A Southward Tide

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

Tag: God

October 29, 2013

On Jadedness and Magic

I began feeling jaded during teenage hood. As the magic of childhood faded and life started to appear in all its glory, a wretched unjust affair, I experienced the common symptoms: eye-rolling, sarcasm, over-sensitivity, unfounded hatred of existing power structures, a thirst for independence occurring alongside a pathological desire to feel part of a group (my peers – unfortunately also teenagers). Then freedom! Graduation! And all sorts of new things started pouring in again. College. Undesirable behaviors. After experiencing everything there was to experience in a short span, and then moving to New York, activity and boredom capital of the world, now I was jaded again. My twenties were a decade of ugly shiftless feelings, disappointments and ebbing wonderment.

Much has already been said about my generation’s inability to grow up. We have squeezed the last drops of collegiate experience well into our thirties to thirsty, spiritually bereft results. We wait till almost middle age to have children. And to what end? Now a mother of two, I understand that psychic reconciliation with one’s own mother and father can only occur after a few years of interrupted sleep, bathroom floods and crayoned walls. How can we forgive the twisting directions of our own lives if we cannot understand our own incapacity as parents to shield a child from the arrows of existence? Since we cannot forgive, we cannot move on. We remain stunted teens with crow’s feet and graying hair.  

But more importantly, we remain jaded. I’m not suggesting that everyone needs children to perceive magic again. For others, a dog (or three) will suffice. Maybe a pet armadillo. A backyard teepee. Or a scuba tank and a fish-eye lens. But let’s just say: the magic has always been here. We just closed our eyes. And jadedness is this willing escape from the whole picture of life into the comfortable womb of resentment. It is a momentary death as we turn from brilliance to count circles on the ceiling.

Maybe the only way out is not through but on top of – flip it, turn it backwards, throw your life on its head. A call to all fellow werewolves, midnight flutists, bird whisperers and underwater stargazers (you know who you are) –  to paraquote Ghandi – be the magic you want to see in the world.

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October 26, 2013

Baudelaire Preferred Laudanum

I misread a Baudelaire poem once
and thought:
“He had it all wrong.
Conversations with nature
are, in fact,
hard to come by.”

The ocean never answers.

Cross-legged, cradling
quandaries like lambs I’m hesitant
to cast upon an implacable altar,

I beg the rolling tide
for some sign.

close by a sandpiper needlepoints

is that a sign?

a gull
swoops

sign?

waves crash
louder than

a moment

ago

Thank God –
there is an ice cream shop nearby
because this business is tiring.

Baudelaire preferred laudanum.

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October 23, 2013

The Interpretation of Silence

“We live…lives based upon selected fictions. Our view of reality is conditioned by our position in space and time – not by our personalities as we like to think. Thus every interpretation of reality is based upon a unique position. Two paces east or west and the whole picture is changed.” (Balthazar, Lawrence Durrell)

Balthazar, the second in Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet, has always been one of my favorite first reads, shattering the constructions so carefully set out in Justine. Is this not the best type of literature – the kind that piles misinterpretation upon misinterpretation, that builds a false belief system so Romeo can drink his poison, where the fiction of the story itself and the fictions created within the story merge seamlessly. In a much quoted line from Justine, Durrell foreshadows the unraveling of the subsequent books, “Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?”

Ultimately, we condition ourselves by the preset limitations of our perceptions. How many little deaths do we create, how many times do we drink the poison believing our dreams to be dead when they are just sleeping? Or sometimes we dream the false dream, like the narrator of the The Alexandria Quartet, when beyond our small castle of thoughts a much larger fortress resides, an entire socio-political, even emotional, landscape. In ninth grade, I developed an intense crush on a classmate who was always staring at me. Only months later did I realize his girlfriend was seated behind me; hours of visual dialogue had occurred between them and in my head, just wasted time.

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October 17, 2013

The Terrible Always Now and Other Ontological Problems

“For what more terrifying revelation can there be than that it is the present moment? That we survive the shock at all is only possible because the past shelters us on one side and the future on another.” (Virginia Woolf, Orlando)

At a lower school gathering, our discussion turned the media blitzed world of pervasive gun violence and pedophilia. Over coffee, we plotted to protect, insulate, even isolate our children from this cruel new decade. And yet, is this era worse than before? What of mangled vets returning from Vietnam? What about Emmet Till? And Jerry Lee Lewis and his 14 year old bride? What about age old alcoholism and The Valley of the Dolls? The Cold War?  Studio 54? The present is myopic; it accumulates no knowledge beyond our own existence. We are like blind moles digging ourselves a circular tunnel that fills in behind us.

St. Augustine questions, “How can the past and future be, when the past no longer is, and the future is not yet? As for the present, if it were always present and never moved on to become the past, it would not be time, but eternity.” (The Confessions, Book XI). Accordingly, the present is fluid, unmeasurable, indivisible, time flowing from future to present to past. Change is the only constant, but isn’t the present immutable, always being, always the same?  Is the present the moment where all of life and experience is born and dies simultaneously? If so, as Augustine ponders, does the future or past even exist?

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October 14, 2013

One Hundred Years Past

It was a long way she trod from
second one till a hundred past.

Paris bombed!
The wars did come and go.

From the windowsill, she sewed rag to rag
and watched them all. She tied her
things up in boxes stacked a century ago,
mended clothes pressed flat in a Norman cupboard.

She died in a modern hospital room
that resembled nothing the year she was born,
the early century – 1908.
She was just a child when all those boys died.

And then she bore her own in the second war.

Paris liberated!
Flags waved, firecrackers burned.

Years later, they fought.
My father left.

For decades, she was old.
We sat her at a table once a year
and smiled when she was gone.
She smelled like musty things.

How little we notice until they die,

then we try on their heavy shoes,
we unpack their boxes, flip
scalloped pictures, yellow and gray.

We touch their things as if
we knew how to cradle a hungry child
and yearn the taste of milk.

How little we build from souvenirs,
how little we cared to ask when
she sat old by the windowsill.

Life is long – but the same length for all,
the same second one till years gone past.
And the pain it takes to remember,
we soon forget.

She lived to a hundred and three,
and we shall soon forget.

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October 11, 2013

Memento Mori

An open casket wake. Deceased in his eighties. Slow unfolding dementia. Minor stroke. And peace a few days later with his family by his bedside.

He wanted the casket open. His wife would have it preferred closed but she kept his dying wishes. There at the end of the hall, I can see his long nose peaking out over the mahogany.

I never saw my father after he passed. That was an image I chose not to have. My mother and brother gave me that choice; they went to the hospital to take care of the details. As awful as he looked the last days of his life, there was still blood circulating in his veins.

At this gentleman’s funeral, I am seeing a dead body for the first time. I understand now why people say that the dead look waxy. It is not a cliche, there seems to be no other way to describe it. A carved stone. A fake dried up skin ornament. A rubber caricature. All the features are elongated, the angles accentuated. The head is propped improbably while the chest disappears under sateen. I wonder why a man would want the world to see this abandoned vessel. I’ve heard it brings closure, it helps solidify the grieving process, heals the wounds faster. Perhaps it was a custom he brought from his past. Perhaps there was some hubris too in opening his own corpse for display, a final morbid joke, a memento mori that forced us to witness our own mortality as we looked upon the remnants of his corporeal placeholder. 

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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 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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