Paula's House of Toast

It was all so too too very I nearly puked into my DeSalvo Collar.

NPR did a piece on gay marriage yesterday. The second half was an ultra softball interview with a couple, he some prof of "ethics and moral philosophy," she some chick with an Oxford-related theology credential, who took the "con" side. These quasi-academic pieces of work had posited three sine qua nons of marriage -- complementarity, a public contract and procreativity -- which, QED, ruled out gay "marriage," although some of their best friends, etc etc.

One would think that such overly PhD'ed entities would not insist on such a literal and exclusive reading of complementarity: insert penis into vagina, tab A into slot B, and that's that. They evoked, of course, centuries of History and Tradition, and the Sanctity of the Institution of Marriage. They weren't quoting scripture, but Leviticus was lurking in the background. One could mentally morph the argument into one for slavery, white-supremacy, anti-semitism, the oppression of women. The ugly prejudice is prior. The rest is ugly rationalization, cloaked in college degrees, religion, tradition, history, you name it.

These are the insidious hate mongers, the insidious segregationists, the insidious separate-but-equalizers.

And again it's the old "we must respect and tolerate their opinion because it is their deeply held religious belief blah blah blah." Well fuck that shit, as the phrase goes. Bigotry is bigotry. I mean do we "respect" the fundamentalist Islamic "law" that provides for women to be stoned to death because it's a "deeply held belief" ? Hell, no.

I would imagine Profs Buffy and Boffo would be surprised -- and offended -- to be placed in the same category as Topeka's infamous Reverand Fred Phelps. "Moi?" they might cry, in unison, or perhaps, "Nous ?"

Yeah, vouse guys. I'm talkin' to you. High-end fundamentalists. Creepy homophobes in sheepskinned clothing.

I have a great Phelps story.

We were visiting DK's folks in Topeka, and decided to give their late, magnificent and placid poodle, Stokey, a joyride in the car, windows down, truly dog heaven. We tooled about for a while, the beast having the time of its life, until we came to a major intersection where a gaggle of Phelpses, adults and kids, were waving their virulent horrid signs. Stokey -- normally a placid, silent, amicable animal -- spotted them and suddenly began to bark like a dog possessed.

Good dog. Very, very good dog.

If he'd been there last night, I bet he'd have barked at the radio.

It was the 1960's, maybe even the late 50's.

My father was coaching a folk trio called, I think, "The Riverside Boys," or if not that, at least a trio that sang "Down By The Riverside."

They also sang, or maybe he did, again around that time -- that being my early-ish childhood -- "Mack the Knife," and "Me And My Shadow," songs that left a darker, stronger imprint on my memory. As did the song that Sophie sang, "Show Me The Way To Go Home," a drinking song, but it seemed more about being lost. And, of course, my mother's "Bobby Shaftoe's Gone To Sea." Songs about night, menace, loneliness, separation, homelessness, lostness.

We watched a DVD last night, a 1960's German blues festival -- Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, Otis Spann -- and I noted how many blues tunes mention going down to the river. Much 60's ambiance: narrow ties, shades, berets, and the whitest, strangest damned audience one could imagine, down to the mink stoles, and I don't mean John Waters.

I thought about my own riverside walks (yes, I'm gearing up to take one). Yesterday, walking, I thought about writing. How, as an amateur, I can write poems about, say, willow trees, even though it's possible that everything that can possibly be said about willow trees has long since been said. No pressure to push the envelope of the avant garde. Just the pure pleasure of taking the visible, perceptible, reflectable inner/outer world and making language and metaphor about it.

I noted how yellow the landscape is becoming. I remembered the tunnel between the hospital and the adjacent medical office building of the last limb of my residency (1992-4) -- how school kids had done a mural there, and how I was struck and delighted by the word "amarillo," yellow, that was part of it. And how the tunnel was gently curved, so that walking through part of it, one could, with no end visible, fantasize that it was endless. As I often did during those hellish years. Better walk forever along that gentle arc, along that gentle wall covered with kids' drawings, than be on call.

Speaking about putting willow trees in poems, I am reminded of a stipulation I once read in a journal's submission guidelines: no poems by housewives. What a bitchy, callow rule !

I bet that journal's full of first person free verse about being an angst-ridden, downtrodden artiste.

So I should walk, right ?

Right.

So I walked an hour in the sun: down to the river, the usual path. Vegetation's getting sparser. The knotweed's bare. The oak leaves, brown and leathery. Maples turning, some still green. The water brown, thick, fast after yesterday's rain. I sat on one of the riverside benches and a whole brace of geese and ducks approached, floating crosscurrent, probably avid for bread. Seeing I had none, they returned to the business of floating, dunking, preening.

I walked an hour, hoping the sun would kick in and good cheer would suffuse me. But it was like pouring ineffectual caffeine into deep fatigue. Plus my neck began to hurt some, and I had to stop to tighten the velcro on Albert's vice grip. There were the usual joggers and cyclists. Some smiled, provoking me to bleary thoughts: they are taking pity on the damaged old crone.

Then I began to sweat.

Maybe this injury has bolluxed me more than I have been willing to admit. It seems vaguely unreal. I think I harbored the thought, fueled by neuro's use of the word "ditzel" and ordering up of a bone scan, that maybe there wasn't even a fracture present.

(Denial ! That Kubler-Ross chick again, as "All That Jazz" calls her.)

Hey, I gave up on that Kubler-Ross chick when she published her book on HIV. I was in the midst of dealing with this awful disease in the mid 80's as the first cases began to appear in the prison system. I felt sad, angry, overwhelmed; it's hard enough to have a COLD as a prison inmate, never mind a fatal, frightening, new, stigmatizing disease. I remember grabbing her new book off the shelf in the bookstore, and turning eagerly to a section specifically about incarcerated HIV patients. I could not make it past her terrible, blanket vilification of all physicians working in prisons.

Bye bye love, hello loneliness.

Sometimes the simplest lines from simple songs say it best. Dead, we join the billions who have died before us. Dying, we all do alone. Even better:

Row row row your boat
gently down the stream
merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily
life is but a dream

Our new kitty, orange and white, a little cross-eyed, and tentatively named Gertrude, sniffed at my coffee this morning -- and began to drink it. I knew we'd picked a winner.

Sunshine and better sleep make a wonderful compound.

Granted, it was better through the wonders of modern chemistry, but I'll take it over staring at the ceiling and catastrophizing. The Valium seemed to function like some sort of renewable ballast. I woke a lot, but sunk right back to sleep.

Today I'm going to take a walk. Maybe sit. Write ?

I have to try to scramble back onto the world. What do I mean by that ?

I could say "get back to my life," but, of course, I have never left my life. This is my life, this broken-necked, overly-bathrobe clad, valium-eating, collar-wearing, peevish, time-dithering, not-going-to-work life.

The illusion that I have left my life is the true departure. That's the purgatory I've been flirting with, the neither-here-nor-thereness that's getting me down. I AM here. HERE. Now. Nowhere else.

Wake up, PT.

ARK

Wild weather: my almost defunct 1999 Mother's Day ivy sailed off the verandah rail, and the white plastic chair upended and skittered halfway to the yard.

Bleary after last night's insomnia, I spent the morning being led deeper and deeper into the labyrinth of the Web, along some strands of an old fascination, the Araki Yasusada Hoax, led there by Joseph Duemer's link to hgpoetics which references an excellent Kent Johnson interview.

I have tracked down the genesis of my own "fictitious poets" obsession and my own personal "fictitious poet," Tadeusz, to December 1995, and my piece "THREE UNKNOWN POETS." This is clearly before I became aware of the Yasusada Hoax with American Poetry Review's deliciously peevish retraction in the Fall 1996 issue.

In the prior issue they'd showcased this avant garde and occidentophile Hiroshima survivor's poems and notebooks in a prestigious "Special Supplement." Upon learning that Yasusada himself was a fictional construction, the editors basically went ballistic, denounced the "art" they'd previously deemed worthy of a Special Supplement, and, later, one of them called the submission "criminal." A whole fascinating dialogue has ensued about the nature of authorship, about what determines the prevalent tastes and prejudices of the prestigious mainstream poetry journals. APR, with all those photos of tweedy poits and large-tressed poitesses, had sometimes seemed even to me, an amateur, a dilletante, to be slightly silly and pretentious. Viz. my poem, "Ark," a satire of its lumbering quarterly arrival.

What I can't recall is whether I discovered Ern Malley and the Spectrists, and Pessoa's heteronyms before or after the Yasusada affair. Could have been either way. I finished the long Tadeusz/Hester story in 1998, and my delight and energy in writing it was certainly fueled by the Yasusada controversy.

The piece I'll append below appeared in Salem State's Lit Mag, and a couple of the Tadeusz pieces appeared in the Exquisite Corpse before it went completely on line.


THREE UNKNOWN POETS

Tadeusz Czhgymcscz and The Blue Udder

Tadeusz Czhgymcscz (1903-1933) was the founding father and, so far as it can be determined, only member of the short-lived Eastern European avant-garde literary movement Der Blau Euter, or “The Blue Udder.” His most famous and widely anthologized poem, “Galompki” is said to epitomize the spirit of the movement, which, in the words of the critic Fraufenster, “...combined the eye of God and a stuffed cabbage in a disgusting, inedible smorgasbord of meaningless sound.”

Czhgymcscz died of scrofula in a small, private sanitarium outside of Kansas City, where he had lived in exile since 1932, after an unfortunate and highly publicized incident involving the Russian ambassador’s youngest daughter.

I will take the liberty here to append my own translation of “Golompki” with explanatory footnotes. My deepest appreciation goes my dear friend and mentor, Professor Emeritus Szynt Szyntcscz for his invaluable guidance.


Golompki

I hear the playing of the basset hounds
I hear the baying of the basset horns (1)
On my plate the blargh (2) coagulates
(untranslatable) and deviant
striations of (untranslatable) (3)

But certainly the Archbishop (4)
can be extracted from the pickle jar (5)
without a vszyscs. (6)

(1923?)

(1) Ah, the thankless task of the translator! In the original, these lines involve an obscure pun on the words “fluegelhorn” and “guinea pig”, which, in Czhgymcscz’ native tongue, share a common root. In the spirit of Czhgymcscz’ aesthetic I have chosen to render the pun rather than the meaning.

(2) A drink made of fermented alfalfa extract and goat’s brains indigenous to Czhgymcscz’ native village, often, according to biographers, served by Czhgymcscz’ mother on the occasion of his birthday. It is said to confer virility unto firstborn sons.

(3) This is the famous passage that caused the personal and aesthetic rift between Rilke and Czhgymcscz.

(4) Czhgymcscz is rumored to be the illigitimate son of the Archbishop of Brzscsz. Historical proof of this contention has eluded all three of his major biographers. In Czhgymcscz symbolology, however, the Archbishop invariably represents either the shadowy nether regions of the psyche, or the fine brown scum left on the bottom of the cow barn after the ritual November cleaning.

(5) In Czhgymcscz’ dialect, the words for pickle jar and drainpipe are identical -- another example of Czhgymcscz’ richly ironic wordplay.

(6) No english equivalent. A local eating utensil shaped like an octopus, thought to originate in the maritime provinces of Czhgymcscz’ native land.





Miss HH: Transcendentalist Cipher

But certainly even more unknown that the obscure but vaguely notorious Tadeusz Czhgymcscz is the American Transcendentalist Poetess Harriet Harriet, or, as she is affectionately known in scholarly circles, Miss HH.

She is thought to have traveled in the fringes of the group that included Emerson, the Alcotts and Thoreau, although the only reference to her in any of the extant primary sources is in a (probably forged) letter from Thoreau to the Tireless Loon Baking Co. in which, after bitterly complaining about the texture of the crust of a blueberry pie he had purchased, he makes an incomprehensible reference to “a double order of harriets” . In all fairness, the handwriting reflects the intensity of his wrath, and the phrase has also been deciphered as “a double order of cherry pies” by reputable, if intellectually plodding, scholars.

In any case, a slim volume of her work remains, self-published, entitled “Corn Chords,” which is, of course, both a pun on the name of the famous New England town from which she came, and a reference to her peculiar and ultimately fatal obsession with mastering the Cornhorn, a now extinct woodwind instrument related to the oboe and fashioned, as the name implies, out of corn cobs.

Although her somewhat anti-social persona has led some scholars to compare her to Emily Dickinson, the most cursory of glances at her oeuvre will unmask the folly of that comparison. I offer by way of example one of her lesser poems, “Chowder”

Chowder

Those blighted men are always eating chowder --
chowder chowder chowder chowder chowder !
I do not think they could eat it any louder
if instead of clams and fish it contained gunpowder!

So gentlemen I offer you my scorn.
And I will play my scorn upon my horn !
As I place my bleeding lips upon the corn
I wish to Brahma that I was never born !

This is typical of her poems, in that it consists of two quatrains with an aaaa and bbbb rhyme scheme, a relatively chaotic meter, and predictably indiscriminate use of exclamation points. Note the reference to “Brahma” that places her, in spirit if not in actuality, at the heart of the Transcendentalist movement.

Some scholars argue that this poem with its vehement chowder imagery suggests that she was an employee of the “Tireless Loon Baking Co.” which also was known to serve lunch. Others claim that it is a reference to her father’s passion for this seafood dish and his well-known execrable table manners (viz. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous Pastiche “On Mr. H’s Manners and the Overbowl.” )



Django Bass: Can’t Be Beat

No discussion of poetical unknowns would be complete without mention of our own favorite son of obscurity, Django Bass ! (1938-) He is often erroneously included in discussions of the “beat” poets because of the widespread critical misprision (see Bloom,1964) that his most famous poem “Care Wax” is an homage to Jack Kerouac, when in fact the most cursory of biographic researches quickly reveals this to be the name of the car wash at which he worked from 1958-1961. In fact, the same cursory research quickly reveals this to be Bass’ one and only poem, a slender oeuvre indeed, one for which the word-weary critic soon is quite grateful!


Care Wax

“Put that car up on the jack, Care Wax
the undercarriage,” he Howled.
“Then put a shine
on the road-
ster !”

“We’ll drive it
from Chicago to Gary !”
(snider and snider he grew).
“Through ALL the boroughs!”
“Of Course -- oh !”

The runaway car --
should he shoot her ?
Nah, rope ‘er.

(1959)


In a rare interview given in his Portland Maine dry cleaning establishment in 1972, Bass reiterated his insistence that “Care Wax” was uninfluenced by the beat movement.

“Beets ? Never liked ‘em much. Stains are a bitch to get out, too. ‘Specially from polyester. Need a whole jug of carbon tet to get them suckers out! ”

Bass was voted “The poet least likely to suffer from the anxiety of influence” by the MLA in 1983.

Despite being deeply moved this morning by Merton's poems "O Sweet Irrational Worship," and "Elegy for the Monastery Barn," and the passages from "Conjectures" about the point vierge, I finished my poem "Prime" as follows:



PRIME

How the valley awakes.
T. Merton

The Trappists have been up for hours. I wake.
The fell of day drowns out the point vierge
again: the digital blares news, my brain
takes up where it left off -- commit, omit.
The world’s anathema. I cannot sit
zazen or still. My vallombrosa’s rain
is acid, black, and heaven’s concierge
has stamped my stub stigmata red: MISTAKE.

I took a course in thermodynamics in college. This fact never ceases to astound me. I believe I passed it. Thinking of the course produces in me a vague frisson of confusion and displeasure. I can picture the classroom. The amount of information I have retained from it is practically nil. I recall one word. I do not remember what the word means. The word is "hysteresis." And when I look it up today I find that it pertains to magnetism, certainly not a thermodynamic topic, or, if so, so abstrusely linked that, absent repeating the course, I have no hope of retrieving it.

So, officially, I remember nothing. What I know about entropy (the second of Thermodynamics' "Laws," right ?) is what any educated liberal arts type might know: the tendency of a system to move toward maximum disorder. Including my memory.

It's possible that there is some data culled from "thermodynamics" that lurks silently integrated within something else I "know" or "understand."

But, mainly, it's a hole. A shadowy classroom. A misremembered word. An impressive hole.

I was thinking of entropy last night, since the structure of my sleep -- under the accumulated weight of wearing the collar, taking then stopping valium, and relative inactivity -- has decided to attain maximum disorder. This is the first year I can remember when I greeted the prospect of "gaining an hour" of supposed sleep with dread. My computer, even more bolluxed than me, set itself back two hours.

I had been thinking of entropy all day. A walking tour of the downstairs had filled my inner neat freak with horror. The mail table: heaped, overflowing. The frontroom: newspapers on the floor and a dismantled bicycle. The den: dead flowers, toppling stacks of magazines, shoes, socks, detritus from the kitties' cardboard catnip scratching box. The living room: the site of DK's abandoned late-summer rearrange-the CDs-etc. project, sprawled like a patient on the operating table, wide open, tubes and drains in place, abandoned by the doctor. Beginning to rot. The kitchen table: vanished under its mounds of papers and books. Two auxiliary piles in the corner on the floor, rising to the chin of our kitchen penguin. Two or three pairs of shoes. Some socks. Crumbs. The "head of the cellar stairs" pile growing larger each day.

And the back stairs rug, unvacuumed, what, five or six weeks, turns furry. Mackled with kitty litter.

The system needs a definate input of energy. And mine has been ebbing toward absolute zero. Abulia. Catatonia.

Lying there last night, I realized my Aspen Collar had undergone a further Kafkaesque metamorphosis -- from a pair of Albert DeSalvo Boston-strangling hands to a Gregor Samsa-like carapace, encasing and isolating my whole being in its plastic shell. Nolo me tangere.

"AS I awoke one morning from uneasy dreams I found myself transformed in my bed into a gigantic insect. I was lying on my hard, as it were armor-plated, neck..."

And again, my daily 10:30 AM realization: I am still in my bathrobe.

Must get a grip, eh ? Good project for the day.

Well, life does go on. We had to buy a car. We did. We will pick it up today. I don't want it. The thought repells me.

We adopted a kitten. Orange and white. A six months old girl kitty, a stray. She's getting neutered today at Animal Rescue. Very sweet kitty. Affectionate. Crawled into my lap at the shelter and grubbed up scratch. I feel surprisingly indifferent.

DK wants a chair. To replace the awful one. We looked at chairs. Since we last bought a chair over a decade ago chairs have tripled in size. Sitting in them, one resembles that Lily Tomlin character, the little girl always depicted sitting on a huge chair.

These things are MONSTERS. They come with ottomans (ottomen?) the size of the Ottoman Empire. They cost a FORTUNE.

Why have chairs so engrossed ?

They are big enough for a 6-700 pound person. Literally.

Are we looking at new norms-to-come on body weight charts and in furniture to parallel, for example, the supersized vats of cola and hogsheads of popcorn sold at the movies ?

Days like this I think I must have two or three accessory spleens.