-present)

10. Franz Boas (anthropologist, 1858-1942)