The Long Form [PLEASE PRINT]

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[MOST RECENT LOVER]

[REASON FOR LEAVING]

[FAVORITE POET]

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shake it up, baby

 

doc said I have essential tremors

I get that

who doesn't

I know, right

a little trembling is downright essential now and then

you got that right

especially in this day and age

it's the dawn of another age

or another rage

for real

maybe an earthquake is the planet's essential tremors

letting off seismic steam

try a little tenderness

is it contagious

ain't no cure for love

Love Potion Number 9

keep searching

my teeth chatter

who could blame them

the words they've uttered

makes me judder

in my own skin

my nervous envelope

as Proust said

remembering things past

and present

 

Overwrite Overpass

haven't we been here before
before when
you know, back in December
westbound, not eastbound
we're eastbound now
now I remember
every rest stop
'I Shall Be Released'
over and over again a loop
remember when I said it's over before it began
right
that I'd never see her again
but we're on the other side now
son
brother
going the other way
coming and going
what's the going rate
going and coming
what's the difference
true, what's the diff
this is the other side
the opposite way
no direction home
none at all
my breath smoke in the night
rising halo
the ribbon of road unfurling in the dark
radio silent, CD off
I shall be released
arriving before I get there
but this is the other side
I know, you said that
if you can't erase it
at least record over it
overwrite it
play it backwards
pay it forward
in the rearview mirror
frosted in the skeleton night
still as an anvil
before it lands
I told you so
you didn't want to hear it
I brushed it off
lake-effect snow
on my hair
off your coat
the windshield
wiping the window
back and forth
forth and back
swishing for the clean slate
never slated
barely sated
singsong sing
north of Sing Sing
lunch for one
tea for two
for her and for you
the check, please
let's hit the road
wake up, a little Susie
on the road
you and me
me alone
as I always knew
always will
the ghost of a chance
lost in a dream
as it was in the beginning
is now and ever shall be
world without end
love without beginning

Prayer for a Palimpsest

O Goddess-God-Supreme Being-Cosmic Energy-Eternal Now-Silence:

Grant me, if it be your will, the selective amnesia of serenity, a magic slate of erased pain, a scraping away of the ragged scars of burnt memory from the parchment of remembrance. Vouchsafe to grant your servant a palimpsest of the mind, an electroconvulsive therapy (formerly known as electroshock therapy) without the electricity, if you don't mind. May it please you to wipe my slate clean, revealing a fresh layer in this palimpsest brain, enabling me motion: to reverse course, look away, move forward. While you're at it, gift me, please, with ablution and absolution, permitting a fresh and clean restart, a do-over. Ah, but you caution me against this? You tell me that every moment affords an opportunity for me myself to do this very thing. You remind me that the memory of pain can be a useful motivator, a shield against desolate repetition. In fact, you warn me of the mortal dangers of such palimpsestic thinking and feeling (and after all, is there a difference between the two?). So now I am confused. I am baffled. Puzzled and stumped. I see where oblivion has taken me, its tides tossing me wayward. Yet the burden of memory (no, pardon me; I didn't say guilt) is an anchor tied to my ankle. You decide. Yes, you decide in all your Silent Wisdom. You decide what to grant. But let me know when you have an answer. And give me the strength to abide by its commands. Amen.   

recalling the future

 ... and as I watched, with the stark lucidity of a future recollection (you know -- trying to see things as you will remember having seen them). 
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

In the bleachers during the World Series, October 2012, San Francisco. I will remember this. I will remember it like this, as starkly and irretrievably happy, as I am in this film being filmed right now. The smell of beer on the metal floor. Moody clouds as the sun set. The fans in front, back, and sides of me. The frenzy. The crack of the bat. Roars of the crowd. My coffee. The manic shouting (by me). My weeping as the Tony Bennett recording played. Texting back home. All of it. Framed. Sealed. Under glass.

Are such recollections a forced inevitability? Can you will this tape into memory edited in the way you prescribe? Or does that make it a foregone conclusion a self-fulfilling prophecy?

And was it really like that? There is no way to prove or disprove it, the subjective parts. Maybe by hypnosis. 

I would suggest we do this with Big Events: birth, death, marriage, hiring, firing, divorce, travel.

But now I'm confused.

It's never as you imagine you will remember it, not exactly. Yet sometimes it is, or seems to be. Is it like the Werner Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, whereby the observer, the very act of observing, influences the outcome, the results, of the measurement? (I just butchered the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Never mind.)

I said we do this with Big Events.

I take it all back.

It's not so much a super-hyper-future recollection as a super-hyper-experience.

I don't even know what I'm talking about anymore. I don't even know what point I was trying to make.

Maybe you can help me out.

remembrance of things past, and present

I'll talk to you soon.
See you soon. 
You said you'd talk to me soon.
I did.
You said you'd see me soon.
Correct. 
What happened.
Nothing.
What about talking to me soon.
I did.
No, you didn't.
What do you mean.
Exactly.
What do you mean, what do you mean.
I mean you didn't talk to me soon, or see me soon.
Yes, I did.
No, you didn't.
I don't want to argue about it.
I'm not arguing.
You're not arguing.
We're not arguing.
Then what is this.
Never mind.
Never mind what.
Where are you going.
Who said I'm going anywhere.
You're going.
I'm going to go.
When will I see you again.
See you soon.
Soon.
Talk to you soon.
I'm going too.
Where.
Not far.
Pretty close.
When are you coming back.
Soon.
You're saying soon.
I think so.
We'll get together soon.
We'll talk soon.
I'll text you.
Text me.
Soon.

memory

I've taken to reading Marcel Proust again. Not every day, and not for long. Why? Because Proust reminds me of the subjective skew of recollection. He said, she said, I said, they said. Two individuals can share individual cups of coffee, or view a sunset, or walk a walk. Naturally (and organically, for that matter), their recollections of the shared experience are radically different. Infinitely different. We like to think otherwise, especially when being sentimental, but memory and recollection -- and thinking, if you will -- occupy idiosyncratic spheres that do not ever correspond or overlap perfectly. When you think of it (or feel of it), that's what literature purports to do: to re-create the event, the experience, the wonder, the immediacy, the "it." But it always falls short.

assignations

The mind has a thought. You assign meaning to it. The meaning may be so-called positive or so-called negative. You attach significance to a cluster of electrons passing through your brain and central nervous system. love. hatred. loss. gain. joy. anger. pain. comfort. the list is endless, not infinite but innumerable, beyond the known words in any given language or all languages. You assign and attach meaning in this way, and you let it determine your happiness or unhappiness (again, mere notions, mere words) at any given moment. Reading this, you figure, gee, that's kind of crazy to surrender such power to "thoughts," pulsations in the brain, the nervous system, the emotional-cognitive network.

Mrs. Dalloway

I am reading Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. The book, a paperback edition published decades ago, had been sitting on my nightstand for ages. Isn't "nightstand: a quaint, old-fashioned word, rather Victorian, suggesting reading and domestic habit and a hint of orderly bliss and harmony? Not that I have that gospel to preach this evening. Would that I could. The novel is A Day in the Life (which was termed the #1 song by the Beatles in a special edition of Rolling Stone magazine on newsstands now) of Clarissa Dalloway and her privileged if angst-ridden world and those around her. The words are delicious, the sentences stringy and sinewy, the cadences charming, the characters perplexing and intertwined (none more than Septimus Warren Smith, fresh from the horrors of the War, and his Italian wife Lucrezia). I like this work, today, better than the work of Marcel Proust. And doesn't Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine owe a tip of his cap to this book, since his book explored lushly not a full day but a lunch hour? "It had no plot," you'll hear someone say as a negative comment against a movie or novel or story or you-name-it. That critique typically rankles me, not that I should take it personally. Who the feck cares if it has a plot? We all know Hamlet or Macbeth or Tony soprano will die, but we watch it anyway. Ooops. Trapped myself there. "It" in those cases refers to productions that have a dramatic arc. Fine. I'll grant you that. Maybe the whole "plot" business, or the fixation on it, bothers me because I transfer that to the "God has a plan for me" saying. I get it, but I don't see the Divine Power playing with us like puppets or marionettes. Yet I have experienced "grace" and "providence," so perhaps I am a confused and sloppy thinker or feeler. Where was I? On the street in London, or the park, just after lunch, inside the head of clarissa and her band of drawing-room characters. Carry on.

Proustian postscript for 2009

oh, and after reading Charles Simic's poems I spent several weeks reading Marcel Proust, the part about Albertine, the captive.

Some Proustian doses are good literary medicine.

Fragment From The Book of Uncommon Prayer

Theological anthropologistical historians/herstorians report finding this fragment from The Book of Uncommon Prayer:






63. For a Person Afflicted with Woozy Wordsmithery:

O merciful Father Mother Creator, vouchsafe to guide and safeguard all logorrheic wanderers wiggling their winding way through wordly thickets of Joycean or Proustian prose posing as ponderous Pelagianism (but is in reality pontificating piffle) so that such would-be wordsmiths may find solace in your eternal Silence. Amen.

The Steppes of Tipperary Hill

On Tipperary Hill (and some say Syracuse may claim sole possession of such a neighborhood moniker), also known as Tipp Hill, the after-the-sidewalk three steps (replaced a couple years ago by my wife and our young neighbor: two women working like chain-gang laborers in the summer heat, or poster gals for Rosie the Riveter-type feminine industriousness) lead to a patch of broken-concrete sidewalk, before you get to more steps leading to the front door, and then our purple (plum?) house (my brainstorm).

The broken concrete is in five pieces (I love that early Jack Nicholson movie "Five Easy Pieces," the title of which refers to classical piano, a film that features the classic chicken-salad sandwich rant in a diner; it also starts with a classic line; the record player is playing Tammy Wynette's "Stand By Your Man" and the Karen Black character is filing her nails or something; Bobby, the Nicholson character, says: "You play that record one more time, I'm gonna melt it down into hairspray.").

The five pieces of concrete sidewalk wobble, but they can be adjusted to snugly fit together, at least temporarily. Years ago, Ballet Daughter was holding IrishStep Daughter, an infant, and fell right there, or thereabouts, the infant's head hitting with a thud. It was horrid. But wasn't horrid. Everything turned out frightful but fine. Did the accident occur because of the five pieces of separated concrete? I don't know. Memory is so tricky. I doubt if the deteriorated condition was that deteriorated 10 or so years ago. Ask Marcel Proust.

If the five pieces get out of whack, it is easy for anyone, including the postal delivery person, to trip. (Well, tripping is optional, not mandatory. Just open your eyes.) A covering of snow (possible about nine months of the year here) blankets the problem, like love covering a multitude of sins (didn't St. Augustine say that? Check with Ralph Keyes, the quote guy; I believe Augustine did say: "Love -- and do what you will.").

So, I frequently find myself wedging in the five pieces tidily. A jigsaw puzzle in real life.

Oh, you're wondering why we don't simply spend some money to fix this risk, this potential liability? That's an excellent question. The answer, like the precarious puzzle in the ground of reality, is puzzling.

The answer (all lies or part truths or full denial) is:

part poverty, part laziness, part mystery, part needing something to blog about,

and all puzzle. There's a metaphor in there somewhere.

Lobal Warming

I was waiting for my gastronomic Santa Fe salad to be prepared (just for me, because they had run out) at the mall food court. As I was leaning back against the counter, surveying the grand expanse of boulevardiers en shoppant, my meditation was interrupted by two young customers, ordering their own repasts.

One of these two females (discretion and the prevailing ethical winds prevent me from estimating the age range of said imaginary characters encountered by an imaginary pseudonymous blogger, but suffice it to say that Vladimir Nabokov was a novelist and lepidopterist, whose own imagination allowed the wings of his fantasies to brush against unconventional nets regarding these matters) suddenly turns to me, stares at me, sighs, and sweatily says, "I'm so hot!"

(Did I mention the ample display of human flesh, the twin peaks of June in the cold heart of November? Did I forget to sing the glories of Grand Tetons cleaving to ancient concupiscence?)

The mind is a funny thing. I'm reading a lot about neurons and dendrites and stuff in a book by author and fellow blogger Jonah Lehrer. The fascinating book is titled "Proust Was a Neuroscientist." Lehrer's book cites works like Oliver Sacks's "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat."

The mind, especially the erotically inclined comic mind or the comically inclined erotic mind, would have found it so easy to say, "Yes, you are" and politely smiled, if that is remotely possible.

In the space of milliseconds, nanoseconds, the mind races through the menu of myriad responses, verbal or otherwise, available to it. Alas, the dendritic firings/misfirings and molecular exchanges are set in genomic motion before my creation, ordered up in a gastronomic soup of RNA, DNA, and YIKES!

So often in my life the wrong words have slipped out even as the Strict Catholic Command Center shouted, "DON'T SAY IT DON'T SAY IT DON'T!"

With a straight line like hers, what wisecracker could resist saying, "Yes, you are"?

"Hot? Been to the gym?" I feebly mumbled.

I didn't quite get her reply. Seeing her chuckle, rather than watching her summon security, was relief enough.

Then her plastic didn't work.

I didn't even offer to buy dinner for her.

See? All that lobal warming stuff is just a myth.

a life exposed

At one point this afternoon, I wanted to surrender to the seduction of sleep. And why not? Spaniards have their siestas (some even go home, put their pajamas on, and have at it -- napping, that is). And why not? Armada or not, the Spanish have been around a long time, longer than our society, and seem to do just fine.

I think I was experiencing an adrenaline letdown after all the excitement and energy of preparing for an interview Tuesday at City Hall involving our company and several others, an interview not deemed important enough for one Common Councilor to attend and not important enough for another Common Councilor who was on the selection committee to do more than come late and then leave after 10 minutes or so, which infuriated me, a corporate bystander at this interview but one who had spent the previous day and more in prepping the team collegially. Uncommon Councilors. Dreadful.

Tonight's walk had its own revelation: remember that piece of graffito with the word LIFE with the x over the i? At first glance, I thought someone had tried to paint over the word, a cover-up of animate form. But, no, just the opposite. It seems that LIFE has been scrubbed to the bone, down to the bare cinder blocks, forming a faux bas-relief.

Was someone trying to clean LIFE, only to find that the background got scrubbed but LIFE persisted?

Did howling rains cause some kind of rapid-fire weathering? (Doubt it.)

Or was it like that all along, but I didn't remember it that way?

In reading "Proust Was A Neuroscientist," I am finding reinforcement in my belief that memory is always unreliable, a faulty archive.

What will LIFE look like tomorrow?

Hello, I Must Be Going

Ain't going nowhere but here.

The title is stolen from The Incredible String Band, or "The Stringies," as some of us called them, back in the day, the "day" being 1967, the year that The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album came out. That year, people in the U.K. selected 5000 Spirits or The Layers of the Onion by The Incredible String Band as album of the year, if memory serves me well (and, really, does memory ever serve any of us faithfully, Monsieur Proust?). The weekend of Woodstock I saw ISB at a folk festival in NYC, along with Odetta, Tim Hardin, and others.

Hello. Goodbye.

Surrender to Win.

Lose to Gain.

"Come in we're closed."

Our paradoxes are our epiphanies, if we but see the signs before us.

The sign above was seen in a doorway of a closed bookstore, last Sunday, in Geneseo, New York, just after our trip to Letchworth State Park, "Grand Canyon of the East."

ChicorLit

Maybe I'm getting better, have turned a corner, reached a tipping point, cliched a cliche. Last week I was chatting with a colleague (Botanist Colleague) about chicory, celebrating its singularly summery and scintillating color. I asked her about it, since I wasn't quite sure how chicory differs from purple coneflower or cornflower, if at all.

Sure enough, the flower I had in mind is chicory, she confirmed for me by consulting some serious-looking textbooks. You see chicory on roadsides a lot at this time of year, just about anywhere in the continental U.S. (As for Europe, I don't know, so chime in readers from around the planet.) It has been used as a substitute for coffee.

So today I made a remark to Botanist Colleague (BC) about chicory, something to the effect that she certainly got it right. Our chicory-referenced dialogue proceeded along these lines, although we bloggeristic Proustians realize how unfaithful and saucy a mistress Ms. Memory can be:

PK: "You see them all over."

BC: "Yeah, you do."

PK: "You were saying they're transitory, lasting for a day?" [like blog posts, I could've added but did not]

BC: "They bloom every day. They wilt real quick."

PK: "Just like me," I quickly and breezily reply in my head, the words clanging around in the cranium like a struck gong.

But I didn't say it! A monumental first!

The elevator doors close.

Saved.

This may be the first instance of what I think they call impulse control in my so-called adult impulsive life.

The Virtue of Jet Lag

Jet lag. What a wonderfully oxymoronic term, connoting (or is that denoting?) the rush that slows; the propulsion that regresses. Yesterday, rather hung over from fatigue (late-night browsing in the Double U Double U Double U Universe will do that), I was driving to my haircut place (i.e., Hirsute Psychotherapy by Don), and I experienced memories of recent trips. And the memories were of first moments of arrival in Ireland and in Berlin.

The gauzy, slow-motion sleepwalking of arrival in Shannon, the terror of trying to drive a car on the "wrong" side of the road, the traipsing through a cemetery in Ennistymon as the sun was rising (and Youngest One was toppling over with sleep in the back sleep).

Or sitting in a Mercedes-Benz taxi en route from Tegel Airport, trying to converse with a driver who knew not Word One of what I was saying, canals and rivers, graffiti splattered on stately buildings, falling asleep during a ballet class's lullaby piano melodies, the Brandenburg Gate looming at the end of Unter-den-Linden.

Powerful memories.

And it dawned on me (though not the dawn of vertiginous arrival). These jet-lagged memories recur frequently. They are triggers of further evocations. They are the madeleines featured by Marcel Proust, those tea biscuits that a bite of which [grammar check, please!] transported the narrator into a journey of the past.

I have come to understand that (despite the bone-crushing weariness, deep disorientation, and grouchiness) jet lag is the portal into a new world (it seems to hit me more en route from America to Europe, probably because of the morning arrival). It's really not all that bad, looking back. It's more like we are expected to bemoan it (and I understand why; I do not sleep well at all on planes), but if we roll with it, jet lag yields later benefits (sure, sure, you're saying; so does a colonoscopy).

I salute Jet Lag Memories.

Memories Are Made of This

I know, I know, you were expecting my regular-octane juvenile humor: "Mammaries are made of this HAHAhahaha."

As for dissecting memories, it's been a recurring theme, not dream, of The Laughorist blog (soon to celebrate its first blogiversary). As surely Marcel Proust illustrated lushly to the extreme, our memories are tricky, subjective, and flirtatious; we rarely know what doors they will open. And we don't know if we dare believe what we see, hear, taste, smell, or feel when we walk through those memory doors. That was part of the thesis of Stumbling on Happiness: the human propensity to color, or discolor, past (or future) events.

I just read an interesting take on this sort of thing by Alec Wilkinson, in The New Yorker issue of May 28, 2007 (do we really not write "19" anymore? does anyone remember writing 19XX [well, not really the X's] on checks, essays, reports, summonses, divorce decrees, baptismal certificates, marriage licenses, postcards, and letters of resignation? I do).

The article is about one Gordon Bell, who is lifelogging. He is creating a personal archive, a database of everything he can scan into a computer about his current and past life. MyLifeBits is what the project's called. He now works for Microsoft and wears a special camera as part of this all-consuming venture and experiment (experiventure, call it).

We bloggers think we're obsessive?

Think again.

It's all rather intriguing. Bell, 72, one of the founders of the Internet who has been called the Frank Lloyd Wright of computers, and Microsoft want to see how computers act when they establish a responsive relationship with our memories, or what we digitally tell a computer is our memories. Thus, a computer could easily say, "Watch out, Pawlie, you are entering the trough you typically enter after 17.268954 days. And it will last 3.000012223 days."

Or so I gather.

There's all sorts of potential ramifications to this sort of thing, some wonderful, some frightful. Microsoft's Jim Gemmell says in the article, "People argue about the need to forget things, but if you look at business discipline -- advising that you write everything down, your goals and objectives, and return to them to see how you did, examining what went wrong -- I think the same thing could happen with our personal lives. Being able to say, 'Now I realize my tone of voice was threatening' -- I think there's a real positive aspect in having the real record of what things looked and sounded like, and sequences of events, because we often end up believing things that are not based on facts anymore."

Really, Jim? Great. That's all I need. Computer as Grand Inquisitor. Computer as Torquemada.

Leave it to a software engineer to quantify memory.

Imagine this after-the-so-called fact bedroom debriefing: a blow-by-blow analysis on the fruitfulness (or dearth of ripe yield) in the garden of earthly pleasures, id est, orgasm or its lack. Let's cal this the Sixth Circle of Hell. And the Seventh Circle of Hell would go beyond anyone's worst nightmare of "he said, she said." It would be a recording with painful precision not only of the words but also the feelings and motives of the players.

We don't even what to imagine applying this beyond the home to the workplace or the public arena.

O spare us, HAL 9000.

This digitalization of memory gives new meaning to that line by James Joyce, "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."

Maybe it's me. Maybe I'd rather take refuge in the facts as I remember them, filtered by my psyche, not HAL's.

(Wouldn't you?)

(Say, what would Steve Jobs and Apple say to all this?)

Is it all agonizingly Orwellian? Or enticingly Proustian?

Wilkinson, a fine writer (I once read an essay he wrote about the legendary New Yorker editor William Maxwell, whom I met, briefly, in the 1980s, wherein Maxwell told the young Wilkinson to send a manuscript by means of letters to Maxwell; brilliant), writes: "Memory revises itself endlessly. We remember a vivid person, a remark, a sight that was unexpected, an occasion on which we felt something profoundly. The rest falls away. We become more exalted in our memories than we actually were, or less so. The interior stories we tell about ourselves rarely agree with the truth."

Whatever that is.

May you remember This.

The Calls of the Wild

Haruki Murakami has his Wind-up Bird; I've got my Unwind Bird. I've even got my Unravel Bird, my Unwindable Bird, and my Long and Winding Road Bird.

I once spent the better part of a year writing haiku, as directed by a spiritual mentor. It was a good suggestion. It forced me to observe the world before me more acutely. And awareness is what It's all about, in't? (Years later, I found the little red notebook I carried around with me while commuting daily from Jersey to Random House in Manhattan. It was pretty cool. In the same book is an autograph of the author James Baldwin, spotted at a Hyatt Hotel lobby in Chicago. But I mentioned this in some previous blog. Oh. That's right. Doesn't matter. Blogging is all about The Eternal Now, baby. Incidentally, in case you missed it at the beginning of this paragraph of digression, the haiku link is perfectly splendid. Really.)

Well, blogging sometimes provides me with the same observational motivation.

I walk out at lunchtime.

I hear the purple finch. I know its lighthearted corkscrew of frivolous song.

In the evening, or sometimes the early morn, I discern the lyrical, slow repetitive lament of the robin, or a mourning dove.

Or the grackle's onomatopoeia.

These are sounds that give me pause. Why does most writing (including blogging) focus on the visual, rather than the olfactory or the aural? (Of course, exceptions abound, such as Marcel Proust, or Patrick Suskind [can you tell me how to add the umlaut over the u?], author of Perfume, which was made into a movie.)

I know perfume can get my tail wagging.

Sometimes flashing neon lights in Naughtyville get me all flustered.

But sounds?

The unmistakable crisp click of heels on a hardwood floor.

The languid reverie of a cardinal.

The "mermaids singing, each to each."

The crack of the bat.

An endless trickle from the aquarium's filter.

The closing of the elevator doors.

The mating-call whisper of the unhooked bra.

The cry of the titmouse (how could I resist?)

An unfettered laugh.

The tap on the keyboard.

The I/O switch.

(A tip of The Laughorist's beak to Naturesongs.com. I've taken poetic liberties in my descriptions, for fun. But this is a seriously great site.)

Sounds used are copyrighted to Naturesongs.com, 1999-2007.