1. I used to have thoughts.
2. Tonight’s full moon will be a blue moon. This afternoon, a heavy wet snow fell for a few hours like a spell.
3. I read recently that the coldest place in our solar system has been discovered on our own moon in the crevasses of its south pole. The temperatures are unfathomably cold, though that doesn’t stop one from trying to imagine the abject solitude and stasis of existing in that dark place, just about 64 degrees above absolute zero, the lowest temperature possible. Here in the city, I don’t often think about the moon, except when it surprises me rising over some city building like an apparition or when I catch its oblique reflection in a another building’s fenestration like the glint in someone’s night eye, and the shadowy night becomes immersed in its blue chiaroscuro. I remember Italo Calvino's fantastical tale, The Distance of the Moon, in his Cosmicomics of when the moon was close enough to jump up onto or “All you had to do was row out to it in a boat and, when you were underneath, prop a ladder against her and scramble up,” to the lunar surface, where one could look back at the enormous earth turning slowly. In his short story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, Jorge Luis Borges plays with the epistemological question of how language influences what thoughts are possible. In his imaginary world Tlön the language is called Ursprache “from which the ‘present’ languages and the dialects are derived: there are impersonal verbs, modified by monosyllabic suffixes (or prefixes) with an adverbial value. For example: there is no word corresponding to the word "moon,", but there is a verb which in English would be ‘to moon’ or ‘to moonate.’ ‘The moon rose above the river’ is hlor u fang axaxaxas mlo, or literally: ‘upward behind the onstreaming it mooned.’” “...the prime unit is not the verb, but the monosyllabic adjective. The noun is formed by an accumulation of adjectives. They do not say ‘moon,’ but rather ‘round airy-light on dark’ or ‘pale-orange-of-the-sky’ or any other such combination.” Certainly, each of us has a memory of words of our own we used as children to describe the world as we saw it, or we know a child who uses an original vocabulary to define the infinite world on his or her own terms. When I was three, I lived in a Connecticut city in which my mother and I would take “the bus” to various locations, presumably to shop or visit friends. Although much has sunk like Numidian stone through the benthic fauna into the deepest waters of my memory, I remember that we would wait on the sidewalk out in front of our house for the bus to arrive. Those massive vehicles, whose rear engines growled with torque and whose air brakes released huge sighs as the body lurched to a stop, all chrome and two-or-three-toned colors like green and orange and yellow, were both frightening and thrilling, a common alliance of attributes in childhood. There were two busses that came by our house. One had a slightly more squared-off face, the other a curvature of windshield and headlamps and wrap-around chrome bumper. In my world, the square bus was called the “be-be bus”, while the round-faced bus was called the “boo-boo bus.” It was a matter of perception that still makes perfect sense to me. Some words children ascribe to things are better than their assignations in one’s native language. I knew a little girl once who used the word “ölee” (pronounced oh-lee) for “water “. It is a much more beautiful elicitation of the substance than its more common “water” I think. As Borges said, "We imagine that someone, somewhere, invented the word moon.” "Let us imagine something yellow, shining, changing. The thing is something in the sky, circular; at other times it has the form of an arc, other times it grows and shrinks. Someone - we will never know the name of that someone - our ancestor, our common ancestor, gives to that thing the name moon, different in different languages and variously lovely.” The word moon seems like what it is – round, glowing, mysterious. It is equally lovely in French: lune. But the Latin, from which it is derived, lua, and the Spanish luna have an extra syllable, which changes the aesthetic. For millennia, humans have simultaneously feared, worshipped, and studied the moon. Its profound effect on our earth, the precarious perfection of the gravitational balance of the two bodies upon each other’s orbital ebb and flow though a seemingly eternal space – though now we know differently – tugs at our seas and our imaginations. Now we have NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mapping the temperature of the moon’s surface. Meanwhile, for nearly two decades the Hubble Space Telescope has been giving us detailed pictures of the farthest known galaxies in the Universe. And the theories abound in the spectral sciences from astrophysics and quantum physics to statistical mechanics and particle physics. Here is where science and religion intersect. Both require a stretch of the imagination from suspension of disbelief into a Platonic leap of faith. I think it was Whitman who said “the mountains, valleys, and rivers that gird them round about would be blank conditions of matter if man did not fling his divinity about them.” (Or did I, or you dreaming of me, dream that?) Poets and philosophers, as well as writers like Eco and Borges, have lent their art to the ontological themes of time and perception. There is as much to be taken from T. S. Eliot’s lines from Four Quartets
(Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.)
as from the Gnostic Gospels of Thomas ("If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.") We have mapped the human genome, but that map will not lead you to a better understanding of the love you feel toward your child. We are connecting cosmic dots that eventually point inward. When we peer deep into space with the Hubble we are looking into a distant past, but we are also staring into ourselves. It is possible to imagine that dark place in the south pole of the moon, so cold that perhaps only water bears (i.e., Tardigrades. “Tardigrades are polyextremophiles; scientists have reported their existence in hot springs, on top of the Himalayas, under layers of solid ice and in ocean sediments... one of the few groups of species that are capable of reversibly suspending their metabolism and going into a state of cryptobiosis,” a kind of suspended animation) could exist there. What is more miraculous: the dark cold rock or the ability to imagine it?
4. Some of the thoughts were like children left to their own imaginations, others spread like crystallization in utterly unique patterns of perfect randomness, others combined like recombinant DNA and spread into the darkness, behind doors in rooms full of doors that lead to other rooms full of doors with mirrors that reflected other mirrors and other doors and other rooms.
5. In early 2000, my mother took a turn for the worse. She had pain in her ankles, the freezing to death or burned alive kind of pain. On March 8, 2000, my mother died.
6. The first six sentences of the following quote were written before the year 2000 arrived; after the ellipses, I continued the thought as though only a moment later (although, in fact, two years later; how this still resides on any drive, I don’t know). The whole thing is some bizarre extant curiosity:
There is no reason to suspect any conspiratorial or apocalyptic forces relative to the incipient millennium gathering like storm clouds, but one does not need to have the ability to read tea leaves to ascertain various salient portents of something. In other less obtuse words, something weird is going on. There are exogenous influences upon us. And I am afraid my own life has a substructure of precarious clichés: a house of cards built on thin ice over a barrel perched on the last straw, etc. But let’s not talk about me. How would you like to be in East Timor, or Kosovo, or the Bronx?...since this was written over two years ago, at the approach of the year 2K, we must add here: Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Iraq, Downtown Manhattan, etc. – We’ll come back to this document in a little while to continue, edit, and excogitate.
In my many years, and this includes my youth during the Vietnam War, I have never seen this planet seething with so many dichotomous antipathies. Every part of the globe is wrought with quasi-religious, quasi-ideological, quasi-geopolitical, and quasi-economic conflict, painted over with layers of hypocrisy and deceit, and infecting every stratum of every society. Here in the U.S., Bush and his cohorts, in whatever manifestation of the actual hierarchy of which we shall never know, proclaim that we are the “good” who shall rout the “evildoers” and rid their scourge of the earth, while uniting behind a “compassionate” patriotism and a doctrine of “with us or with the terrorists” rallying (and threatening) the other countries of the globe to do as we say, etc., for whatever geopolitical agenda the B. Administration is actually pursuing.
If I were to “cut and paste” today’s listings from the A.P., the illustration of conflict, particularly conflict resulting in human deaths, would be trenchant. Seen from a distance of 289,000 miles, it would not be surprising to see the blood stains spreading on the blue-green orb. What apocalyptic event do we need to seek peace rather than war? One would think that the unfathomable annihilation at and of the World Trade Center would have been a beckoning to an unwavering determinism toward dialogue and compromise rather than an excuse for unbridled retribution, wanton destruction disguised as liberation, and the brutal indoctrination of fascist politics disguised as patriotism with the support of a completely duped American public, who seemed to have lost the ability to question authority.
I just came from a Bat Mitzvah, my first encounter with the Jewish rituals and synagogues and mozel tovs...it was moving and sentimental and real (the way only life can be)...my most salient observation is from the Torah, which speaks of peace and equality, tolerance and respect....it also has many historical allusions to conflicts with Egyptians and how God tears them apart, scatters them in the desert as food for the multitude, and swears to smite them into eternity...but I did get a great pair of oversized sunglasses that I can don at any whim. Still...put Jesus, a few rabbis, Mohammed, and Oprah in a room, and there won’t be a dry eye in the house. Am I the only one who misses B. Clinton? He sucks as a human being, and even as a president...but, like Ranch Doritos, every now and then you need a fix of them. Amazingly, he had very intelligent things to say about Bush’s reference to the “axis of evil”, specifically in regards to North Korea, which he realizes must be dealt with very differently than either Iran or Iraq. It is absolutely frightening when Bill Clinton becomes the voice of reason. But Bush makes Alfred E. Newman seem erudite.
7. The night after my mother died, I found myself back in Connecticut at her nursing home to gather up the few belongings she had in her room (a television I had gotten her, photographs, her Bible, which was inscribed
for my son Stefan, every letter and card I had ever sent her and various bric-a-brac. I had been listening to Henryk Górecki's
Symphony No.3 (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs) - the work is an evocation of the ties between mother and child - and when I pulled off of the long familiar avenue into the parking lot of the nursing home, a basso profundo thunder and lightening storm of great noise and fury, accompanied by a spectacular light show, performed its antediluvian drama. Suspending all logic and disbelief, I thought it was my mother somehow crying out to me. Only now do I understand that it was I, crying out to her.
8. September 11, 2003: It is strange that a date becomes something visceral even while its meaning is without exegesis. Illness reveals, through molecular hermeneutics, the invisible hand that leads our manifest destinies in ineffable pathways, through indecipherable forests, and along seacoasts that will deposit us in our far flung destinations. This date reveals the tragic effects of the conspiracies entangled in religion, politics, and, most of all, the greed of evil men, who compensate for the chaos within out bodies by exerting an equivocal force of inevitability upon our futile endeavors.
9. The obituary was brief even for a small town newspaper. I thought, “I’d like to rewrite this short obituary, to amend the mistakes, to include a glimpse of the life. She was a child in a photograph, with an overbite smile and chopped short hair, a white homemade linen dress, skinned knees upon which sat her little hands, as she sat in the dory, the water reflecting the old fisheries on the dock, as she smiled for her father who was taking the picture, composing the image that would fascinate me for a lifetime; my mother, as a child in a boat, full of life and hope, sadness and joy.”
10. "You know what they say about elephant ears? — They can hear low sounds from miles away; they pick up the sonic booms? A deep rumbling, a vibrating sound. The elephant can hear the sound through its own trembling skin." – Jackie Kay, from In Between Talking about the Elephant, Granta, Issue 75, Autumn 2001.
The short drive from downtown to our house is a circuitous route of one-way streets, quick turns, merging into relentless flows of traffic, mostly uphill grades, and a few traffic lights. There is one, at the bottom of an uphill thoroughfare, which I never fail to hit just as it turns red. Something about that brief, expected pause is akin to a welcome respite rather than a nuisance delay. Invariably, I look over at the vehicle stopped on my left or check my rearview mirror to see who is behind me. Today, in a late-model sub-compact two young women of, perhaps, college age, who may have been students or employed at the mall or both, sat smiling and conversing. The driver was attractive in an as yet unformed, emerging way, shiny with youth. Her friend and passenger had a very round, adipose face with her hair severely tied back. The driver was blowing a huge bubblegum bubble and very self-impressed with its successful yellow globe, looking into her own rearview mirror to see how it suited her appearance. She took it out of her mouth and displayed it, all the while conversing and all the while her friend laughing in obvious approval. The light turned green and the whole backwards-glancing scene receded from my attention, though not from some glint of recollection. Nothing really materialized other than a sense of familiarity as I tried to search my memory for a time when the weight of existence was so light that smiling and laughing were inevitable.
Everyone experiences these minor epiphanies, usually while transposing endless input from many and diverse exigencies. I had been listening to a snippet of NPR – economic babble from an expert on credit default swaps – wondering whether or not to stop at the Whole Foods (or turn right at the crest of the last hill, as I did, having to stop suddenly for an incongruous boy with a fishing pole crossing in front of me – here in the middle of a heavily populated area and no apparent water around) and already leaning toward blowing off the treadmill once home, recognizing, and allowing to win, a nervous hunger, the nervous part of which having been caused by a Red Bull-fueled, hypertrophic right-wing ideologues and pundits; the eight-year long, Groundhog Day-like nightmare of the SCOTUS-sanctioned “W” years that were equal parts “24” , Rosemary’s Baby, The Manchurian Candidate, Eraserhead, The 700 Club, Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights, My Mother the Car, Finnegan’s Wake, Bartleby the Scrivener, and Rimbaud’s Une Saison en Enfer (with some of Disney’s Fantasia, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and Fast Food Nation thrown into the mix); before which there was a brief hiatus of eight years of softcore Republicanism disguised as the administration of my least favorite Democratic President – yes, that includes Carter; before that, Bush the Father of non-invention; preceded by the Borax-peddling host of Death Valley Days, tree-hating ("A tree's a tree. How many more do you need to look at?"), ketchup-is-food, purveyor of voodoo economics, and future object of all male Republicans’ mancrush, Saint Ronny of sunny Cali-forn-I-A. While Carter had at least asked us to put on a sweater to save energy, Reagan appointed James Watt as Secretary of the Interior, who said, "We will mine more, drill more, cut more timber."
11. The weight of the average human heart is 10-12 ounces for males and 8-10 ounces for females. This average heart in a human life of 80 years beats about 30 billion times. On June 27, 1969, Life magazine displayed portrait photos of all 242 Americans killed in Vietnam during the previous week, including the 46 killed at 'Hamburger Hill.' The photos had a stunning impact on Americans nationwide as they viewed the once smiling young faces of the dead.
12. The Return of the Re-Return of Irony:
They were eighteen and nineteen years old. At home, their mothers were waiting for them, mothers who had given birth to them, who carried them in their arms when they were small, who woke them up to go to school, who couldn’t do anything when their sons were taken into the army, who couldn’t do anything when – instead of their sons – they were presented with a form:
"Your son perished while fulfilling his international duty in Afghanistan."
I wrote this paragraph, and I thought: why did I write it? Simply, it was very painful for me to read these names once more as they were written there.
Now, our troops have returned from Afghanistan.
Now, our government has announced that the war was "a mistake.
Now, I think about the results of this mistake. Tens of thousands killed, hundreds of thousands of bodies crippled and fates twisted. That is the only result of this war. What can any war give, aside from such results?
-From Afghanistan: A Russian Soldier’s Story by Vladislav Tamarov, writing about the names of those from his company, written on a board, indicating those who had perished.
[A]s Commander-in-Chief, I have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan. After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home. These are the resources that we need to seize the initiative, while building the Afghan capacity that can allow for a responsible transition of our forces out of Afghanistan.
- Obama's Remarks at West Point, Dec. 1, 2009
Why is everybody beginning to be so uneasy?
Why so disordered? (See how grave all the faces have
Become!) Why do the streets and the squares empty so quickly,
And they are all anxiously going home to their houses?
Because it is night, and the barbarians have not got here,
And some people have come in from the frontier
And say that there aren’t any more barbarians.
What are we going to do now without the barbarians?
In a way, those people were a solution.
-from Waiting for the Barbarians, by C.P. Cavafy (Richard Lattimore translation)
13. We think in metaphors. To understand a thing or a place or an emotion, we must hold it up next to another and view its similarities or contrasts. Sometimes this happens in an instant; a passing shadow or the almost imperceptible touch of cool air that is like or different than...though, there are times when we examine and scrutinize in linear time, outside of time, stratifying the possibilities, organizing the symbolisms, feeling the shape of a thing, understanding without the hierarchy of language.
14. The sound of mice gnawing concrete kept him awake at night. This house, he was certain, was haunted. Not that the mice had anything to do with it. It was the footsteps in the wall; the distinct sound of footsteps as he pressed his ear to the wall, while the mice chewed their way in, their sharp teeth crunching the stone, which he could feel in his bones, and the fear of which made his bed an island.
15. Yesterday, I went for a long walk on the east side of the city (a bit more circuitous and longer than my well-worn path), and on my way headed back north, with many eastern jags yet to come, a pair of tympani incongruously glinted their copper patina from the bottom of a huge, arched, two-stored window with Gothic mullions beneath the steeple of the First Unitarian Church – it was the only time I stopped during the two-and-a-half-hour walk –whereupon I took out my cell phone to try, unsuccessfully, to capture time and the desire I had to be inside on that balustrade with a pair of mallets to hear what those kettle drums would sound like in there. This morning I actually heard them, during an ultrasound of my heart; they were magnificent.