Hank Meals
Great food shot from Dr. H. Reminds me somewhat of the erotic flower images from Georgia O'Keeffe.
Friday, August 29, 2008
Three Voices - Works in Progress
Email to the Buffalo
08/28/08 3:51 PM Bersone:
There's more to this than meets the eye. I'll attach latest version
-- it's a little thing, I know, just something I noted down while driving to work -- it's easier to get going on lighter things sometimes. I've had my trouble getting going after the last two weeks.
Going Too Fast To Stop
Something has fallen off the truck
What’s in the package
That tumbled from the truck
Still taped up
It bounces on its corners
As another truck blows past it
What’s in the package
Bouncing along the concrete wall
The wall between the bridge
The bridge and the gray cold water
With its murky facets
Below the low dawn sky
Is there something of ourselves
Wrapped in the package
That will never be opened
The package bouncing fatefully
Only a short wall
Between it and the water
It seems to jump by itself
But that’s only the momentum of its fall
Whatever of ourselves is inside
Is at the mercy of its fate
It has no inner direction whatsoever
But there’s something in that goddamn package
I tell you
It’s jumping by itself
Like a Mexican jumping bean
There’s something inside
And it has fallen off the truck
Still taped up!
08/28/08 5:21 PM Buff:
Yes, yes. Getting tight. It’s a fascinating concept – something of us in a taped up package bouncing down the road as if of its own accord – something alive yet hidden, unknowable except in the imagination – something we must trust about ourselves. Fascinating. It holds the reader like a magnet.
08/28/08 3:51 PM Bersone:
There's more to this than meets the eye. I'll attach latest version
-- it's a little thing, I know, just something I noted down while driving to work -- it's easier to get going on lighter things sometimes. I've had my trouble getting going after the last two weeks.
Going Too Fast To Stop
Something has fallen off the truck
What’s in the package
That tumbled from the truck
Still taped up
It bounces on its corners
As another truck blows past it
What’s in the package
Bouncing along the concrete wall
The wall between the bridge
The bridge and the gray cold water
With its murky facets
Below the low dawn sky
Is there something of ourselves
Wrapped in the package
That will never be opened
The package bouncing fatefully
Only a short wall
Between it and the water
It seems to jump by itself
But that’s only the momentum of its fall
Whatever of ourselves is inside
Is at the mercy of its fate
It has no inner direction whatsoever
But there’s something in that goddamn package
I tell you
It’s jumping by itself
Like a Mexican jumping bean
There’s something inside
And it has fallen off the truck
Still taped up!
08/28/08 5:21 PM Buff:
Yes, yes. Getting tight. It’s a fascinating concept – something of us in a taped up package bouncing down the road as if of its own accord – something alive yet hidden, unknowable except in the imagination – something we must trust about ourselves. Fascinating. It holds the reader like a magnet.
08/28/08 2:13 PM Buff:
I shouldn’t do this, but I’m attaching something that has occupied my attention for the last few days. Can’t quite seem to make anything out of it, but still feel there might be something there.
THE WIND
By your will does this wind blow
Through the hollow chambers
Of this ailing heart.
Is that your voice I hear,
Or the craggy surface of the mountain
laughing at these tears?
Over the breathing sea
Salt air whispers,
Shhh, I bring you life,
Shhh, I breathe for you,
Shhh, I give you dreams.
Sand rises from the desert floor,
Riding the wind like flocks of sparrows.
Dust settles on the mountain pine,
Where Jays feed on nuts and insects.
All great lands and seas comingle,
Riding on the wind,
The song of earth.
By your will does this great wind blow
Through the hollow chambers
Of this ailing heart.
You sing my joy and my grief,
You sing my dream through this long night,
You sing my soul into the darkness,
Yet,
you do not
know my
name.
08/28/08 6:30 PM Bersone:
I just read it through a couple of times: beautiful grief, transcendent yet felt. Your courage and availability, trembling at the brim yet not spilling over: what we learned many times in the sixties: we're surrounded by heroes. When we think about it: two million years of history behind us, every bravery and tenderness making room for each other, like the Italian movie about shoes where the guy hides his gold coin in a horse's hoof: fools, wonderful fools, doing what we do under the indifferent beauty of the stars. The poem is very good. Yeats once said that the mood of tragedy should be sorrowful calm, yet yours lifts, and lifts. It makes you think about wind.
08/20/08 8:52 AM Buff:
Here’s a poem Wendy wrote in response to the news story about the woman who died on the emergency room floor:
Managed Care
Blinding light
Binding plight
Doctor's waiting room
Heart a flight
Wait all night
Prostrate on the floor
Linoleum tile
Magazine pile
In a different room
Cold steel bench
Disinfectant stench
Staring at the door
Dr. Important arrives
Downcast eyes
Tell me why you're here
Pages flutter
Did the Patient mutter?
What, I didn't hear
08/21/08 7:05 AM Bersone:
Doctor Important! That's classic. Form is tight, strict rhythm. I wonder who she's read to write so disciplined. If it's natural, it's rare. Emily Dickenson-like, compact. I'll have to read her blog and drop her a note. Next week or this weekend I hope. It excites me to talk to Wendy about poetry. Dr. Important, that kills me.
08/27/08 9:05 AM Bersone:
This is to you Wendy: a note to tell you how much I liked your poem: very well-observed, and felt: the tough eye in the poem keeps the feelings in check, making them stronger by such severe containment and we get the wonderful humor as a result. Terza Rima I think, the form, I'll have to look it up. An Italian form. The magazines! Who doesn't notice them in those surroundings! There's a couple of lines in a Leonard Cohen song: "on a chair with a dead magazine / in a room where love's never been" Anyway, great poem. Says a lot for everyone. All my best to you and hope to hear more poetry from you. Stan Rice would have loved you poem.
-- Gene
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Where You At?
Hip lyrics from way back when – Slim Gaillard & Slam Stewart days
Medium swing tempo. Street hipster style. Don't remember who did this one - probably Slim.
(SING)
Where you at?
Where's your natural habitat?
Baby where you at?
I wanna go there
Where's the place?
Which direction should I face?
Baby where you at?
I wanna go there
(BLOW YOUR HORN)
I was doing fine
'Til I heard you call.
I've been searchin' everywhere
But I can't find you nowhere at all
So, where you at?
Tell me 'fore I flip my hat
Baby, where you at?
I wanna go there.
(TAKE A BOW)
LINKS
PUT YOUR HEADSET ON!
Great YouTube of Slam in 1947!
Check out this link for Slam on MySpace!
This is one I remember from the Jazz At The Philharmonic days – circa the ‘50s:
Slim Gaillard singing, playing guitar and even playing piano at one point – a classic. If I can ever figure out how to put music up on this site, I’ll provide a copy for anyone who wants to hear it.
Hit that Jivin Jack,
Put it in your pocket
Till I get back,
I’m goin down town
To see a man
And I ain’t got time
To shake yo hand.
LINKS
Slim Gaillard info
Slim Gaillard on YouTube #1
Slim Gaillard on YouTube #2
A fabulous video apparently from an old movie. Don't miss this one!
More groovy pics:
Slim Gaillard - Oh so hip!
Group shot with Slam - I see Diz in there.
Monday, August 11, 2008
On Jazz Music & Henry Miller
Email to the Buffalo
08/08/08 5:50 AM Bersone:
coincidentally the radio popped on this morning to John Coltrane and Miles, not exactly the same quintet you mentioned, no cannonball, but I was struck by the piano player hitting notes just behind coltrane, which must have taken close anticipation to know so unerringly. like fucking, but better, in a way, I mean, no comical cleanup, like my first whore, in Kansas city that morning, the sun coming in through the yellow shade of the tenderloin hotel, jumped onto the corner sink in the room and vigorously washed it out, her wet soapy hand making a sloppy popping sound that caused the romance to abate somewhat although a deft piano player may have been able to play sweetly behind her.
08/08/08 6:54 AM Buff :
Jazz is an interesting art form where there is no time to think - what a relief. In a group such as the one you mentioned the form is collective spontaneity on the highest level. It takes discipline, hard and persistent work, dedication and a mastery of craft to get there, and then you forget all that, empty your mind, open your ears, ignore the ego and disappear into the flow. When you reach that place, in that moment, the music is playing you. What a wonderful feeling that is - not unlike flying in a dream. We used to say that if we can reach that place for only just one moment a year, it is worth all the gig, travel, ego bullshit that it takes to get there. Miles, Coltrane, Bill Evans, these guys get there every time they pick up their horn. It is an astounding accomplishment. Movements, responses such as you mentioned happen automatically in that place of sweet and utter surrender to the music. It is marvelous to hear, and when the listener has learned to empty the mind, open the ears, and give up the ego, he, too, can fly through the dream. It was Clifford Brown who brought me to that place for the first time, though I had been listening "at" jazz for several years. When I heard his sweet sound and lyrical lines I fell into his flowing energy like a leaf falling into a river. It changed me forever, and most likely saved my life.
And yes, for sure, no sloppy clean up. :)
08/09/08 11:50 AM Bersone:
No time to think! That's the relief; suddenly you can surprise yourself with what you didn't know you knew. When I was working at the bank that second or third time, driving home with Maria Cooper, that finely shaped black girl, I remember being awakened by a billboard, which I later learned was part of an art project, of a pair of hands holding some burning oranges. It caught my eye immediately, and I watched it over the next few days, wondering what commercial message they would attach to it. Nothing appeared, just the image. I ran across an old notation this morning, as I was cleaning things out, with that image, followed by another I picked up on a documentary of India, which I'll append to this missive at the end.
I was leafing through Henry Miller's days in Paris, that big picture book of yours, and he was talking about feeling so much like an outsider in this country, that he felt so outside America emotionally -- and that was back in the sixties.
I've got to simplify things. That life Henry described at Big Sur when nobody was there sounds good. I've been told Portugal or Croatia and cheap and beautiful. Re-read Words for the Wind, a Roethke poem that's been going through my mind for a couple of weeks:
... mad in the wind I wear
myself as I should be
most lovingly: I breathe
our musical ruminations are helping me, and I'll take Monk to the lake. ruby, my dear, quite tender -- apparently an adolescent love.
ceremonies
cupped hands proffer
burning oranges
on a billboard
floating candles burn
in rocking coconut shells
at night, on the Ganges --
to acknowledge the paradox
that the Monsoon gives
and takes life
I bet that reality you describe in which the music plays you is described somewhere as a profound Buddhist reality. What the great thinkers and artists and social visionaries have been getting at.
08/11/08 8:24 AM Buff :
I have this thought about Henry feeling outside America emotionally:
Aren’t we all, and mustn’t we all be? If we were to fall in step with the political and social consciousness of the day we would be stepping back in time 100 or more years! That sort of consciousness moves at the pace of the lowest common denominator. The artist necessarily rushes ahead to the rim, the outer edge of human experience and pushes, pushes against the force that holds us in. We want to pop the bubble and run headlong into the dream without a safety net. The artist is not concerned with survival, self preservation, the so called “future”. We know instinctively that there is no future; this is it, and we want to know it all. Henry emerged at the time of the birth of capitalism, which is one of the many bastard children of fear and greed. We have emerged at the time when capitalism is exploding like Fourth of July fireworks, shattering like a supernova, shuttering in its death rattle. We cannot waste our time dawdling in all this social drama. We must, by the will of our deepest instincts, fly ahead, beyond, into the unchartered space of the ultimate. We are the shooting stars of this galaxy and it is our job to shine high in the sky beyond the reach of the land lubbers who wallow in their daily mud. We are dreamers, my brother. It is our destiny to dream. Henry was our forefather; now is our time.
08/08/08 5:50 AM Bersone:coincidentally the radio popped on this morning to John Coltrane and Miles, not exactly the same quintet you mentioned, no cannonball, but I was struck by the piano player hitting notes just behind coltrane, which must have taken close anticipation to know so unerringly. like fucking, but better, in a way, I mean, no comical cleanup, like my first whore, in Kansas city that morning, the sun coming in through the yellow shade of the tenderloin hotel, jumped onto the corner sink in the room and vigorously washed it out, her wet soapy hand making a sloppy popping sound that caused the romance to abate somewhat although a deft piano player may have been able to play sweetly behind her.
08/08/08 6:54 AM Buff :
Jazz is an interesting art form where there is no time to think - what a relief. In a group such as the one you mentioned the form is collective spontaneity on the highest level. It takes discipline, hard and persistent work, dedication and a mastery of craft to get there, and then you forget all that, empty your mind, open your ears, ignore the ego and disappear into the flow. When you reach that place, in that moment, the music is playing you. What a wonderful feeling that is - not unlike flying in a dream. We used to say that if we can reach that place for only just one moment a year, it is worth all the gig, travel, ego bullshit that it takes to get there. Miles, Coltrane, Bill Evans, these guys get there every time they pick up their horn. It is an astounding accomplishment. Movements, responses such as you mentioned happen automatically in that place of sweet and utter surrender to the music. It is marvelous to hear, and when the listener has learned to empty the mind, open the ears, and give up the ego, he, too, can fly through the dream. It was Clifford Brown who brought me to that place for the first time, though I had been listening "at" jazz for several years. When I heard his sweet sound and lyrical lines I fell into his flowing energy like a leaf falling into a river. It changed me forever, and most likely saved my life.
And yes, for sure, no sloppy clean up. :)
08/09/08 11:50 AM Bersone:
No time to think! That's the relief; suddenly you can surprise yourself with what you didn't know you knew. When I was working at the bank that second or third time, driving home with Maria Cooper, that finely shaped black girl, I remember being awakened by a billboard, which I later learned was part of an art project, of a pair of hands holding some burning oranges. It caught my eye immediately, and I watched it over the next few days, wondering what commercial message they would attach to it. Nothing appeared, just the image. I ran across an old notation this morning, as I was cleaning things out, with that image, followed by another I picked up on a documentary of India, which I'll append to this missive at the end.
I was leafing through Henry Miller's days in Paris, that big picture book of yours, and he was talking about feeling so much like an outsider in this country, that he felt so outside America emotionally -- and that was back in the sixties.I've got to simplify things. That life Henry described at Big Sur when nobody was there sounds good. I've been told Portugal or Croatia and cheap and beautiful. Re-read Words for the Wind, a Roethke poem that's been going through my mind for a couple of weeks:
... mad in the wind I wear
myself as I should be
most lovingly: I breathe
our musical ruminations are helping me, and I'll take Monk to the lake. ruby, my dear, quite tender -- apparently an adolescent love.
ceremonies
cupped hands proffer
burning oranges
on a billboard
floating candles burn
in rocking coconut shells
at night, on the Ganges --
to acknowledge the paradox
that the Monsoon gives
and takes life
I bet that reality you describe in which the music plays you is described somewhere as a profound Buddhist reality. What the great thinkers and artists and social visionaries have been getting at.
08/11/08 8:24 AM Buff :
I have this thought about Henry feeling outside America emotionally:
Aren’t we all, and mustn’t we all be? If we were to fall in step with the political and social consciousness of the day we would be stepping back in time 100 or more years! That sort of consciousness moves at the pace of the lowest common denominator. The artist necessarily rushes ahead to the rim, the outer edge of human experience and pushes, pushes against the force that holds us in. We want to pop the bubble and run headlong into the dream without a safety net. The artist is not concerned with survival, self preservation, the so called “future”. We know instinctively that there is no future; this is it, and we want to know it all. Henry emerged at the time of the birth of capitalism, which is one of the many bastard children of fear and greed. We have emerged at the time when capitalism is exploding like Fourth of July fireworks, shattering like a supernova, shuttering in its death rattle. We cannot waste our time dawdling in all this social drama. We must, by the will of our deepest instincts, fly ahead, beyond, into the unchartered space of the ultimate. We are the shooting stars of this galaxy and it is our job to shine high in the sky beyond the reach of the land lubbers who wallow in their daily mud. We are dreamers, my brother. It is our destiny to dream. Henry was our forefather; now is our time.
Monday, August 4, 2008
The Acoustic World & Other Poems in Progress - Bersone
Email to the Buffalo
07/20/08 6:43 AM Bersone:
Buffalo
I heard an interesting interview on http://www.ttbook.org/ with d j spooky, who just wrote a book called Journal Unbound and has
a latest cd out, Rebel Creation -- influenced by Cage and into the digital collage world we live in where people rip, mix and remix: plagarism displacing individual conceptual genius into a mix -- more like how it was in Shakespeare's day actually. Very confirming of your work. MIT press issued book. I attach poem I mentioned this morning, re: global warming circa mid seventies. Mucho Mulato adiamente quel que fois!Attachment:
(oneski)
geno-cide
brown smoghaze fades into the infinite today
smothering the hills of Marin from view
dead starfish roll onto the beach in small
sick waves
another weird
dry winter
where is the lyric poet
without clear air?
we eat mushrooms & run around Point Reyes naked
the deer don’t mind us & we hear the wings of crows
breaking overhead, as we lie still in the gray grass
back in the city
we eat pizza & pass out
exhausted, having wrestled another physical day
from the death going on all around
everybody working too goddamned hard for the wrong things
we’re at the top of the seashell: the spirals going faster & faster
we’re at the top & all about to crash & even that’s no news:
what the fuck are we going to do?
how can you not follow your nose?
(twoski)
eleven convicts escaped city jail
A snitch tipped the cops that one
was holed up in a hotel downtown.
They surrounded the place, broke
down doors & windows, shot teargas
into his room: waited. He didn’t come out.
Finally they busted in only to find him sleeping.
“didn’t the teargas bother you?” they asked.
“Not really,” he replied. “I just
thought it was a little smoggier than usual.”
We breathe the same air, convicts & I.
We have many similar convictions.
SF, 1977
07/21/08 6:55 AM Buff:
I like the Oneski, Twoski rhythms. The piece is like brilliant shards of glass glimmering in the morning sun - each shard complete within its shattered self. A few shards that caught my eye immediately: "we hear the wings of crows" "the spirals going faster & faster" "We breathe the same air, convicts & I" Your eye in the center of your humor brings a pleasing depth. You said that Valline didn't respond to this. Again, I think she may be taking herself way too seriously, looking for something "epic" and missing the jewels you expose right there in the gravel of our daily lives. I'd like to see Threeski, Fourski, etc. Perhaps the driving poems could be added in this sequence. However they are organized isn't all that important. Each is a little peek at the truth; the delightful truth of this marvelously absurd life.
07/21/08 5:50 AM Bersone:
thank you for your cherished and respected responses to my poems, which I rarely acknowledge but which mean so much to me. I must share a little thing I observed/overheard this evening, as I approached the BART stairs on Market and fourth in the cold summer fog of the city: a middle aged black man was retrieving, unexpectedly it seemed, an almost unsmoked cigarette from the pebbled trash receptacle, and almost absent-mindedly remarked to himself quietly as I passed hurriedly by, "You can pretty much give up the chastity pose." obviously an educated man down on his luck. I wished I'd had the presence of mind to slip him a twenty, but the rush swept me by as he dropped his pearl into my ear, completely free and dearly earned
07/22/08 5:53 AM Buff:
Wow! What a gift.
I heard this one recently from a black man talking in a loud voice on his cell phone as he passed through a small crowd of us waiting for access to the sidewalk ATMs:
"Girlfriend? Girlfriend! The only girlfriend that nigger ever had was his right hand!" None of us so much as flinched, stoic and hardened as we are.
:)
07/25/08 6:33 AM Bersone:
Man I wish I was up there; I'm in uncharted territory here, on about my seventeenth or eighteenth day. El bizarro not zorro: attaching a little thing I've been plucking at for a couple of days before work, it's turned into something of a hodgepodge but it'll sort itself out. Different ways to get a sense of the whole hanging together, sometimes the structure and sound of the words, sometimes the theme and content, sometimes a voice, sometimes trying to connect dots in the chaos like seeing leo in the stars. So many people agree that three stars are Orion's belt you've got to wonder if its mass hypnosis. Hope you're refreshing yourself. No emotion's pure but only emotion endures.
Attachment:
This Acoustic World
The snarl of Hell’s Angels’ Harleys
comforts me, as their bikes land
and take off through the night,
giving a little vibrato to the cello
playing Brahms on the radio.
I think this is because the universe is so deep
at this time of night -- the sound
of the threat
seems to stretch and
bend until it is finally
absorbed into the resolving silence.
And yet we’re so afraid to let ourselves out!
In a world that can take everything you’ve got!
I think of you in our house in the foothills
and wonder what you hear –
maybe rain
on the ivy outside the window or
deer delicately stepping between sticks,
as if trying to avoid walking on the dead
who are everywhere in the living ground.
I am listening to you listening far away
just that much extension
of whatever I am makes me
sense possibilities beyond myself, and I
battling for a buck in the bay area
am an exile
from a promising dimension
where all my real responsibilities lie hapless
abandoned as my grandfather’s tools
after a stroke paralyzed his left side.
Saturday, August 2, 2008
On D. H. Lawrence - "Piano" "Conceit"
Email to the Buffalo
05/01/08 9:24 PM Bersone:
I've been enthralled by what Lawrence called "the insideous mastery of song / my manhood cast down" in a poem wherein he remembers back to sitting with his mother at the piano, singing, the thread of smoke from a cigarette reminding him of one of her gray hairs he pulled off his coat, as he buried her, I believe: but there it is: the insideous mastery of song: in my case the turbulent emotions evoked by the Time / Life best of Country Love songs offered on TV: then the movie about Bob Dylan, evoking images of Jesus, and an old memory of me in Korea during a rainstorm, huddled under a poncho, reading the bible with a flashlight, thinking about what I was going to do when I returned to the United States. I went to my computer, thinking to add to my memoir, starting with this scene, which I liken as a prelude to a period similar to what you went through in Ft. Bragg, a point where we had the chance to set our lives strategically. These turning points, whether we were able to spirit ually pivot or not, are points of great clarity, portals almost, which we can revisit for a perspective on the universe because they offer clarity, clarity usually obscured by the necessities of the moment, our need to get a job or whatever. But I could not find my memoirs in my computer (I'm sure because I'm not looking in quite the right place) and will have to bring it up tomorrow. But in my looking I came up with an old poem I wrote about being with Carolina in Maccu Piccu which I will attach. (when I can find it)
05/02/08 12:49 PM Buff:
Piano
Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.
In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cozy parlor, the tinkling piano our guide.
So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamor
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamor
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.
D.H. Lawrence
Music is a strange alchemy. It's completely invisible, passing through all the physical senses without hesitation, directly to the soul. It's effects cannot be measured and often not even verbalized. It is tonal abstraction, a manner of fucking with the emotions. It can be dangerous, boring and monotonous, while it can also be enlivening, thoughtful, moving, and satisfying. It can trigger otherwise lost memories in their truest essence, an essence that may have been originally missed. I think Lawrence used the word "insidious" because the memory worked on him until it wore him down and "betrayed" him back to his now lost childhood where his "manhood is cast down", dissolved, leaving him a weeping child in a man's body. This is as close to sentimentality that one will ever see Lawrence be. But, yes, I can hear you, it is beyond sentimentality, past that sometimes frivolous emotion to something much more tangible, a specter that once recalled from the darkness refuses to leave, a dark and stubborn spirit. One can be haunted by music, by a memory the music brings up. Lawrence was delicate and fragile, while he was also huge and thundering. I think I can say that I love Lawrence as a man in a way that I have not loved any other artist I do not know, whose work has touched me, including Henry. Lawrence never gave an inch, never worked to cover anything, always revealing, revealing, peeling away layer by layer infinitely working toward the truth, the core of the truth. He can know the spirit of a snake, and he can weep like a child.
Yes, the image of you in Korea is a great subject for meditation. I hope you do go back there to see what you find. This is the clarity I seek, not what I have called the unbearable clarity one finds in modern society where truth is intentionally obscured to bolster the bottom line. The clarity of truth is like spring water alongside a hot and dusty road. Refreshing in the deepest sense. It is only in the realm of my imagination that I have found this quality of truth, clarity of truth. One day I will go there and never ever return. You will understand, and perhaps join me.
I am trying to regain control of my life, live in the moment, dream while awake, travel to worlds that have no boundaries. Suddenly I know what they mean when they say, Dancing on the head of a pin. I think that one day I will be able to do it. We shall see.
Buff
05/02/08 12:52 Buff:
Conceit
It is conceit that kills us
and makes us cowards instead of gods.
Under the great Command: Know thy self, and that thou art mortal!
we have become fatally self-conscious, fatally self-important,
fatally entangled in the cocoon coils of our conceit.
Now we have to admit we can't know ourselves, we can only know about ourselves.
And I am not interested to know about myself any more,
I only entangle myself in the knowing.
Now let me be myself,
now let me be myself, and flicker forth,
now let me be myself, in the being, one of the gods.
D H Lawrence
05/02/08 3:51 PM Bersone:
April has drawn its mood around us with a close sky, disturbed by wind alternated with premonitions of heat: I can see why it is Hank's favorite season here: no tourists of course, but green, sedated by green, enlivened by green. Today he and Larry are walking Steven's Trail. I stayed home, having written past midnight and my time growing short, since I return Sunday. I wish I had had your mother's training concerning money, and had the discipline she instilled in you. Still, thinking of Huck Finn lying on his raft, watching the smoke from his pipe rise into the overarching trees, I remember him saying, "I like to lazy on my raft like this . . ." And so the balance, like a bucket, brimmed with water, trembles at a breeze yet does not spill over. Such is my life: full to overfull, yet held at the brim. The structure has held.
Your comments are deeply informed with an aesthetic knowledge earned by a lifetime of paying attention. Who would have guessed? Such attention has done life honor.
The cat is at home on the deck, reclining sensuously in the sun or closed into herself during a breeze. The hummingbirds thrum the air like rubber bands. I am grateful for you, my friend. I have been reading my work outloud, and am excited about it. I have done a lot more than I have shown.
05/05/08 7:55 PM Buff:
Life is an art form of the highest order. We are here to live, nothing more. There is nothing to learn and nothing to teach. All essential parts are included in the package. Here you are; now go for it. Make a world of joy, make a hell of torture. Whatever. We are born illusionists. Magicians. You’ve got a life, now go out and play. No whining, no pleading or wishing, prayer is a waste of time. Huck Finn had it all figured out: “I like to laze on my raft”, there is nothing better to do, and strum your lute while you’re at it. All this crap about achievements is just honky bullshit, a form of enslavement. It took me almost 70 years to figure this shit out. A little slow on the up take, to say the least. No matter, every moment is a new life, a new song to sing, a new illusion to conjure. Life is joy, pure unadulterated joy! Delicious! Mmmmmm!
05/10/08 6:25 PM Bersone
Buff,
My father had a fire engine red 1951 Studebaker, designed by a famous industrial designer, I forget his name,
who placed a propeller at the nose; it was a car ahead of its time. I knew a guy who owned a 1947 Studebaker tow truck, also. Eventually the Studebaker gave way to the big three automakers of the fifties. I know something about this heart problem because my old real estate partner had a lot of problems involving his heart, brought on by smoking. He had a device implanted that would go off once in awhile, because his heartbeat would take off. He had had a heart attack and had some damaged cells which, every now and then, would get confused and thought that maybe they should take off, which threw the heart rhythm off and it would pound like mad until the defibrillator would race ahead of the heart, go off, and gradually ratchet the whole thing back down into a normal rhythmic range. This was the least of his problems: he had had cancer, from which they told him he would die twentyfive years before he did die, heart disease, and significant lung damage from heavy smoking. The last episode left him with an oxygen tank which he was supposed to use constantly but he eventually cast it aside. He was in the hallway of his apartment building, which he was remodeling, a massive job, when he suddenly needed his air. He yelled for his air to the speedfreak who helped him to get the tank but he had failed to educate the man as to which tank was full and which empty.
Unfortunately, the guy grabbed the wrong one. I showed up after he had been lying without air for at least three minutes and accompanied him to the hospital but he never recovered consciousness. I never knew a man who endured so many physical ailments without ever losing the twinkle in his eye.
His life story was a movie to behold. He was about ten years older than me and, during the Korean war, lied about his age and went off to war in an engineering unit. There was about eighteen guys stuck on a small rock island, under fire, and they had looped a cable through an eye hook in the rock and the engineers were attempting to drive sections of bridge powered by outboard motors to the cable to hook it up and gradually create the bridge. My friend told his partner, "You know it's our turn next and you can see that everybody's getting killed; so when I drive over there pretend to hook up and we'll be carried down river and get the fuck out of here." This is what happened but they realized then, after washing ashore miles away that they were deserters in the middle of a war halfway around the world from home. They fell in with a bunch of prostitutes, their contribution being that because they knew how to get onto bases and camps, they were able to make off with chickens, foodstuffs and various uniforms and clothing.
Eventually the other guy turned himself in but my partner kept up his lifestyle for some months. Eventually he traded for a water truck, which was a great advantage to the whores who weren't allowed past the frontlines, where all the money was. He'd drain off a quarter of the water and fill the truck with women, their heads just above water so they could breathe, and he'd be waived through, no problem. Once out of sight, he'd let them out to ply their trade and gradually make their way back to where they all lived. Eventually, he climbed up a pagoda and pretended he was going to jump off the roof. This brought in psychiatrists whom he allowed to gradually talk him down. Once down, he feigned amnesia to avoid desertion charges, and was hospitalized for several months where he gradually allowed his memory to return. Once it all came back to him the medical authorities proclaimed him a success story and sent him back to the states.
I spent a couple of nights with him, taking his pulse and counting the time between beats -- the whole thing was amazing that he lived through. From what I know of this, you probably have a long way to go, but who knows? I certainly hope so. One thing for sure -- we did it our way!
05/01/08 9:24 PM Bersone:I've been enthralled by what Lawrence called "the insideous mastery of song / my manhood cast down" in a poem wherein he remembers back to sitting with his mother at the piano, singing, the thread of smoke from a cigarette reminding him of one of her gray hairs he pulled off his coat, as he buried her, I believe: but there it is: the insideous mastery of song: in my case the turbulent emotions evoked by the Time / Life best of Country Love songs offered on TV: then the movie about Bob Dylan, evoking images of Jesus, and an old memory of me in Korea during a rainstorm, huddled under a poncho, reading the bible with a flashlight, thinking about what I was going to do when I returned to the United States. I went to my computer, thinking to add to my memoir, starting with this scene, which I liken as a prelude to a period similar to what you went through in Ft. Bragg, a point where we had the chance to set our lives strategically. These turning points, whether we were able to spirit ually pivot or not, are points of great clarity, portals almost, which we can revisit for a perspective on the universe because they offer clarity, clarity usually obscured by the necessities of the moment, our need to get a job or whatever. But I could not find my memoirs in my computer (I'm sure because I'm not looking in quite the right place) and will have to bring it up tomorrow. But in my looking I came up with an old poem I wrote about being with Carolina in Maccu Piccu which I will attach. (when I can find it)
05/02/08 12:49 PM Buff:
Piano
Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.
In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cozy parlor, the tinkling piano our guide.
So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamor
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamor
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.
D.H. Lawrence
Music is a strange alchemy. It's completely invisible, passing through all the physical senses without hesitation, directly to the soul. It's effects cannot be measured and often not even verbalized. It is tonal abstraction, a manner of fucking with the emotions. It can be dangerous, boring and monotonous, while it can also be enlivening, thoughtful, moving, and satisfying. It can trigger otherwise lost memories in their truest essence, an essence that may have been originally missed. I think Lawrence used the word "insidious" because the memory worked on him until it wore him down and "betrayed" him back to his now lost childhood where his "manhood is cast down", dissolved, leaving him a weeping child in a man's body. This is as close to sentimentality that one will ever see Lawrence be. But, yes, I can hear you, it is beyond sentimentality, past that sometimes frivolous emotion to something much more tangible, a specter that once recalled from the darkness refuses to leave, a dark and stubborn spirit. One can be haunted by music, by a memory the music brings up. Lawrence was delicate and fragile, while he was also huge and thundering. I think I can say that I love Lawrence as a man in a way that I have not loved any other artist I do not know, whose work has touched me, including Henry. Lawrence never gave an inch, never worked to cover anything, always revealing, revealing, peeling away layer by layer infinitely working toward the truth, the core of the truth. He can know the spirit of a snake, and he can weep like a child.
Yes, the image of you in Korea is a great subject for meditation. I hope you do go back there to see what you find. This is the clarity I seek, not what I have called the unbearable clarity one finds in modern society where truth is intentionally obscured to bolster the bottom line. The clarity of truth is like spring water alongside a hot and dusty road. Refreshing in the deepest sense. It is only in the realm of my imagination that I have found this quality of truth, clarity of truth. One day I will go there and never ever return. You will understand, and perhaps join me.
I am trying to regain control of my life, live in the moment, dream while awake, travel to worlds that have no boundaries. Suddenly I know what they mean when they say, Dancing on the head of a pin. I think that one day I will be able to do it. We shall see.
Buff
05/02/08 12:52 Buff:
Conceit
It is conceit that kills us
and makes us cowards instead of gods.
Under the great Command: Know thy self, and that thou art mortal!
we have become fatally self-conscious, fatally self-important,
fatally entangled in the cocoon coils of our conceit.
Now we have to admit we can't know ourselves, we can only know about ourselves.
And I am not interested to know about myself any more,
I only entangle myself in the knowing.
Now let me be myself,
now let me be myself, and flicker forth,
now let me be myself, in the being, one of the gods.
D H Lawrence
05/02/08 3:51 PM Bersone:April has drawn its mood around us with a close sky, disturbed by wind alternated with premonitions of heat: I can see why it is Hank's favorite season here: no tourists of course, but green, sedated by green, enlivened by green. Today he and Larry are walking Steven's Trail. I stayed home, having written past midnight and my time growing short, since I return Sunday. I wish I had had your mother's training concerning money, and had the discipline she instilled in you. Still, thinking of Huck Finn lying on his raft, watching the smoke from his pipe rise into the overarching trees, I remember him saying, "I like to lazy on my raft like this . . ." And so the balance, like a bucket, brimmed with water, trembles at a breeze yet does not spill over. Such is my life: full to overfull, yet held at the brim. The structure has held.
Your comments are deeply informed with an aesthetic knowledge earned by a lifetime of paying attention. Who would have guessed? Such attention has done life honor.
The cat is at home on the deck, reclining sensuously in the sun or closed into herself during a breeze. The hummingbirds thrum the air like rubber bands. I am grateful for you, my friend. I have been reading my work outloud, and am excited about it. I have done a lot more than I have shown.
05/05/08 7:55 PM Buff:
Life is an art form of the highest order. We are here to live, nothing more. There is nothing to learn and nothing to teach. All essential parts are included in the package. Here you are; now go for it. Make a world of joy, make a hell of torture. Whatever. We are born illusionists. Magicians. You’ve got a life, now go out and play. No whining, no pleading or wishing, prayer is a waste of time. Huck Finn had it all figured out: “I like to laze on my raft”, there is nothing better to do, and strum your lute while you’re at it. All this crap about achievements is just honky bullshit, a form of enslavement. It took me almost 70 years to figure this shit out. A little slow on the up take, to say the least. No matter, every moment is a new life, a new song to sing, a new illusion to conjure. Life is joy, pure unadulterated joy! Delicious! Mmmmmm!
05/10/08 6:25 PM Bersone
Buff,
My father had a fire engine red 1951 Studebaker, designed by a famous industrial designer, I forget his name,
who placed a propeller at the nose; it was a car ahead of its time. I knew a guy who owned a 1947 Studebaker tow truck, also. Eventually the Studebaker gave way to the big three automakers of the fifties. I know something about this heart problem because my old real estate partner had a lot of problems involving his heart, brought on by smoking. He had a device implanted that would go off once in awhile, because his heartbeat would take off. He had had a heart attack and had some damaged cells which, every now and then, would get confused and thought that maybe they should take off, which threw the heart rhythm off and it would pound like mad until the defibrillator would race ahead of the heart, go off, and gradually ratchet the whole thing back down into a normal rhythmic range. This was the least of his problems: he had had cancer, from which they told him he would die twentyfive years before he did die, heart disease, and significant lung damage from heavy smoking. The last episode left him with an oxygen tank which he was supposed to use constantly but he eventually cast it aside. He was in the hallway of his apartment building, which he was remodeling, a massive job, when he suddenly needed his air. He yelled for his air to the speedfreak who helped him to get the tank but he had failed to educate the man as to which tank was full and which empty.Unfortunately, the guy grabbed the wrong one. I showed up after he had been lying without air for at least three minutes and accompanied him to the hospital but he never recovered consciousness. I never knew a man who endured so many physical ailments without ever losing the twinkle in his eye.
His life story was a movie to behold. He was about ten years older than me and, during the Korean war, lied about his age and went off to war in an engineering unit. There was about eighteen guys stuck on a small rock island, under fire, and they had looped a cable through an eye hook in the rock and the engineers were attempting to drive sections of bridge powered by outboard motors to the cable to hook it up and gradually create the bridge. My friend told his partner, "You know it's our turn next and you can see that everybody's getting killed; so when I drive over there pretend to hook up and we'll be carried down river and get the fuck out of here." This is what happened but they realized then, after washing ashore miles away that they were deserters in the middle of a war halfway around the world from home. They fell in with a bunch of prostitutes, their contribution being that because they knew how to get onto bases and camps, they were able to make off with chickens, foodstuffs and various uniforms and clothing.
Eventually the other guy turned himself in but my partner kept up his lifestyle for some months. Eventually he traded for a water truck, which was a great advantage to the whores who weren't allowed past the frontlines, where all the money was. He'd drain off a quarter of the water and fill the truck with women, their heads just above water so they could breathe, and he'd be waived through, no problem. Once out of sight, he'd let them out to ply their trade and gradually make their way back to where they all lived. Eventually, he climbed up a pagoda and pretended he was going to jump off the roof. This brought in psychiatrists whom he allowed to gradually talk him down. Once down, he feigned amnesia to avoid desertion charges, and was hospitalized for several months where he gradually allowed his memory to return. Once it all came back to him the medical authorities proclaimed him a success story and sent him back to the states.
I spent a couple of nights with him, taking his pulse and counting the time between beats -- the whole thing was amazing that he lived through. From what I know of this, you probably have a long way to go, but who knows? I certainly hope so. One thing for sure -- we did it our way!
Friday, August 1, 2008
Photo by Larry Miller
American Back Yard
(Click photo to enlarge)
To purchase a print of this image go to: http://FloandLarry.imagekind.com
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