#wolfku musing

[ulfwolf]

Wolfku Musing 51

The word of God in the summer heat… He died from a dirty needle

Sweltering funeral.

I’m not sure what I’m doing here. Yes, I knew him, I mean who didn’t? Lately, we used to shoot up together. So what? To be bluntly honest, I had forgotten that today was his funeral, and I still don’t remember who told me it was and where. I did arrive in time, though—well, just about, the last to do so, I think. The doors were still open but a holier-than-thou-looking young man was busy preparing to close the massive things. He looked at me wondering if I was coming or not. I was pondering that very question, should I actually enter? Then I figured they must have air conditioning in there and since I wanted to get out of the heat: two birds with one grave stone won the argument.

Not so.

Not so with the air conditioning, that is.

Hotter inside than outside if that’s even possible; and more humid too. And that he had so many friends, I had no idea—for they could not all be family, surely?

Nor had I any idea that Archie had been such a good person. If this other priest-looking man, who was the priest, surely—and who referred to Archie as Art—is to be believed, that is. It’s ironic, really, this man of God singing Archie’s praises when Archie himself always said (correctly, in my opinion) never to trust a priest. By that perverse (though likely correct) logic Archie was a devil, which more or less corresponds with my conclusion from a few years running with the boy/man, now ex-boy/man.

And, no, he did not die from a wrongly diagnosed liver condition (I’d sue if I were the hospital—and really, can priests lie with impunity? Surely, there’s a special hell for those guys, lying priests, I mean), he died from being third or fourth down the line using the same needle, just after Henna, who everyone knew, had hygiene, medical, and other issues the length of the Nile. No one in his or her right mind uses the same needle as Henna. Then again, Archie had not been anywhere near a right mind for weeks and months, possibly years by that time.

And certainly was nowhere near the angel this lying priest-guy is busy up there by the casket painting.

Man, it is unbelievably hot in here. So hot I can actually see (or is it hear that I do) God’s word wilting mid-air and not quite making it to all ears. Feels like seeing but it must be hearing that fizzles out and then drop to the marble (at least I think it is marble) floor.

Everybody is listening, straining to hear over the oppressive heat that though it does not make a sound effectively drives you deaf anyway and blinds you to God’s word.

No angel, our Archie.

The priest seems done now and beckons the front row to come up and add a footnote or two. Or a special person in the front row. No one is rising (to the challenge or request) as yet. His mother perhaps? Father, sister, a-giant-stick-stuck-up-his-ass brother probably. He’d put the priest to shame in a lying contest, that brother of Archie’s—or Art’s as the lying priest would have it.

Ah, his mother. Standing up now and making for the microphone.

I met her once and only the once. She came into the late-night bistro (well after midnight) where Archie and I were slurping milk shakes and drinking coffee discussing how best to create a cross-word puzzle, not solve one, mind you, make one up. Our discussion was going pretty much nowhere but in very interesting circles.

She walked straight over to our table but did not sit down. Handed Archie an envelope and didn’t even look at me. Hardly looked at Archie. Then she turned and left. My only though then was: God, look at how small she is.

She hasn’t grown much since.

In all black. Makes you even smaller, it seems; blending you into the darker splatches of background, they sort of take bits out of you, leaving only a partial person up there trying to come up with something adulatory to say about her son. Well, she could say, for one, that he did not accept her (fully paid) invitation to a private rehab out in the country somewhere, which was what the envelop she handed him in the bistro contained.

I did not know that you could sell prepaid rehab registrations, but somehow Archie managed to convert that envelope and its contents into dollars—cents to the actual value, of course; we lived off of that envelope for a week, food and room and smack. Thanks mom.

She says nothing about that here though, in this absolutely sweltering church right now. Instead, she’s on about a promising student, career, life evaporating just like that and God’s mercy for accepting Archie into his lovely heaven (yeah, right).

Then she works at not crying; not very effectively. Her husband (her estranged husband, I should say) rising now to walk up and take her elbow and escort her back to her seat.

I almost applaud.

But realize, in time, this would not be the place or time.

The priest is back up there looking down at the front row again. No takers. The church has gone dead quiet now, as if holding his breath.

I almost don’t stand up.

And I almost don’t say, very loudly: “He died of a dirty needle for Christ’s sake.”

(c) Wolfstuff

http://wolfstuff.com/musing

[ulfwolf]

Pelicans fishing Rising, diving, splash, rising Glorious killers

They don’t live around here, these pelicans. My northern shore is but a way station in their travels farther north and back south of here. But when they stop by for a breather they usually stay for a day or two to feed, and to give everyone else some advanced lessons in flying.

Ever since I first saw them—it would have been down by Los Angeles or thereabouts, I’ve been fascinated by these aerial wizards, skimming, skating the water on their wingtips, effortlessly, as if true children of the wind.

Nature is often like this, disguising the ardent killer in grace. The lion, the cheetah, the hawk, even the larger snakes silently gliding through the understory toward some unsuspecting creature’s death.

The pelican, of course, is no exception, he’s an excellent fisherman. And what fishermen do is spot fish and then skillfully remove them from their element (water) where they’ll soon asphyxiate whether in the beak, gullet, or stomach of this beautiful killer.

Watching them skim, rise, dive, kill, all so beautifully, I can almost forgive this flier his deadly motive. Almost.

(c) Wolfstuff

[ulfwolf]

Wolfku Musing - 31

Cocooned by dry  warm  inside air Beyond the panes  wet snow  is falling

The room I now find myself in has a large bay window hanging three stories above the street. The room and its window are in a yellow-bricked three-story apartment building on Main Street with shops on the first floor with their large, lit display windows, and apartments on the second and third floors. I’ve sat down at the clean and empty desk and I look out and down at the snow falling. Snow in the air. Large flakes. They turn to sleet on the ground. Darkness has already arrived. It is winter after all and this is Sweden. Store fronts and car headlights reflect in the watery sidewalk and street. This room, this window, this snow, this city, this desk constitute the last in my long line of beginnings, the current one. The one I’m in. I am tasting this new, fresh now. This starting over. This rewind, press play. The new life ahead.

This freshly minted beginning.

For I have just arrived. As I entered the room, I placed my duffle bag and my briefcase on the made bed. It is very well-made this bed, hospital-well. It speaks well-made volumes about the land lady. After a few moments of looking around for I don’t know what, I moved my briefcase—the one I just bought with my next to last money, from the bed to the clean and empty desk by the bay window. I opened the case and took out my expensive fountain pen—the one I bought with my very last money, the truer to write (or so I told myself at the time). I pulled out and sat down on the heavy wooden chair with its hard seat and harder still back (uncomfortable is the word) and I placed my elbows on the clean (shiningly clean) desk surface, closed my eyes and looked for the momentous part of the moment, looked hard and long to capture the essence of this moment, to fill myself and overflow with this moment, to fully possess and be possessed by this moment, this brand new very important new-beginning moment.

My life has just undergone another sea change, the last in a string of them, but sea nonetheless. I have left Stockholm behind. Yes, I’m running away, but that’s not the point I’m making here.

Besides, as always, I run away with the noblest of intentions.

And as a result, here I am, sea changed. I sit in this moment on this hard, yes truly uncomfortable chair. The air in this dark, sterile room is very dry with the central heating set to what must be far too high and I realize I will have trouble sleeping in this room. I like cold rooms for sleep. Here, I will suffocate dryly. I really should have noticed this before I decided to rent this room, but be that as it may.

For here I am, in this sea of change, filled with this momentous new beginning, and what feeling I cannot find in the moment itself I (and I’m so very good at this), what cannot be found I will manufacture with my feeling pump, now set to momentous new moment. I pump hard and I urge myself to feel this moment, to really feel it, so big, so powerful, so irrevocable, so utterly sea-change.

And here it comes: I think I can feel the moment rising to fill me. Here, where I sit on the hard chair by the desk, pen in hand, yes, I feel it come on. I open the briefcase, find and retrieve paper. I place a shallow stack (four, perhaps five sheets at most) of paper on the hard, shining desk top, just paper and a hand holding a pen, both poised to capture and eternalize this very moment.

I bring my pen to touch the paper. It is very smooth, this paper, hardly any resistance at all to this also smooth golden tip of a pen. Still, the pen leaves a blue trace on the paper as the first word forms and I as I feel others form behind it. My words, eager to escape. I smell the paper, I smell the ink, I smell my words. In this very moment. We, my pen and I, write something poetic.

I hear the cars outside and below, muffled by the falling snow.

I hear other city sounds. This city is new to me. These sounds are new to me. The air in this room is new to me and seems drier by the minute. I feel the air make its way in trough my nostrils. Rather, I feel my nostrils, dry and contracted, barely letting it through. I make an effort to forget them, air and nostrils both.

Listen.

I cast about for meaning again, in these new sounds, in this new air, in this new smell, and now I find that I hold myself to mean everything, that all meaning is me—yes, very poetic: pen and paper agree.

And so I trace ever-new words on this paper in front of me. I spend this ink to prove my poethood. I draw and draw these urging words and know that I am poet. I am poet, therefore I am. I write words on paper, I see them leave my pen, it is I doing this, therefore I am, I am poet.

There is a whole family living somewhere in this apartment, but I don’t hear anyone else. Just the dry air squeezing itself in through my nostrils and the muffled sounds of new and foreign city outside. It must be a pretty big apartment for me not to hear anyone else stir or move about or flush a toilet or something. The room is clinically clean. Sterile. It is impersonal. It is mine, though, and I have just left Stockholm for this—acting on one of my many, many un-reflected-upon, un-thought-through impulses.

I impulse, therefore I am.

I write some more words. These are important words, poet words. Ink words carved out of dry air, wrestled down onto dry paper.

Then I leave for a movie.

I slept twice (unrestfully) in that room and visited it perhaps five times. Seems it’s always snowing when I’m in that room, as if I’m only there one prolonged once, looking out through this bay window one prolonged once and wondering what will happen next.

A day later I meet Marie and everything takes a new turn. A sea-er sea-change. I spend all my time with her now, then move in with her and tell my landlady I no longer need the room. This is the second and last time I meet this woman. Nice enough, she is, if a little surprised. I settle with her, take my bag and head out the door. My briefcase is already at Marie’s.

Which is where I met Baudelaire. Literally yes, literally no. They were his eyes, red globes in darkness, suspended first above me, descending then upon my eyes in a perfect fit. They glowed as they slowly fell through the still, dark air like pools, like lenses, like portals upon his world, and when they touched, his eyes and mine, and became the same eyes, yes, I knew that I knew.

He has stayed with me, has Baudelaire. As a symbol, if nothing else. As an excuse, if nothing else. For what are these little strings of words I jot down on scraps and sheets and in little books so black and conspicuous in my hand as I let inspiration have its way with me.

They’re not poems, they’re not. They’re not prose, they’re not. They’re, what did he call them? prose poems. And if he got away with that, so, I am sure, will I. And that is why I decided to go to France, become a poet. May have to learn French, though.

Tried to do that. Did not succeed.

But he’s still with me, Baudelaire and his eyes. It happened, this mystical experience, this union of eyes, and no one can take that away from me, although they could and did for Hemingway. Stole his memories.

Sitting there though, in that dry, warm, sterile room looking out that bay window at the snowy winter’s night, did I reflect at all on why I would want to know Pi to the 200th decimal?

No, I did not. Then it was all about the moment. I was that moment, only that moment.

I’ve seen truth since, of course. I wanted to impress, that’s all. Pi to the 200th decimal to impress my father or some girl. To impress my mother or some girl. To harvest approval. And in those days, approval was my only currency. I needed to hear back from others how alive I was. How deep I was. How Baudelaire I was. How poet I was.

There was no me there without this approval, for I was only such me as others would grant. Very empty. Very in need. Very needing that pump I carried around. My feeling-pump.

And sitting there, looking out into the falling snow, lit from below by head lights and store fronts, arriving out of a black above first into a faint glow (more like a mood than a presence), then into a lit amorphous thing, then into flakes, thousands of them, large ones, into snow, falling, falling, did I reflect upon stealing?

My father called me tjuv. That word is Swedish for thief. Tjuv. Not a pretty word, not a pretty thing. Though well-deserved. Very. For all my life I had been a thief. A petty thief.

Life as a petty child thief is a long string of related, familiar emotions.

First, there’s the thrill of opportunity.

Then, there’s the rush of theft.

Then, there’s the pleasure of candy bought with the loot. Almost pre-sex sex-like.

Followed soon by the fear of discovery, a fear as palpable as certainty.

Followed by the emotionless denial of knowing anything about the missing money. Nothing, no sir. And had my eyes turned any bluer, any larger or any more innocent they would have had to nail me to a cross.

Followed by the apathy of the inevitable confession. The humiliation of capture.

Followed (sometimes) by the pain of the hard hand on buttocks.

Followed by the propitiatory apology: I will never, ever do it again. No, no, no, never.

Followed by the relief that this was now all over. Clean again. Nothing to hide. Nothing to feel guilty about. Breathing, in the company of free beings.

Until, of course, the new thrill of opportunity.

All arranged in tidy sequences of a more or less constant ache which knew for a fact that it was me they discussed downstairs. Which knew I caused them pain.

Then one day, I was fourteen years old, I up and changed. Just stopped stealing. Tjuv no more. Go figure.

No. Nothing like that. Looking out the bay window and then down upon ink and paper and expensive fountain pen in hand there was only the moment. Everywhere in deepening snow, in cars starting and stopping, and the hour getting on, there was me and my moment.

Then I went to the pictures.

And sitting there, striving for the far reaches of every corner of the moment, did I think at all in this direction, of today, the then future? Was this now, this moment, even conceivable then? I think not.

Rimbaud was dead at thirty-seven. Baudelaire at forty-six. Age is not a thing to ponder for this boy by the bay window. There is only that very moment, those words onto that paper, that dry air which I knew I would have trouble sleeping in.

Now, more than half a life lived later, I’m still sitting at a desk of sorts. Not a pen in hand but a little keyboard. I touch type and do it well—my words hit the screen as I think them. So far from dark, snowy, Swedish February night.

Nonetheless me.

I live in a cabin. I have lived on a boat. I have lived marriage—make that marriages. I have lived business. I have lived corporate America. I have lived music. I have lived books. I have lived New York. I have lived Los Angeles. It is now for me to extract myself from all this lived and share it.

I shall grow gaunt and gray, mysterious and sinewy, distant and present, looking out bay windows at falling snow. I shall share, shall become the sharing that is its own reward. And I shall escape, finally, this prison, this string of bay windows.

And looking out I see I can live no other way. I will work my body into song, laugh in the face of God, and deliver the earth.

(c) Wolfstuff

http://wolfstuff.com/musings/2019/3/21/wolfku-musing-31

[ulfwolf]

Wolfku Musing - 30

The beautiful lie that tells  the truth is the perfect name  for fiction

(Note: since I wrote this reflection, Arundhati Roy has in fact finished and published her second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, which, although I wolfed it down in a few sittings and did like it, does not, in my not so very humble opinion, stand up well against The God of Small Things).

Not long ago, I began re-reading Arundhati Roy’s masterpiece The God of Small Things, and as I—even before turning the first page—fell through the lettered terrain of her amazing prose to land squarely in the heat of Kerala with its bursting jackfruits and dissolute bluebottles, I could not help but wonder: Why on earth has she not written a second work of fiction?

Roy’s 1997 debut novel earned her not only uniform acclaim but also the Booker Prize, as good a sign as any that she had, indeed, arrived as a writer of great fiction—the Booker Prize, in my view, is just a small step down from the Nobel Prize, if that.

This novel went on to sell over six million copies world-wide, and is possibly how most of us still think of her—as “the wonderful author of.”

But after that, since 1997, nothing. Nothing but non-fiction that is. Well, Arundhati Roy does not think of non-fiction as “nothing,” of course. Writing non-fiction has for her become a tense and urgent business, she just has to get it out. “It’s like the body doesn’t have room for its organs,” she said in a recent interview with the Guardian.

So, instead of another work of fiction she has directed her considerable talents and energies towards political activism, which over the years has seen her in and out of trouble with both the public and her peers, as well as with the law, and with the Indian powers that be. While these energies have produced a host of essays and polemic tracts, to me—no matter how well-written—they do not tell the whole truth.

And that is my point: Many writers, readers, and critics agree that good fiction is, in fact, the lie that tells the truth—And Roy’s fiction is very, very good.

Some (and I count myself among them) take an additional step and hold the truth told by fiction as a truth deeper or higher than (depending on viewpoint) the truth told by non-fiction: Fiction tells a truth both more personal and more universal—a deep truth that cannot be told any other way. Whey then, did Roy turn away from this deeper truth to pursue her surface warfare of polemics?

I just don’t know, but I lament that she did fact.

Now, she is apparently working on a second novel, but at a pace that makes Donna Tartt appear to rush things.

In the recent Guardian interview, she also confided, “I have been working on it for quite a few years. If those characters are still hanging around in my house, swinging their legs and smoking their cigarette butts, they’re not going to go away, so there must be something there.”

She also says that she is a different person altogether when writing fiction, which, she says, she can relax into. “I don’t mean because it’s easy to write but I trust its rhythms and I don’t have to get it out there. There’s no urgency. It’s like cooking, it takes its time. I rather like the idea of just living inside it and not coming out of it.”

Well, precisely. So why doesn’t she simply connect the dots? Why doesn’t she return to and tell her larger truth?

She is certainly immensely capable of it.

(c) Wolfstuff

http://wolfstuff.com/musings/2019/3/20/wolfku-musing-30

[ulfwolf]

Wolfku Musing - 28

A poem is a story with galaxies of spiritual space

In the fall of 1967, sitting by my nineteen-year old self in the cellar/cave portion of a famous Stockholm pub called Brända Tomten (“The Burnt Parcel”) with a small carafe of white wine—half of which had already found its way into my belly—a fountain pen, and some paper—more or less convinced that in a previous life I had been Charles Baudelaire—I jotted a few “deep” lines down on the paper and then called it a poem.

I think the lines rhymed.

Irrepressible optimist that I was at the time I submitted this “poem” to a magazine (or a daily paper, I forget which) that actually replied within a few days. Nice poem, the editor said, but far too reminiscent, plagiarizing even, of some Swedish poet that I had never heard of. I looked her up, of course, this Swedish poet, and found that she was quite famous, several books (collection of poems) to her credit.

Discovering this, I naturally took this accusation as a compliment. My little three-minute scribble compared to this, apparently, modern icon of Swedish poetry. Oh, well, I thought, I guess that makes me a poet too.

I’m not sure I ever told anyone about this—though it would surprise me if I did not for at that time I always held center stage in my life and actors always need an audience.

Yet, this I knew: the poem, the deep lines, were fake. They were just colors that I tossed upon the wall to see what kind of pattern they would make. It was more a matter of chance than anything else; a matter of what words happened to surface at the time and spill their way onto paper. Should anyone (killjoy) have asked me at the time: well, what do you mean? I would have been stumped for an answer. Completely.

Now, Baudelaire was a poet, a true one. I believe History has proven him out. Still, I felt that he, too, somehow, was cheating for he wrote mainly what he called prose poems, which to my way of thinking were nothing but stray thoughts captured and wrestled down onto paper. I mean, what trick, or skill, was there to that? You just jotted down what did in fact float to the top without even a need to look out for (or try to chase down) rhymes. And when enough words had floated to the top and thence and onto paper, then you simply stopped writing and said: that’s a prose poem. Nothing to it.

Deep though, they obviously had to be.

The thing was, on some very self-aggrandizing level, I expected some true genius (for it would take one, to say the least) to read and interpret and explain to the world (and to me) what I meant by my poems; yes, it would take a genius to unearth and recognize (and hail) the true genius of my shamelessly simulated prose poems.

So, I wrote lots of them, these impersonations, nothing to them. This was a fecund, freewheeling, teenage mind at play.

Then one day, much later, I read, or heard rather, a real poem: or a line from a real poem. I went like this: “A helicopter lands on the Pan Am roof / Like a dragonfly on a tomb.”

The image that sprung live in my mind was vast and vivid. And real. And perfect. And incredibly precise. And encompassing. And Joni Mitchell’s.

New York. Park Avenue. A thousand cars, a million people. A cloudy sky. A giant tomb at the far end (though, actually in the middle) of this broad, busy metropolitan avenue. And landing atop this tomb, a metallic dragonfly.

I had seen it several times, though never really thought about it. Well, I had thought about whomever had so much money they could skip taxis and limos to instead helicopter their way into the city from Kennedy or La Guardia.

Possibly the perfect metaphor. But then again, what is poetry but one, or two, or a few, perfect metaphors?

Denise Levertov opens her final poetry collection, This Great Unknowing, with this line: “I move among the ankles of forest Elders.”

This, to me, is an as true and evocative gathering of words one can ever hope to luck across. With them spring the forest, the ancient (and wise) trees. The air, the understory, the overstory, the cries of distant, or not so distant birds. The fog perhaps, or even rain. The soundless tread of reverent steps upon moss or needled-covered ground. Awe. Silence. Communion. One life to another. Father and child. Uncle and niece. Wisdom to youth—even if that youth was walking her final days, as Levertov was at the time.

Haikus make no bones about it. Seventeen syllables (more or less) are supposed to evoke a world, or at least a small portion of it, vividly. But for me, they sometimes appear as angles crafted on the heads of pins, as fine miniatures too elaborately fashioned, metaphors too meticulously spun.

Then, again, I think of Baudelaire and his rambling, fascinating bits of French life, so replete with desire and suffering, enchantment and thirst, darkness and strange moons.

And then I think of Mitchell and Levertov and I realize that a good poem, one that originates in the unpretentious heart, then travels (via words) to the grateful heart of another there to settle and sprout a world as vast as any novel’s.

Which is when I realize that a poem is a story (a novel even), says as much as any story, is as long as any novel: there is just so very much more space between the words.

(c) Wolfstuff

http://wolfstuff.com/musings/2019/3/17/wolfku-musing-28

[ulfwolf]

The Wolfku Garden - 25

Out there, on the rim Where the ocean falls away sits God, feet dangling

Of a late afternoon, with the sun and its warming light just right, the Pacific Ocean spreads out before me like a gigantic softly-rippled aqua-mirror, reaching all the way to the rim of the world, and there, among the haze and low whitish clouds (that look like a distant, soft mountain range beyond which lies the land of magic, or Heaven, or…), out there at the very edge, there (I can easily picture) sits a very content God, feet dangling over the rim—very pleased with Himself and Things in general.

Cooling off, I gather, for the afternoon feels unusually warm to me, and He is that much (8 miles or so from where I’m sitting) closer to the sun.

Again, I pinch myself to make sure I’m awake: I live here, this amazing scene is my back yard.

(c) Wolfstuff

http://wolfstuff.com/garden/2019/3/8/the-wolfku-garden-25