on being, becoming, and overdoing it

 

i'm chagrined. it's not the first time. i talked about myself way too much, telling many things i'd never told anyone. now, of course, i'm embarrassed. being old, you should be wise, exclaimed one of king lear's nasty daughters. alas, it really doesn't seem to work that way. i know better than to reveal the soul and overwhelm a listener with personal details. who wants to hear them, really?as they say, i forgot myself, even while elucidating an autobiography. of course, i know the truth can never be told. any honesty about ourselves a distortion. 

i guess that's a good example of overdoing it. the source, to impress, the explosion of latent ambition. along with most people, i believe i can become somebody. fat chance. the most i can do is amplify what i've been given, broadcast it as though something totally new in the world. can i really be a creative person without feeling i'm a god? after all, poetry the short-hand of heaven, love and death on the same plane, a cryptic translation of a canonical text, a successful reduction of our dualistic language to the one-celled creature we once were, swimming in the brine. 

actually, i need to celebrate my tutor from college who recently died, jack gilbert. here are a couple of articles:

http://articles.latimes.com/2012/nov/12/entertainment/la-et-jc-jack-gilbert-20121112

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/nov/20/jack-gilbert

he certainly was stubborn, in a good and inspiring way, i think. 

and that brings me back to being. i discovered the other day, feeling like i could just sit still and soak up nature for the rest of my life, basically doing nothing,  i felt like a fully-grown man, a most unusual state-of-being! unfortunately, it didn't last. my nervous energy asserted itself, the searcher, the explorer, the person who's always believed he'd find the truth of existence somewhere, in a movie, a book, a guru, the bad cat of ambition bristling. 

okay, i have had a realization. a life without romance a dead, meaningless one. going thru old love letters, i understood those encounters enlivened me, brought out the spontaneous and foolish child, who enjoyed being totally ridiculous and off the wall, emotionally over the top, blinded by the glitter and sweep of goddesses. settling down cost me my vision, my willingness to be uncomfortable. no wonder i could throw out a truck-load of diaries kept in this town. 

as everyone knows, circulation, of all kinds, the key to a vibrant existence, and nothing sends the blood pumping like the wonderful illusion of love. not true love, certainly, where you encourage the best in a mate, rather an attempt at ecstasy, doomed to fail and be revived with someone else who seems descended from olympus, until i see the human being (disappointed) inside. since the soul-mate may never arrive, at least i've suffered the touch of magic,  to feel i've lived and have the will to go on, to try again, even though the odds of the house are all on its side. 

Searching For Pittsburgh

The fox pushes softly, blindly through me at night,
between the liver and the stomach. Comes to the heart
and hesitates. Considers and then goes around it.
Trying to escape the mildness of our violent world.
Goes deeper, searching for what remains of Pittsburgh
in me. The rusting mills sprawled gigantically
along three rivers. The authority of them.
The gritty alleys where we played every evening were
stained pink by the inferno always surging in the sky,
as though Christ and the Father were still fashioning the Earth.
Locomotives driving through the cold rain,
lordly and bestial in their strength. Massive water
flowing morning and night throughout a city
girded with ninety bridges. Sumptuous-shouldered,
sleek-thighed, obstinate and majestic, unquenchable.
All grip and flood, mighty sucking and deep-rooted grace.
A city of brick and tired wood. Ox and sovereign spirit.
Primitive Pittsburgh. Winter month after month telling
of death. The beauty forcing us as much as harshness.
Our spirits forged in that wilderness, our minds forged
by the heart. Making together a consequence of America.
The fox watched me build my Pittsburgh again and again.
In Paris afternoons on Buttes-Chaumont. On Greek islands
with their fields of stone. In beds with women, sometimes,
amid their gentleness. Now the fox will live in our ruined
house. My tomatoes grow ripe among weeds and the sound
of water. In this happy place my serious heart has made.

Jack Gilbert

flowers: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/vovflower

and more flowers: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/iris

a few miniutes of enlightenment are okay, but do you really want to miss everything else?

i live by epiphanies, brief vacations in nirvana, everything absolutely clear: what i want to do, be, and the world very vivid. an example might be driving down a highway in france, my girlfriend at the wheel, she's taking allergy pills and easily becomes unfocused. for a fraction of a second, she skims the grass on the shoulder of the road and overcompensates, spinning us out of control. all time slows down, i'm very firmly saying, 'steer into the skid, steer into the skid.' we come to a stop in the middle of the road and people peek out of their houses to see if we're dead.

yes, it's moments like that, moments in war, moments in love, moments in the middle of an examination by the angel gabriel when you're trying to wangle your way into heaven after a dissolute life. absolute clarity exists, and since i've been reborn, i could read the bible for whatever religion i've discovered for the rest of my life. and every time i turn the insight down. i don't really want an answer for everything, yet i will make decisions based on such moments. 

one time at lake tahoe, the powers that be decided i need to move to a lookout on the north shore. i resisted inwardly. i liked where i was at angora, south shore, where i sat above alpine lake and looked up into desolation wilderness, my kind of place. concurrently, i read the tarot cards in those days. and looking for a sign, i visited the new location, nobody around. in the garage, over a desk used by the fire crew, someone had pinned up the fool from the tarot deck. i took it as a sign to take a chance and make the move. and no, i never regretted it, sad to leave four years later for my present post. 

this is an insane way to live. what about a career, certainty, saving the money to buy a plot in the chico cemetery? i'm defenseless, unable to make a fortress of my possessions: house, family, children. a mystical existence, of sorts, or an uncanny careless one. approaching the infirmities of old age, i still won't make a decision without seeing a sign. today i reached my deadline: everything i own capable of being loaded on one half-ton pickup. true, the passenger seat wouldn't have room for a companion. so be it, i'll swerve down the highway alone. 

and perhaps that's been my attachment to the novel doctor zhivago and the poems at the end. the hero constantly veers this way and that across the wild ocean of life by a turn of the wheel. in fact, i think he has a poem called 'epiphany'. it does refer to something in christianity which i've totally blanked out. on the other hand, the everyday definition will suffice. 

                                The streetlights are like butterflies of gas.
                                The morning has flicked us with it's first chill. 
                                That which I am telling you is so much like
                                The far-off vistas now plunged in sleep. 

                                 You and I are in the grasp
                                 Of precisely that timid devotion to a mystery
                                 Which holds St. Petersburg, spread like 
                                                      a panorama
                                 Beyond the unecompassable Neva. 


maybe that's why i can't focus on anything but taking photographs. on the way back from my last book trip to berkeley, i swung off the interstate into a town called maxwell, ironically my father's middle name and where he pastorized the little methodist church, me one-year-old. a grainy photo showed me standing up in a baby-carriage with a strange house behind, two stories, a screened in porch above and below. i wandered around snapping pics. everybody i heard spoke spanish and the catholic church of a monumental size. alas, the protestants must have given up, and i was about to, when i turned a corner. another church. ah, methodist, and beside it the parsonage i knew pictured in the photo seventy-two years ago. EPIPHANY!

MAXWELL: www.pbase.com/wwp/maxwell1  

when i see a homeless person, i'm terrified

no, i don't live in a war zone. at least, it isn't yet. basically, i'm a haunted man, expecting lightning to strike me out of a cloud, sleeping with earplugs, and breathing shallowly the whole day. needless to say, i can fake being relaxed and have managed to do so most of my life, yet i'll break into a sweat if half a dozen people crowd into my lookout, or i'm confronted by a trying situation, soaked to my shoes. 

what i fear is not the object of my displeasure, it's being cast out into the street myself. for example, i realized a woman to pounce on my empty room the minute i vacate in may, maybe the best one i've had: quiet, glass door as a private entrance, lots of hawks, cats, and squirrels in the trees rising high into the sky. in fact, it's been perfect for downloading myself. by that i mean, throwing notebooks and photo-disks into the dumpster, for examining hundreds of letters received before 2000, when everybody stopped writing them. yes, a handwritten letter basically a confession, and no one wants to confess on the internet, big brother scanning the airways. 

i must admit, this terror motivated me today. i washed my truck and had it checked out at the garage - tomorrow i drive the last nine boxes of books to berkeley, totaling 130. you read right, one hundred and thirty, which only happened to accumulate by their invisibility. fortuitously, my friend has opened a new used bookstore. last trip i visited my books beautifully lined up in a most charming place. alas, the walk-ins want philosophy, history, and poetry, all the erotica has to be hidden from the offended intellectuals  in the back room. only in the home of the atom bomb could such a things be. "The presence  of death concentrates the mind wonderfully." 

and as for the stuff going into the trash, i scanned photos and documents for a week, not everything by any means. finally  i landed in a hard-nosed mood and out went six boxes of disks. i kept hoping i'd come up with a plan for the sixteen boxes of diaries and notebooks, knowing full well my heirs would toss the good with the bad. two days ago, i entered that nirvana of shamelessness and ten boxes - 125 spiralbounders - vanished into the green-dyed  monster of the scavengers.  what was my rule of thumb? many seemed boring to me, or too revealing of my continuing adolescent emotions, a record without humor or style, stuffed with pasted memorabilia: theater tickets, programs, pictures of gorgeous women. 

                                                     my empty home today      

how do i feel today? well, a bit sad. still, a job well-done. i saved plenty and i do believe we should save the gold and throw out the tailing's. as i've said, i would be more than happy to have written the fragments of sapho, my discarded image pictured in metaphors for the masses to read two thousand years later. that has been my supreme failing: i desired to be a classic!


recovered poems, greece 1966:   http://www.pbase.com/wwp/voyages


california dreamer: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/caldream 

HAPPY VALENTINES DAY!!

www.pbase.com/wwp/valentine

not all fates are created equal

going through boxes of letters written and received in the past sixty years, i'm humbled, especially by letters from girlfriends. how young and confused we all seemed in 'youth'. i'm getting over viewing my own so negatively. actually, i find myself grateful for my parents. and i don't mean simply forgiving. no, very appreciative of the adventures, the lessons, and the care. true, i wanted more. i knew my father attached to my sister, my mother both the nurturer and disciplinarian, which made romantic relationships forever difficult. 

and the oedipus complex! good gravy, i'm finding freud right about so many things. i suspect revisionist discussions of him have more to do with being politically correct than real knowledge. yet, none of this seems to matter any more. it did sabotage the romances related in these letters. that said, being young and impatient and driven by sexual desire had more to do with it. 

as sappho said in my last communique:
   
                                  Don't prod 
                   
                                               the beach rubble

                                       if you're squeamish.

and now i feel it was foolish of me to search the web for what happened to guys and gals i've had the privilege of knowing. yes, i spent yesterday on the web, searching, picking up viruses and bad cookies along the way. at the moment i'm trying to clear the computer and my head.

i did find success stories: a couple of lawyers, a young actress who grew up into a very successful costumer on broadway with a huge shop. nobody should get married before thirty and my sagest advice: do everything you want to do in life before then. be a dancer, sail the world, ride a motorcycle to tierra del fuego. the rest will be a piece of cake, not undermined by unsatisfied desires. 

i did find two tragic deaths, and the second i'm still reeling from. their obituaries will follow. peter a tscherning i met on the island of rhodes, a classical scholar about twenty-two. the letter i have from several years later when he's back at harvard, hints at  his going through a terrible trauma. i have no idea what it was.  i mixed my own history up with his to created the main character in my only novel, visible, detailing the adventures in lindos, greece among the travelers. obviously his fate saddening, and a part of my own, having combined my story with his. 

the other far more shocking to me. i met amina agisheff on an icelandic flight from luxembourg to nyc, the cheap way to travel in those days. the plane took off. barely over the water, it had to dump its gasoline. the airline put us up for two days. amina, a fellow from seattle named randy, and i palled around, and in the end drove a dealer car to the northwest. i left them in seattle, though amina and i had become entangled. at the lookout, after several weeks, randy brought her down and drove off into the night. i realized it had become a triangle. 

i won't go into the rest of the story out of respect for the departed. obviously, from the article, she'd overcome a lot of wildness in her salad days to become a mother of two, and teacher, and eventually at thirty-five the victim of a serial killer. i've never experienced a death like this, even though it happened thirty years ago and seventeen after our last meeting. no, the longer you live the more you realize life is not fair. the only counter to this showed up on my daily zen calendar: 

                                 Life is painful, suffering is optional. 

don't burden the future with anything but fragments!

egad, either i do it for myself, or it will be done for me. on new year's day i told my friend susan, 'i'll just leave all this writing stuff for someone else to deal with.' with a sad, wry smile, she said, 'no one will want to.'  an epiphany!!!  i immediately realized the truth of her mona lisa look. i've seen too many people throw out the baby with the bathwater when a relative died. to quote lenny bruce once more, 'when you die, all your precious possessions become junk.' 

okay, i shifted into high gear. at my storage unit i tackled the copies of manuscripts collected over the past fifty years, tossing everything scanned (and probably throwing out a few tikes), box after box, until the back of my pickup literary loaded. they didn't fill the dumpster however. so much for a life's work. boy, nose to the grindstone, i wonder what i missed? certainly the life of a mainstream person, which i was terrified of falling into. 

ah, you say, what a shame to lose it all. alas, i haven't. i've fifteen boxes of spiral bound notebooks, for example, everything written by hand: diaries, scrapbooks, a million one-liners, original manuscripts, etc. i've given myself til april 1st to get this all in order, a fast document scanner arriving tomorrow. have no fear, i will boil it down to the diamond dust. 

one reason to leave your daughter one precious teapot and not a whole house of furniture and knick-knacks. this treasured bit of history may survive, and a diligent family historian like my niece dawn bryant may come up with what she wrote on facebook this morning: 

Dawn Pease Bryant recommends an article on CNN.

5 hours ago ·

• As a lover of history I think it is just SO COOL that they have found Richard III's remains under a parking lot!!! My 13th Great Grandfather, Robert "The Smythe" Pease, was born in 1485 just 125 miles from the site of this discovery - the same year King Richard was killed at the Battle of Bosworth Field and King Henry VII began the reign of the Tudors!!!

  
  

  
  

  Richard III: The mystery of the king and the car parking lot

  www.cnn.com
  

  Richard III is one of the most notorious kings of England, caricatured as a hunchbacked villain, but as experts prepare to reveal  

the irony, of course, every civilization kills off the last one, and the curious root in the rubble, trying to put it all back together. more power to them: fragments are more fun. i've read we're all pattern-makers, happiest with puzzles rather than definite answers. true, last week islamic fanatics burned an ancient library in timbuktu. i can't count the times i've mourned the loss of the library at alexandria (burned by christians). yet..yet, the other day i realized i wished i'd written the fragments of sappho, more than anything. 

                                       If you are squeamish

                                       Don't prod the 
                                      The beach rubble. 

                                                                                         *(see note below)


everybody grabs the photographs when the house catches fire. my sister not so lucky, my mother a family history fanatic, thousands of old documents and photographs lost. sad, you say. no, now dawn has to dig even deeper, coming up with remarkable facts from the past. may you do the same!

more photos posted. another vision of the eclipse last spring:

http://www.pbase.com/wwp/eclipsebw 

and these from a surviving box of pictures of a mysterious relative, esmeralda. i hope dawn eventually can piece her biography together:

  
                                                   http://www.pbase.com/wwp/esmer 

**and i suddenly realized: i did write my own sapphic shreds: 

http://www.pbase.com/wwp/aphrodite 

Happy New Year!