My God Mammon

In a rare moment of candor, 2008 presidential hopeful, Mormon elder, former venture capitalist and current Massachusetts Governor-Despite-Himself Mitt "The Mitthead" Romney



whose remarkable resemblance to Dr Bob Dobbs of the Church of the Subgenius



is a phenomenon whose significance has yet to be fully deconstructed, took a break from gay bashing ("They're even having CHILDREN ! Ewwww !") during a recent Utah speech to declare that

"America's culture is also defined by the fact that we are a religious people,"
Romney said. "We recognize our God not only in our Declaration of Independence, but even in our currency."

There is much grist for the theopolitical mill in his weighty words. Is God "in the currency" or, transubstatiated, "the currency" itself ? Will capitalism undergo a quasi Protestant/Catholic schism over this issue ?

It Was Lost

And now it's found.




(It had been hiding in plain sight at the very bottom of my backpack.)

Cleansing The Doors of Perception

Without their little one-year's-worth plugs of wax that I flushed out last night, my ears are letting in the most incredible sibilances. Faucet water, rustled paper, the recoiling keyboard space bar, cloth against cloth when I walk -- a whole stratum of high, crisp, thin, hissing sounds floods back. I didn't know what I was missing. The sonic world seems almost intolerably bright. There is a little nimbus of hiss around every sound. Like backlighting. Tinny, tinkling. I find my fingers stealing earward, my eyes squeezing shut against the glare. I quail in terror at the thought of wind passing through winter oaks.



These low, lush, matted, tangling blades of green were present last winter in the same spot. I have no idea what they are. They are, though, a balm to the winter-scoured eye: sinuous, lively, plump. In great contradistinction to all the spiky, bleached, skeletal, gray-brown-beige winter thicket. I've been photographing this bit of riverbank wood and meadow land for about a year, now. One would think that would be enough, or, at least bring a sense of closure. But it's not enough. My curiosity pushes ahead to the next botanical year, to the next cycle. What variations will it bring ? A year is not enough.



But, on the other hand, even a single moment is enough. A photograph is a moment of light, captured and fixed. Does a photo have, or signify, duration ? Does a photo of the moon exposed at a one second shutter speed have more "duration" than a weed shot at 1/500 ? What about star trails left on film exposed for hours ? Is a photograph a record of a "present moment," that elusive ne plus ultra we're always "trying" to live in, as if we could live otherwise ? The photo as an artifact has its own present moment. Just as memory is a phenomenon that occurs in the present.

It's still cold. There's been more snow, and there's more predicted. The bright morning gives way to a scrim of clouds and filtered light. There are so many doors.

The way in is the way out.

Supra Dig

I am struck by the dignity of weeds. In keeping with etymology, they are worthy. Worthy of my regard, of my camera's regard, of your regard. As in, Francophonetically, Regardez !

Look. Take. Show. That's a complicated sequence. Fraught. It takes an intimate moment and shatters it. Makes it public. Disperses it. The eyes (minds) then have it, or a simulacrum of it, to do with what they will. It's more a regradation that a degradation, but it's that, too. A transformation of a living moment of seeing, honoring, loving, into a static image. One image among the world's billions. (One weed among quadrillions.) We are prolific text and image makers. Myriad things, each with its painted cake. What a bakery ! What a takery ! What a fakery !

From that maternal, adoring moment of holding, of sheltering, a weed in my regard (re-guard) to this: a trafficking. Dispatching the flattened, pilfered instant of light out to sail aloft on the world's image-stream. As decidual and doomed as I am, as it is. Farewell ! But how can it fare well ? Maybe I should say fadewell.

Deeper within dignity is the sense of being fitting: proper, right, appropriate to context. Back to the forest: the bleached, brittle upraised winter twigs. The dark, leaf-ribbed compost underfoot. Weeds are what they are. They lead lives. Like I do. I walk among them with as much care as my clumsy, booted incarnation can manage. It is a delicate operation. I hold my breath and mutter warding invocations: Bezoar ! Podzol ! Potting Soil !

Then I notice a galaxy of asters -- hard, white, shiny, gold-tipped stellate little flowers. Or a grape tendril, loop-de-looping in the air. Or the vague, dry gold of evening primrose pods, so different from the summer's thin, yellow petals.

And I submit, eagerly, to seduction. I am prisoner, love slave, in the seraglio of weeds.

Have, dear little beings, your weedy way with me.

On Losing My Hat

I realized, today, that I'd lost my hat. My big, red and slate-blue, fleece hat, flat on top and round as a layer cake. I felt more than a frisson of chagrin: I liked the hat, and dislike hat shopping.

But I was on holiday and, dispatched on an errand to the post-office in the upscale suburb where DK's composers' consortium does their bulk mailing, I decided to visit the nearby upscale mall. I was feeling that sanguine. Imagine.

So I strode boldly through the Filene's cosmetics department, past all the mysterious potions and creams and pots of color, dodging the white-coated clerks all hell bent on squirting me with their atomizers, and into the mall itself where I'd remembered there was an Eastern Mountain Sports.

It was gone.

OK. Fine. A lesson in transience. I could dig it. So I turned tail and went back through Filene's, taking a brave detour through DRESSES. I am not completely free of material desire. I am not an entirely unnatural woman. I could do a little shopping, eh ?

I was caught up short by a mannikin. A cadaverically thin headless torso of a mannikin. Or, to be charitable, an Audrey Hepburn-thin headless torso of a mannikin. It was up on a pedestal, and its hips were thrust forward at eye level. It was wearing a beautiful dress -- a summer dress, white, clingy, covered with colorful, airy, almost abstract prints of Parisian street scenes. Very 1960's, in a good way. On the mannikin's long, sleek legs were pale, green fishnet stockings, and on its feet, elegant green suede high heels.

She, it, was lovely. I gazed, helpless, strangely enraptured.

Then the thought ran through my mind: There is only one purpose for obtaining such a costume, and that's mating. Attraction. Seduction. Procreation.

I imagined myself wearing it. It felt like a transvestitual, practically transexual fantasy. Oh, sure, I'm thin enough. But bony in all the wrong places. Scrawny. Wizened. And the lank gray hair ? Oh, man. Where were the cosmetics mavens when I needed them ? Shouldn't they be flocking around me in their quasi-medical vestments, offering first aid, offering extreme unguents ?



If I was not shopping for fuck-me clothes, what was I shopping for ?

Grave clothes, proposed my increasingly melancholic brain.

So I wrenched myself away from the lovely, headless siren, veered past a rack of beige, elastic-waisted polyester slacks marked CLEARANCE, and, hatless, fled to my car.

Lush Life

Phragmites. Common, roadside reeds. Beautiful, undulant banks of them filling hollows by the highway. A single one flowered by the river this past summer, surrounded by smaller ones that did not sprout seedheads. The big one disappeared in a gusty, early winter rainstorm. The little ones remain, their leaves extended like stiff, spare banners.

I once spent a long stretch of a road trip fishing for the word "phragmites." It was on a particularly blighted stretch of highway skirting little ocean inlets and salt marshes just outside Boston. Some other "ph" word kept coming up and shoving "phragmites" aside. My brain felt like some kind of jammed, deranged file cabinet. Finally, probably while I was looking the other way, out popped "phragmites."

Now I can't remember the other word. Pharoah. Phalanges.

Phaugh.



Bittersweet. I was enamoured of this pretty vine, once, and desired to obtain some to decorate my house. It was years ago, maybe even during my first marriage. I'd pass masses of it by the highway and dream of bringing armloads of the beautiful red and orange-studded branches home. I'd imagine where I'd place it, and how beautiful the elaborate little red and yellow berries would look in our apartment. I'd picture myself in the woods gathering it up, harvesting the beautiful vine with the beautiful name. I was always on the lookout for it, and could spot the brightly studded tangles instantly. Did I ever actualize my bittersweet fantasies ? No.

This may (or may not) be a parable of my spiritual life.



Is it that it's so close to dinnertime and that I'm hungry that the shiny, brown clustered seeds in the heart of this involuted, snowbound Queen Anne's Lace remind me of pecan pie ? I never much liked nuts as a child, but I loved the dark, dense, thickly sweet filling of pecan pie. It was restaurant food, of course, far too exotic for my Mother's rotation of desserts (Jello, harlequin ice-cream, butterscotch pudding).

My Aunt's glamorous friend, Helen T., ate pecan pie. She had flaming red hair, and wore green chiffon dresses. She had "perfect teeth," mink stoles, and was brassy and loud. She had a round bed. Her husband, a weasly little clothier, slept around. And around. And around. And around. I loved Helen. Her taste in pie seemed extraordinarily sophisticated. She'd stir spoonsful of vanilla ice cream into her coffee instead of milk. This, too, I found cosmopolitan, even sexy. And, of course, there were cigarettes and endless rounds of drinks. Cocktails. There are pictures of Anne Sexton that have always reminded me of Helen. They both had a long-limbed, cool, wounded elegance. Helen died of lymphoma more than thirty years ago. There is a snapshot of her at a New Year's Eve gala, head thrown back, cardboard-and-spangles party tiara in her glorious hair, perfect teeth bared in a wide smile, bright green chiffon swirling Sufi-like around her legs. Her neck bulged with lymph nodes big as eggs.



She looked ecstatic.