Dandy, Focus, Joy

"Banish the will to be dreary," said the designer Dorothy Draper, when she wrote about giving parties. Draper was a dandy. The dandy chooses high style--bella figura. Cut a beautiful figure. In the end, nature triumphs but until it overcomes us completely, twirl, dress up, decorate. Yet let me tell you, I'm not decorating much--a few strings of bright lights--but I'm enjoying gazing at my neighbors' lights, and avoiding what some have called "a false sense of urgency," by staying away from my computer except to check e-mail and work on poems. There's been enough real urgency. You can imagine--the same things that cause urgency in your lives.

I've seen a few friends in the flesh and gazed at their faces and listened to their stories. I watched artist Melissa Shook's video, Kemper and Me, in which she and Kemper, to whom she was once married, talk about theirs lives with remarkable candor. They are honest without being hurtful, a remarkable feat, especially to someone like me who is quick on the trigger. (I mostly show that side of myself to J.--poor J.) I turned off the flash on my camera and set it for long exposures to pick up night light and motion.

Long exposures on modern cameras are short but take in a lot. So do our eyes and so do we if we focus. I can't force joy. It comes when it will. But let me focus! Tell me: what do you wish for?

Nobility and Self Oblivion

The word "noble" is out of style. "Noble" meaning "honorable." "Noble" meaning "superiority of mind or character." Roland Barthes gives these attributes to his mother and to literature: "Since maman's death, no desire to 'construct' anything--except in writing. Why? Literature = the only region of Nobility (as maman was noble)." I believe him!

Mourning Diary is a record of his mourning for his mother. But this morning I'm also interested in his surprising, idealistic view of literature as the only "region of Nobility." A tremendous claim in these relativistic times. Reading Barthes I feel I return to the idealism of my youth when my teachers, friends and I recoiled from materialism. To Barthes' equation I would add another: Literature = Freedom.

A few weeks ago my friend N. and I were looking at one of her paintings. "The paint takes over," N. said. When paint takes over, the artist is freed from herself. When language takes over, the writer is freed from herself. When artists express the seemingly impossible to express, there is freedom in the work. So today I won't beat a poem to death trying to get it right. Or scrub a pot to an inch of its hard-metal life.

Bumble

Writing is harder than breaking stones, Yeats wrote. Not first drafts but revising. I've been away, revising. Now it's bliss to walk to the pond and bumble around rocks. The dog pack thinned out. I didn't have to avoid the larger dog gang, people with their dogs, sometimes more than a dozen, chattering, beside themselves with cozy fellow feeling. J. calls them smug, entitled, while I say these suburbanites seem to know little about animals. They like to see dogs frolic in packs on play dates. They call it freedom.

Between rocks and dog gangs, I choose rocks--these from Ice Age glaciers.

In the woods a single chocolate lab ran at me hard, eager to play. I liked him, spoke to him, then went on bumbling toward the sun.

Outlaws

Does private life exist anymore? In 1960, E.M. Forster thought private life was finished, at least in England. Without wild nature, he believed, there can be no secret life. England's "greenwood" is gone:

There is no forest or fell to escape to today, no cave in which to curl up, no deserted valley for those who wish neither to reform nor corrupt society but to be left alone. People do still escape, one can see them any night at it in the films. But they are gangsters not outlaws, they can dodge civilization because they are part of it. ("Terminal Note" to Maurice, Forster's novel about men loving men.)

This gentle-sounding notion of "wild"--"forest or fell," "cave" with "curl"--reminds me of Duke Senior's appreciation of the Forest of Arden in As You Like It:

And this our life exempt from public haunt
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones and good in every thing.
I would not change it.

I also like to take "wildness" with goodness and shelter--not sermons, though--and walk in woods as close to my town as Concord Center is to Walden. Forster does not write solely about solitary life. His frame of reference is plural: "those who wish," and "outlaws," not outlaw. I believe he was also thinking of shelter with comrades. "Homosexual acts" were a crime in England until the 1960s.

Some people I know, J., for instance, go into the deep wild woods alone and read books like Alone: The Man Who Braved the Vast Pacific--and Won. When I go for my solitary walks, I sometimes "double off" (Thoreau's language) and enter a story I tell myself, a way of changing one to two--no, not quite. Instead, let's say: oneness deepened as well as lessened. "Tell" maybe too strong. It's a place between telling and reverie.

There's no one way to be. But I wish wild kids had not set fire to this tree no matter how interesting the burn pattern.

Secret places, caves, burrows, deserted valleys, forests, Ardens, Edens, brains--please, don't tell.

Wear and Wild

My work glove split; my thumb poked through. Now I've lost this glove and its mate in the garden, where they are wearing more, like these B. found when digging up a sumac.

B. said she wondered whether she would find a body. No body, no bones, yet right for my kind of Halloween. I lost those gloves years ago. B. and I admired them together--lacy holes, leather thumb dangling, rootlets. I found the label, still intact. The leather was still pliant. After a few days in the house the gloves have stiffened. I'll bury them again.

Some say gardens are tame. Don't believe it! Look closely. The ground hog is digging deep.

A creature has eaten a window-like hole in the pumpkin, carved it, scattered seeds, a wonderfully neat job. My efforts for Halloween will not involve gnawing and digging--no pumpkin carving. Ghosts only in my dreams.

Morris Engel, Photographer

Morris Engel took wonderful pictures! Here's one, "Coney Island."

When I was out walking in the woods with M.S., I pointed to a rocky ledge. "It's comprehensible," said M. The figures in this photo are comprehensible too, aren't they? Tell me, what do you comprehend?

Poetry Party at The Liberty Hotel

Please join the Poetry Party at The Liberty Hotel, formerly the Charles Street Jail!

I'll be reading with Richard Hoffman and Kathleen Spivack, open mike to follow.

Thursday, Oct. 14, 6:30 PM, 215 Charles Street

Boston, MA 02114

Thanks to sponsors Harris Gardner of Tapestry of Voices, The Grolier Poetry Bookshop, and here's to Liberty!

The grunge of the derelict Jail is gone, but the renovation is too sand-blasted clean. The building will age again; new dirt will stick. Let's help those surfaces build up a patina. Our hands will do it. I plan to have a beer in the bar before the reading. Look for me a little before six.

Here are before and after pictures: