A Southward Tide

Poems, essays and excerpts. A favorite quote or two. An observation. A compendium of imagery. A dream analysis.

Month: October, 2013

October 10, 2013

The Ocean of Notions

I start with this question: is great writing a psychological or a spiritual exercise?

Why do so many writers eclipse themselves with mind-numbing substance? Is it to quiet the daily mind, to let go of the ego with its to-do lists and cannot’s and should have’s? Our mind is the world’s angriest prisoner, a recividist banging at the shell of our body, using us up foolishly. Great literature frees us from what we know or have known. Einstein says, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” So it must come from elsewhere.

In Salman Rushdie’s first children’s book, Haroun travels to the earth’s second moon Khahani to restore his father’s storytelling tap, where fresh stories had once poured in from the Sea of Stories. The concept of the spring of knowledge, the ocean of meaning is archetypal.

“He looked into the water and saw that it was made up of a thousand thousand thousand and one different currents, each one a different colour, weaving in and out of one another like a liquid tapestry of breathtaking complexity; and Iff explained that these were the Streams of Story, that each coloured strand represented and contained a single tale.” (Haroun and the Sea of Stories, 1990)

So if our mind is a captive, how can we free ourselves and tap into the unknown, the creative well within?

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October 8, 2013

An Orgy in Heaven

I love the rain. The thick oily rains of South Florida, the long growling baritones of thunder that roll off the ocean. As a child, I wanted to run wild through the lighting with bare feet, splashing through knee-high flood waters. I wanted to sit in the pool and face the heavens, the big beautiful metallic raindrops soaking every last thing on this good earth. Nothing was safe. Nothing was saved.

In high school, my favorite time to write was behind the wheel of my 1994 Saturn coupe after a tropical downpour, the slick black road reflecting a world under this world, the translucent Florida sky slivered below a band of storm clouds. I imagined stepping onto the asphalt and slipping into another dimension.

Yesterday the winds whipped up the palms, twisting them in angry caricatures The sky turned purple gray. From under my front porch where I sat with my two children, I watched the rains come a few pulses later, a wild-abandon dance-naked happiness surging in my heart.

I hope the rainstorms in heaven are terrifying and savage orgies, blasting and exalting the angels, demons and strange heavenly furniture.

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October 5, 2013

The Belle Glade Culture

Along the southern edge of Lake Okeechobee built up on the sugar cane flats is a dump of a city. As you drive through en route to the placid gulf waters, you lock the door, remembering to fuel the car in Clewiston, and pity those that endure these baked Central Florida streets. In the 1980s, Belle Glade was crack central; it had the highest per capita AIDS rate in the country, a case study for STDs which were shown in sex-ed to horrified middle schoolers all over the state. In 2010, the average violent crime rate in Belle Glade was over four hundred percent higher than the national average. Institutional poverty runs along clear racial divides with a third of the population living under the poverty line. It’s Muck City, the Florida that intellectuals mock with blogs entitled “Florida Man.” It is a sugar cane migrant farmer gang wasteland.

It is with this impression in mind that I was recently floored by an archeological exhibit of artifacts from the Belle Glade Culture, a culture that existed from 1000 BC till 1700. The Mayaimi people were centered around Lake Okeechobee until Spanish raids all but obliterated them (the few survivors evacuated to Cuba).  As a Floridian, I knew the basics about local tribes, essentially those that existed just prior to the arrival of Ponce de Leon. But the Belle Glade Culture was 2700 years old before it was decimated.

There were native Floridians in 1000 BC. Not the ‘natives’ that came down when Flagler built the railroad, not the ‘natives’ that live here year round watching the flux of seasonal Northerners, not even the natives that run gaming enterprises and sell cigarettes on their Seminole reservations. Under the defunct Glades Correctional Institution may be burial mounds, shards of pottery and sculpture, arrowheads from violent battles, canoes for fishing, two millennia of hunters and gatherers, laughing, crying, having babies and lovers. And for some reason, this brightens my perspective – this melancholic palimpsest of forgotten history.

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October 3, 2013

Cell Wars

What fatal flaw built us to be simple skin operators,
blind to the underside of things?

No matter the state of the surface,
when the light turns, the body flips
an underground switch and a motley
opera of cells enact procedures.

As I lay in bed philosophizing death,
tiny proteins beat me to it.

– November 2011

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October 2, 2013

Losing Ma’loula

In the summer of 2005,  I travelled to Damascus to visit a French couple just before they moved back to Paris, a short week of sightseeing as they packed boxes and said their goodbyes. I only had time  to tour the capital and the surrounding umber hillsides carved with ancient Christian churches, caves and villages. As practicing Catholics, my friends had become close with a presiding  priest at Mar Sarkis, a sixth century Byzantine monastery in Maaloula. Though I spent an entire day in Maaloula, I remember very few physical things. Instead I recall a vast interior landscape, a silence and gentleness, an expansive sense of mystery and wonderment, coupled with the well-worn solitude that a  traveler experiences in ancient grounds. I sat inside the church and waited. I do not even know what I was waiting for, but it was worth the wait. Maaloula is somewhere very few Westerners I know have traveled. It is not Petra. It is not Angkor Wat. It is not Teotihuacan.  It is living – a quiet soft village, one of the last places on earth where people still speak Aramaic. It is a treasure.

The news reports that Maaloula has been seized by extremists, the Al-Nusra Front, an Al Qaeda force operating with Syrian rebels. Many if not all of the ancient Antiochian Orthodox or Greek Catholic churches, monasteries and convents have endured some degree of destruction – altars and shrines smashed, domes pierced by mortar. There are reports that some have been completely leveled. Most Christians have fled. Perhaps it is propaganda. Time will tell the truth.

They are calling it a political thing. A thing of blame. But I l say it is a human thing – this deftness at devouring ourselves.  Like the worm Ouroboros, we eat our own tail. We smash ourselves repeatedly against the wall of time, we burn our idols, we obliterate our myths, we kill our Gods. Narrowing our intentions, we make so tiny the wormhole we must squeeze through. If only we were really the worm Ouroboros, the worm eating itself, the worm born of itself and from itself, the regenerative worm. I do not know. But I know that today we pay a great price when we destroy our own mysteries.

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