BOIARSKI, the blog

TAKE TIME

2011-06-30T19:27:00.000-07:00

Take Five Cesium Seconds

“Time has been a major subject of religion, philosophy, and science, but defining it in a non-controversial manner applicable to all fields of study has consistently eluded the greatest scholars.” -Wikipedia

I feel better now. Defining time, (as in de-finus, to limit, to make finite) has always “consistently eluded” me, too. Ever since I was a child, small enough to be stepped over when adults rushed to be “on time” to this event or that, time puzzled and fascinated me. Once I conquered space, walking and counting, became events in time and time itself “defined” as “tics and tocks” measured by a plastic cat on the wall whose eyes rolled to and fro and whose aqua tail clicked back and forth in “time” with them. Even now, I have a hard time comprehending how quickly the time has passed from my childhood until this moment. I have a haiku that tries to express this feeling.

Climbing the mountain,
I look back to see how much
I have forgotten.

Much of my writing since childhood has focused on the past present in every day. If you have read this blog before you know that much of it is focused on my belief that time is inextricably linked to how I see my writing, a desperate attempt to capture the little firefly of thought before it disappears into the darkness of forgotten time. There is remembered past and there is forgotten past and Dave Brubeck and his crew of truly gifted musicians, whose 1959 album, “Time Out,” experimented with 5/6, 9/8, 5/4 and 6/4 “time.”

In “looking back” to when I was about 14, just starting to understand my self, or at least understand that I was different, an alien, a creature trapped in this space and time with this life to live out. I spent that period in the adolescent agony, consumed with sex and death. When I say sex, I mean of “Portnoy’s Complaint” than of “Candy.” Still a child in some ways, I was just learning what it meant to feel change, my body growing out of my clothes in a matter of months, my shoes not fitting each school year. The shame of acne and the pain of unrequited schoolboy crushes and early experiences with death.

I recall the biggest-selling Jazz recording by the best known combo in US history started playing on the radio. Hearing “Take Five” for the first time was, for me, a moment of expanding consciousness. I remember listening intently to Joe Morello’s drum solo with amazement, realizing for the first “time” that a drum could play a “lead” role and “keep time” while playing with and around the intricate rhythms of the song, how it “marked” time and then the piano took up that chore, while the drum played around that rhythm. I remember Paul Desmond’s sweet sax, like a gilded bird floating over the rhythms, Gene Wright taking the bass lead, Brubeck generous, supporting the entire effect, timeless.

I can’t recall a drum solo before and any since, except for when I heard Ginger Baker solo with “Cream,” at the Fillmore in San Francisco in the 60’s. No others stand out in my memory at all. Ginger Baker, fabulous as that was, was live, as well. I’m sure Gene Krupa was banging away in some big band prior to that recording. I’m sure Ringo put in a few beats that I might find attached to some memories. Baker’s solo was always in such a large venue and for such a short burst that it was never as “memorable” to me as the first time I heard this airy, almost meditative turn an the sticks, one that starts soon after the theme has been established and continues for several minutes, longer than any drumming I had ever heard recorded. It helped me appreciate the idea of “keeping time” or “marking time” with the time “signature” of the music, an odd 5/6 time that I had never heard before then.

If you haven’t heard the piece or can’t recall it in any detail, you should give it another listen. It was part of an experimental album that used a lot of odd time signatures. Brubeck’s piano often took the role of rhythm-keeper, pulling back to support the drum as it explored these strange timings in a half dozen different variations. It seemed to me to be about time itself and how music and time were integrated. It communicated more to me about time than Steven Hawking has ever been able to.

Music, has always seemed to me, to be an art form that is particularly about time. It takes the “measure” of a moment, the “tempo” and the rhythms “mark” time in “signatures” and “beats.” Of course, it is about so much more than “just” that. But, like dance, music exists in the moment. We may “record” that moment and “play” it “back” again and again, but the “recording” happened at one unique, specific moment and that moment is what is being “recalled” for us to sing along or dance to. This is part of the reason a song can be linked so completely to a memory, or a couple can say, “They’re playing our song.” Songs, like all utterances, occur in time. We forget it has only been since Edison that a song could exist after the singer had disappeared into the past.

“Two contrasting viewpoints on time divide many prominent philosophers. One view is that time is part of the fundamental structure of the universe, a dimension in which events occur in sequence. Sir Isaac Newton subscribed to this realist view, and hence it is sometimes referred to as Newtonian time.[3][4] Time travel, in this view, becomes a possibility as other "times" persist like frames of a film strip, spread out across the time line. The opposing view is that time does not refer to any kind of "container" that events and objects "move through", nor to any entity that "flows", but that it is instead part of a fundamental intellectual structure (together with space and number) within which humans sequence and compare events. This second view, in the tradition of Gottfried Leibniz[5] and Immanuel Kant,[6][7] holds that time is neither an event nor a thing, and thus is not itself measurable nor can it be traveled.” – Wikipedia

I don’t have the inclination, not the intellectual chops to get into the argument between Newton and Kant but I tend to think Kant’s ideas are more poetic and mysterious and to me, more attractive. It fits with my Zen view of the mind as the frame through which the world is “perceived”, in the Latinate definition, i.e. “to seize completely.” We seize the world in our battle to understand it, we capture it one moment at a time, take hold of our little frame for looking at what we want to see, and try not to notice those things that do not fit or match that framework before that moment melts away.

I used to think it quite arbitrary how we chose to measure time. I mean, after all, it’s a long way from a sundial or hourglass and the cesium atom. The current definition of time has cesium embedded in every second. Again, according to Wikipeida, “In 1967, a specific frequency from the emission spectrum of caesium-133 was chosen to be used in the definition of the second by the International System of Units. Since then, cesium has been widely used in atomic clocks.” (Prior to 1967, I guess this was determined by someone saying “one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi.”)

All of this measurement is important for sequencing events, and of course, in some particular events, such as competitions and tourneys, competitors are limited by a “clock.” Many sports even have an official timekeeper. Ironically, it leads me to another thought about time and that is the “relativity” of its passing more or less quickly in certain circumstances. Often, the last few minutes of a game, with their strategic “time outs” allow the time during which a game occurs to pass more slowly and even run into “overtime,” which has always struck me as a sort of “life after death.” In baseball, that is preferable to a tie score. However, Americans are willing to sit through a dozen innings as if time had no importance when you turn a square on its side and call it a diamond.

It was once thought that the mind was actually perceiving time in "slow-motion" when under great stress but that was recently shown to be an exaggerated memory, rather than the moment itself. They found this out by dropping subjects from a high tower into a net and measuring their eye movements and brain activity. What will they think of next?

And cesium, itself, has more “timely” connotations from its discovery at the beginning of the 19th century. According to Wikipedia, again, “Since 1967, the International System of Measurements has based its unit of time, the second, on the properties of cesium. The International System of Units (SI) defines the second as 9,192,631,770 cycles of the radiation, which corresponds to the transition between two hyperfine energy levels of the ground state of the cesium-133 atom.[61] The 13th General Conference on Weights and Measures of 1967 defined a second as: "the duration of 9,192,631,770 cycles of microwave light absorbed or emitted by the hyperfine transition of cesium-133 atoms in their ground state undisturbed by external fields". One wonders if this precision, this desire to mark and measure so accurately the passing of a moment, takes into account whether that moment is spent in torture or pleasure.

Ironically, this extremely rare element is evident in abundance now in the topsoil of Fukushima province, an aftermath of the Fukushima reactor co-existing with an earthquake and tsunami in the space/time continuum. My first haiku about that moment in time that is slowed when history is being made, when you know this has never happened before, was about a news clip. The video showed a cherry tree in one of the ancient towns destroyed completely by the tsunami. Snow was cloaking the wreckage in a mass of white crystal, but the shapes were so jagged and irregular that the scene was anything but peaceful. The tree had blossomed and was bravely standing it’s place while all round had been swept away.

This Spring’s cherry tree
blossoming pink in the snow,
glows in the darkness.

Time, the Bandit

2010-12-31T12:23:00.001-08:00

This is always the time of year when I find myself temporarily focused on the passing of time, the “temporal” world. Being so embedded in “being,” one seldom has time to notice, take note of, contemplate it is passing. However, when our calendars change, just as when our clocks move ahead or back, I find my mind turning to thoughts of what has passed and what will come.

Saint Augustine famously said that he knew precisely what time was as long as no one asked him. Once he was asked for a definition, “instantly,” he no longer knew. I have the same experience when I stop and take measure of all the moments that have occurred. It is as if I dipped my cup into the flow and by the time it reached my lips it had evaporated. It seems as if “now” is something we never have time to “know.”

There are essays to read, books galore to explore. Hawking and hundreds of others all the way back to Aristotle discuss the idea. The best I can derive from my reading is the complex relationship between “being” and “becoming” is serving as part of the current thought pattern that philosophers and mathematicians puzzle about. My mind has a hard time using language in a way the permits different forms of the verb “to be” to be parsed and placed, like their proper pieces in some larger picture. After all, every part of existence “is” now and at the same time “becomes” older, or less viable with each succeeding second. As much as I want to believe the cyclical pattern ancient minds perceived in what we in the West see as linear, I guess I just can’t get my mind to pull back so far as to see where the curve that “becomes” the circle “begins.”

It brings me back again and again to the magic and mystery of language, which permits us to talk about these abstract concepts in ways we actually “believe” make sense. As I child, would read the entire dictionary in the hope that by knowing all the words, I might actually “see” how things worked, how my incomprehensible world could be understood. Eventually, I gave that ritual up, not so much because I felt I knew. It was as if I realized it was useless and I had better things to do.

We can’t really stand outside of time, so it is exceedingly difficult to grasp at any sort of objectivity on the matter. We move through time and it moves through us, but like the air we breathe, we almost never notice ourselves in its grip. Pictures, captured light from one moment we were in that has moved on, give us some sense of its passing. I found fascinating this work by Argentine photographer, Diego Goldberg of his family, an interesting artistic comment on “the snapshot” and how it both kills the moment and preserves it as the next moment supersedes it.

Diego Goldberg and his family can be seen at his website, The Arrow of Time. http://www.zonezero.com/magazine/essays/diegotime/time.html. His idea and its concrete expression is as powerful a mediation on time as any words I might pen.

I am not the only one to be inspired and intrigued by the Goldberg family, ABC News, ://www.zonezero.com/magazine/essays/diegotime/video.htm, as well as artists and essayists have riffed off of the inspiration of these precise pieces of the past.

As I studied the photos, I kept noticing slight changes in the faces from year to year, ones that were subtle but perceptible, that must have been invisible as each body was touched by time. The collagen and elastin in the skin degenerate minutely each moment and after years, the faces that filled with life in youth, begin slowly to drain in the juicy and elastic dermis and epidermis and wrinkles, creases, furrows and folds appear. The number, size and length of the facial muscles fibers decrease and tone takes the path of gravity down.

More discernible to the self, but less visible to the world are all the internal changes, the joint wear, the cartilage breakdown, the acuity of vision, then hearing, the number of taste buds, then smell starts to go. The heart tires in its second billion beats, less able to pump so we tire more easily and recover more slowly. The number and density of nerve cells diminish and in most, the spinal cord and brain start to atrophy. The stomach produces less acid after the age of 50 and it therefore absorbs less vitamin B12, found naturally in food. Strength, motion and flexibility all decrease, along with height. We get about 0.4” shorter each decade as the spine compresses under the constancy of gravity. Some things continue to grow, the ears and nose getting larger and longer.

All this sounds pretty disheartening but age is the price of life. An interesting essay in today’s NYT (http://tinyurl.com/323ozvu) about the delusions current baby boomers are buying into puts some perspective on how we face these incontrovertible facts.

I have concluded that there is much that can be done to make this process easier. Since I have been going to the gym a few times a week, I am much more able to cope with the everyday aches and pains of aging. A few of the buff geezers there have actually reached their eighties, while maintaining the appearance of someone in their early sixties. Still, 60 is six decades and there can not “be” too many of those decades “becoming” in any of our futures. One comfort, as I pump my half hour on the elliptical and travel from one exercise station to the next with my iPod inspiring me to "shake it with the oldies" is that even the youngest and most buff members are trapped, like all of us, in the matter of time. Like insects in amber, unable to escape the world that blurs along with us, inside and outside of us, we have no idea what we are coming to. Yes, just as the eye cannot see itself, the “now” cannot truly know its own essence.

The Poetic Implications of Origami

2010-08-29T10:27:00.000-07:00

To imply means “to fold in” as in the “implication” of some thought expressed in a way that need only hint at its meaning to be understood. The “ply” part of the word in and of itself is interesting. I thought the first definition of "ply" would be something like “layer” or “slice”

Wikipedia, declares the order of denotation and connotation in this order:

* Ply (game theory)
* PLY (file format), the polygon data file format.
* Plying, the spinning technique to make yarn.
* A colloquialism for Plywood
* The different layers of toilet paper.
* Ply, a port or bay from Edwardian times.
* PLY, an implementation of lex and yacc parsing tools for Python.
* "Ply", DOS-based 16-bit complicated polymorphic virus from 1996

In games, a ply is a turn, as in a fold, or in Latin, “versa” as in verse, each line "turning" from one rhyme to another, from one image to the next. PLY is also a computer file format known as the Polygon File Format or the Stanford Triangle Format. The format was principally designed to store three dimensional data from 3D scanners. In weaving “to ply” is to spin or weave two separate strands together into one stronger thread, each ply being another doubling of the strands.
Not until the third connotation does Wiki list a layer, first as a colloquialism, then almost off-hand as toilet paper talk, leaving out the once notorious “four-ply” automobile tire. Finally, a nautical term from Edwardian times, and another two example of techno-lingo jargon.

For me, this is completely exemplary of a point I like to make about writing and thinking. IMHO, I believe that prose and poetry are two completely different ways of thinking and fundamentally different ways to communicate.

It is one reason that translation of poetry is the much more difficult than the translation of prose. The two exemplify the difference between walking and dancing, between painting a wall and painting a mural.

I was recently struck by how the two approach the use of words, with prose striving to “define” or “put limits on” thought, to be precise and “unambiguous.”

Poetry on the other hand seeks to free language of the simple denotation and play on the connotations, the other hidden layers of meaning: those folded in by time, like the Mona Deg that begins our week and the worship of the Sun God that ends it, or the broken calendar count of Julius and Augustus, the Caesar boys, lumping their names in with the gods and throwing off the count of the time we still keep as Pope Gregory instructed us, lo those centuries ago.

In origami, a flat, two-dimensional page is folded or plied into different shapes and forms. Cranes and dragons rise up into the third dimension, and indeed into the fourth as they take shape in the hands of the artist and then age in time, from a pristine color and edge, to one weighed down, even in its infinite lightness, by the gravity grave that history piles on daily, one dust grain at a time.

Inspired by "The Times"

2010-01-16T07:24:00.000-08:00

Time is the essence of being and being the essence of time. The smallest verb is the largest idea, the concept is self-referential in the extreme. Dogen says, “The future is behind you. The past is before you.” Damn, that guy can drive me crazy.

Early in the turning of the year’s page, just after the period of the last year’s sentence, at the very first paragraph of the new sentence of the new chapter, I was meditating on the passing of time itself. With the talking clock and time-consuming ideas of art and poetry, art and time, all rolling around in my brain.

I was in a pensive mood, not unusual for anyone as the year turns, certainly not-out-of-the-norm for me. Like most, I am swept up in the recounting of those that have died and the events of the calendar. I wax nostalgic and confess to a touch of sentiment, a sigh for my misspent youth. I was uninspired by my thoughts as I tried and tried to write, but mostly I could only tweet my observations about moments in time like insects in electronic amber.

Not to digress, but once I took a class with the wonderfully warm and funny writer Robert Canzoneri, who described how writers, when faced with real writing work, will do anything not to write. His particular penchant was for shining shoes. He would find himself rummaging through his closet looking for shoes to polish and realize, he last remembered himself getting up from his writing for a glass of water or a cup of coffee.

In my digression I turned to "The Times" and read a wonderful article published on December 31, 2009 the night before, by Roberta Smith entitled, Time, the Infinite Storyteller. (http://tinyurl.com/y9rnfuh) I was enchanted by how she wove the idea of time and art together. It brought a rush of poem’s from one of the first poems I learned to recite as an adolescent in the bone growing, size-shifting, hormonal grip of the years of transformation, constantly in sexual arousal, tripping over my own feet, fighting to control my pimply, swelling fourteen year old body. Learning to sincerely say the words “by heart,” to any young lady patient enough to let me near her, I made the sounds and rhythms in my voice resound with the same lusty emotion Marvell evokes, but it never made me irresistible to females.

Usually, it had the opposite effect, though once or twice it worked real magic.
But it worked its magic on me. Words became my obsession and writing my passion. I became a poet because I loved the magic in the words.

To his Coy Mistress

by Andrew Marvell

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love's day;
Thou by the Indian Ganges' side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood;
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow.
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.

But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long preserv'd virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust.
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none I think do there embrace.

Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may;
And now, like am'rous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour,
Than languish in his slow-chapp'd power.
Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one ball;
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

Memorizing Marvell was a feat no less difficult for an adolescent than learning the Gettysburg Address “by heart,” (which we had to do for American History class, but that is another story for another time.) Come to think of it, it actually, was easier. I had the strength of rhyme’s music in my memory, to guide me from line to line and the passion of the soul, “at every pore with instant fires.” That was when my poetry sprouted, influenced by a twisted cross of testosterone and romance. I eventually grew past the seductive self-serving recitation to time and learned a new poem to recite to my love at night on long walks, Mathew Arnold’s Dover Beach.

Dover Beach
Matthew Arnold

The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægæan, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

So much of this poem, also carefully crafted with the beat and images of time passing, tides turning, ancient and modern wisdoms and foibles repeated, proved futile. All we need is love. What can I say, it was the sixties and love and the war was what united us. I remember reciting it to my wife when we were dating. The poem captured for me some of the essence of how it feels to be in love while somewhere the world is at war.

Then a few days later, after only tweets and a few scraps of the beginnings of poems, again killing time and not writing, I came across another piece in The New York Times, this time in the “Mind” section and not the “Art” section. Ah, the sectioning of the grapefruit of reality. This one was by Benedict Carey, entitled “Where Did the Time Go? Do Not Ask the Brain.” It was published on January 4, 2010. (http://tinyurl.com/ye9k5bu) Reading how the detailed remembering of my childhood differed from the sketchy, often annotated recollection of recent time got me back to the keyboard.

The dimension of time, embedded in every aspect of our lives, is as profound and palpable as the solid depth, height, width we walk around or trip over every day. We can only grasp in retrospect what it means and only through our own reference point, what Red Pine calls “the eye bone.”

"There is no point at which the eyes begin or end, either in time or in space or conceptually. The eye bone is connected to the face bone, and the face bone is connected to the head bone, and the head bone is connected to the neck bone, and so it goes down to the toe bone, the floor bone, the earth bone, the worm bone, the dreaming butterfly bone. Thus, what we call our eyes are so many bubbles in a sea of foam."
-- Red Pine

The elemental, fundamental, essence of writing is that recording of the moment, the conveying of it, the taste and smell, the feel and embrace of time. When a writer can capture that sensual and intellectual presence, time stands still for the reader, she or he disappears as an ego and becomes a character, or a witness to the action of other live while their own life is on hold.

The art of storytelling has evolved into all sorts of expressions from poems to films to song and popular novels and television series, but in essence it is all the same, the creation of the illusion of time, the capturing of moments and the recreating of them for the reader and the audience. Time is detail, memory is detail recalled, every moment we can record will never be forgotten as long as the possibility exists that it might some day be read by another.

Thus my Twitter experiment continues, in what little time is allotted me in the face of actual making a living. I come back to the idea of at least one good line a day and googling, I find lots of sources but not what I am looking for. Finally, I find it, not even a good line, just a line, that was enough to satisfy Horace, to eke out the time to put together a few words. I guess that must be why I am so attracted to the tweet, it is like Haiku, or photography, or so many other forms, so immediate and compact, like an opalescent pearl, shimmering in singularity.

"Nulla dies sine linea”

“Never a day without a line."

-- Horace

Twitter Ugliness, A Part Time Poet's Perspective.

2009-11-14T09:52:00.000-08:00

Twitter Ugliness,
A Part Time Poet’s Perspective

I have been a writer for nearly 50 years, It scares me sometimes that I have been doing this for so damned long and all I have is a few publications, an honor here and there, a nice “Google,” and not much else. When I was a boy and I penned, or should say “penciled” plaintive rhymes and melodramatic stories in my little blue book I had no idea of what the life of a writer might be like.

What have I learned? Not much. Writing is hard, lonely, work that is. for the most part, not reinforced by the world. It is difficult to keep up one’s spirit, maintain focus and beat out work day after day, but that is the only way to write. One gets little recognition or encouragement, and those wonderful times when one does never last. Once again, a writer is back at the desk, with the pen or pencil, keyboard or computer.

It is even more difficult to be a “successful” writer, however one defines “success.” I define (or limit what I mean) as recognition, publication and readership. I don’t ask a lot, because I don’t have a lot of time to spend on an obsession that takes so much hard work, consumes so many of my limited free hours and makes “success” so difficult, even if my personal bar has been lowered to exclude any “financial” elements.

Many of my small successes have come from persistence, patience, and a period where I was unemployed and had the financial support of my spouse, before I had children, obligations, a mortgage and a full time gig. Since that productive time, I have published here and there, now and then. I was recently a finalist of the _OFF Magazine prize and will be in their upcoming, English/Polish inaugural issue in January of 2010. I have three new poems coming in the next issue of EX CATHEDRA, an online magazine I supported by submitting 3 poems. They were so eager to take all three I worry about what else will be in there. But that’s part of the biz, too. that uncertainty as to whether a publication source will accept, or publish, or fold before it can try.

I could not afford that uncertainty and the paucity of any financial element once I gained the responsibility of a spouse and family to support. Pragmatic things like insurance, a paycheck, a home and a school for them. All of those priorities take up so much time.
Time is indeed money, as my latest poem postulates. Without the money to assuage the hunt for shelter, food and family needs, the time is not there for anything else.

Time is money

The currency of time,
like one paid by the hour,
or one who might bill
his/her time to a client,
seconds/minutes spent.

It is a conceit that
makes sense, like an
hourglass filled with
gold dust measuring
the price of moments.

We can waste
time and kill it,
we can sped it
and save it.

Our wrists strapped
to timepieces, eyes fixed
on the long and short hands.
Each agonized tick squeezes
out into the bubble
of the white faced clock.

How can one consider
what is worth the while?

I still write, part time. I still publish, on occasion. I rarely read or travel or promote my work as I did when my work was in the Paris Review a number of times and Coal & Ice was new, nearly three decades ago. All that said, and reading back on what I have written, I am tempted to edit because I was wordy and too bloggishly confessional for my comfort zone. But no. I let it go. This is my notebook, lying open on a table if you care to read it.

The Twitter Experiment (ongoing)

I have been twittering daily since first weeks of 2007 and over that time have gathered more than 1,000 followers, many of whom I interact with, at the rate of several a week. For me, tweeting is “making public” or publishing my thoughts. My mental darts are not polished, and in a sense they are the opposite of the Roman ideal, allegedly practiced by Virgil of “one good line a day.”

I have been a student of Zen for many years and these are my approximation of the quick sketch of the “Sumi” painter, the calligrapher, almost eastern influenced meditations that I roll around in my head for a few minutes then put into 140 characters in one quick stroke, or more like one quick series of keystrokes.

Twitter has becomes an outlet for me, and in the bridge I am on, that spans from my working life to my retirement in a few years, it has been a light and upbeat positive reinforcement to my writing, much needed in “my craft and sullen art” I have come to look forward to the hour or so I spend online every day and collect ideas for tweets. Often, I get a reaction to an old tweet from a reader and it inspires a thread of tweets. I have used the material from these “nota” to build longer and more substantial poems. I found poets to follow and people whose efforts on the web, the environment, the arts, etc. I have grown interested in.

I really only had one problem. My URL provider (www.boiarski.com) where I get most of my e-mail, requires an extra account, a “bounce” as a backup when you create your e-mail account. My bounce, however, got upgraded and started rejecting copies of DM’s sent to my e-mail account. This drove Twitter crazy and they started putting up big red flags to “check my e-mail” when I signed in. I kept ignoring these because I was, and still am, getting e-mail copies of all my DM’s, many of which were girls who wanted to lure me to their dating site, or guys with surefire stock purchasing plans, or mom’s who knew how to cheaply whiten my teeth, or people who had secret electronic skills with twitter that would enable me to get rich, become a millionaire, roll in dough.

Last week, I was spoofed. I feel like a naive “nubie” tricked into following an infected follower’s question as to if I had appeared in a photo on the web. Alarms should have gone off when I had to sign in again but it was late and I was sleepy and I signed off innocently and went to sleep. The next day, I started getting DM’s from followers and soon realized what had happened. It took hours but I got every spoof DM out of my sent box and reconfigured my password. Another few days and I started receiving new spoof invites from others, but I ignored them. No problems, I thought.

Finally, upon awakening last Saturday morning and attempting to sign on, I was locked out of twitter. My name and password were no longer the right combination. No way in. So I followed the prompts to the help page and submit my problem. A day later an automated response comes back. It was an unfriendly and ungainly process to finally bet my submission ticket #657031, but hoping that number didn’t start out as 000001 that Saturday morning, I write out a detailed e-mail and I waited.

Two days and no response, so I re-read the e-mail and I notice that it sort of palms off the problem as a “significant bug” and “caching issues,” as if the problem was too technical to explain and now is solved, so I respond again. The e-mail claims that there is an open job and the information on the reply will be attached to that ticket to provide information to track the problem and respond more quickly. I review all the facts and offer a new e-mail address.

I wait. Days pass. I write and the Help prompt writes back that it is not accepting any more help complaints for now. I have a number, a ticket so I feel assured. But now, I am still waiting. It has been a full week and I have answered every question, supplied every detail, provided a new e-mail and written a half dozen impatient responses to their inability to acknowledge receipt of my additional information, my new e-mail address, or any progress at all on the problem.

For all I know, they are drinking beer and smoking cigars on a Cuban beach while their server farm hums happily attended by interns. I guess this is all part of “publishing.” Short of printing up broadsides and selling them on the street, whenever you use a media controlled by someone else, you are totally surrendering to their whim. So. What’s new. Haven’t you always had that sort of relationship with “publishers?”

DULY NOTED, THE EXPERIMENT CONTINUES. 10 DAYS, NOT EXACTLY TWERRIFIC!

This Carboniferous Life

2009-07-25T10:39:00.000-07:00

In a sense, carbon has always been the problem. When there were not many of us and there were so many trees, it went unnoticed, not noted, no nota bene, like a fire built in an old fire pit, just another fire. As time went on, rings in the wood counting the years, there were fewer and fewer trees. Once where there were millions, perhaps billions of trees for every human. Currently, the ratio is down to about 60 to one, sixty trees for you and me, to inhale the carbon dioxide we exhale and give off precious oxygen we inhale. How soon will we outnumber them?

My back against a big oak, I can feel the solidity of centuries, slow determined growth that exemplifies survival, the strength of the sun. I also have a slab from an old cherry tree, more than 50 inches across, cut down after a storm had broken it beyond saving. I hope to make a table. This wood is made from light, the same radiant sun that warmed my great grandfather, the water he drank and air he breathed abides in this wood. The sun trapped in the wood, every day of every season, a record of time is added incrementally to every ring of wood. Pipelines of nutrition flow up and down inside the bark; the languid limbs lift up to the sky, bristle with branches and burst with leaves, each leave breathing in the carbon dioxide, breathing out the oxygen; drinking in the water and soaking up the sunlight. This tree like all trees is, in a sense, time itself, a record of growth and weather in flood and drought, in heat and cold.

The chemical composition of wood, of cellulose, is carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and high-energy bonds combined in the solar furnace of the sunlight over many years. Each fat or thin ring records the conditions in that year. As it dries, wood hardens and tightens, the cells becoming less moist and stronger. Each time we build a fire, we release the sum of the sunlight, the history of days, and leave in its place timeless ashes. The process produces carbon oxides, unconsumed ones that we call carbon monoxide and dioxide.

After trees got scarcer, (as they continue to do,) coal, more efficient but even dirtier. became the source of energy. Extracted in every cruder ways, coal has always been a killer from a hundred mines where men still lie buried to the mountain tops stopping up the runs and hollows with "overburden" that leeches pollutants. After coal and the darkened skylines of the industrial age, came the age of oil. Just a different carbon compound with more captive suns to for incomplete combustion to fill the sky with sulfurous and carboniferous compounds. Our multiplying tailpipes and chimneys and smokestacks have turned our planet into a laboratory. We are experimenting, as we have since the first fire, with how much we can alter our atmosphere. It is dangerous and foolish modernity when the world creates its own extinction.

I fear a future when trees are kept in closed off, perhaps bubble-domed "preserves," similar to zoos, where one can actually observe a willow or an oak, "in the wild" and where children point in awe, the way they do now at tigers and elephants. Look at Haiti or Easter Island, where the trees were stripped from the soil and eroding masses of mudslides grow larger each year.

The basic carbon unit is the root of the world itself. We are carbon-based life forms. We play with our future and our grandchildren will live with the consequences. Think of that the next time you sit in the shade.

The Twitter Experiment

2009-05-29T16:43:00.000-07:00

The Twitter Experiment

In the subjective mood, let me say, would that I could write poetry all the time, alas, and if I could but lie abed, or sit beneath a greeny bough, with quill in hand, I would so like to for hours on end. write that is.

However, “poetry,” being one letter and a transposition away from “poverty,” makes making a living a necessity. I must support my poetry habit, and ironically, the very act of working seems to weaken my focus on writing. I arrive home too tired to concentrate.

I find when I spend my days waking, preparing for work, working, the commute to and fro, and finally, if I have a moment between supper and bedtime, writing, I can’t be consistent. Sometimes I get off a good shot, as in this poem, which I wrote as part of the Poem a Day Challenge from Writer’s Digest.

Pakicetus

It was the cows and pigs that did it. Seeing what
Was intended for them, what their futures contained;
Seeing how their herds would be gathered and numbered,
Drove us further out into the sea. From shores, bays, rivers,
Feeding in the shallows, we swam out further, deeper, away.
The vast oceans became our pastures, our grazing ground.

Eventually, a hand became a fin, leg variations formed a fluke,
The canals of the ear lessened and the lungs grew and changed -
Fifteen million years, a day against the age of dirt, the age of water.
Now with one breath held for hours, diving down negative mountains
Deep into black waters, we sing arias to each other, with low notes
Few others can hear, long mournful songs of grass and flowers, sweet
Water and green fields waving in the wind as far as the eye can see.

I am incorporating some of the language and thinking in a new piece I am writing for the theater about Darwin. I try to keep working on poems and stories and even plays, but I always seem pressed for time, and when I have time, unable to go uninterrupted for as long as I need.

I fall asleep at the keyboard. Weekends seem to slip away. Holidays often involve family or travel. but always consume time. And now it is wedding, graduation, vacation season, all of which take time from writing. These, of course, are excuses, a long list of crappy excuses, actually for not writing.

Which brings me to my Twitter experiment. I have, since March of 2008, been twittering, at least a line every day. I have 500 plus updates, most of them small poems, some fragments, some just ideas or observations that I might grow into something more. Sharing these spontaneous utterances is fun and freeing. I don’t pretend to be submitting them for publication, but the poetry process, or at least the one I follow, is there for the 400+ people who are following the experiment to see, comment on, share, etc.

One of the best parts of this is my reintroduction to haiku, one of my favorite short forms that I had gotten away from in my drive to be accepted by American academia. Once, I was much more a citizen of the world, who sought out other poets, other forms, other heroes. Here are a few of my haiku, published on twhaiku.com.

Climbing the mountain,
I look back to see how much
I have forgotten.

King Dandelion’s charge,
armies overtake the field,
laughing yellow flags.

The toddler stumbles,
walking wobbly on weak legs.
An old man recovers.

Crows flock to spilled grain.
In the wagon's path feeding
on the farmer's luck.

Take away ego.
You do that and you are there!
But, how will "I" know?

The short form is back
“Mot just!” Disciplined. Succinct.
It did not leave me.

The essence of these short forms is a single thought, or ideally a binding together of two different thoughts into a unifying whole: this string of words implying polarity, a syzygy with each pole linked to its opposite, two forgotten thoughts tied in a knot.

That thought like most of the poetry that follows was thrown out like a verbal improv that I then recorded on twitter, through thwirl or another offshoot, sometimes at home, or at work, on a desktop, a laptop, someone else’s device, always attempting to get in my head a complete burst and then release it like a thrown dart. Here are some samples:

This poem is like candy: chocolate-smooth right off the bat with a caramel center chewy-Louie, gooey, topped off with more smooth-chocolate.

A short soft song, or a subtle, sensuous dance, a poem can be made at once, like Sumi, an image of shape in rhythm, inked in thought & gone.

We are peeling this poem's skin, slowly revealing the flesh of the fruit and the seed buried within. Juices are sluicing on our red tongues.

This poem is like a fortune cookie, gluten-free, paperless. It cracks open and says, You must swim in the now, not dream of an island beach.

This poem is a box; here's a lid. The sides are straight & the bottom flat. Inside are the words you dare not reveal to anyone. Quick, lid!

I have other examples of ideas that are leading to longer things. I am still working on how all those pieces come together. Meanwhile, I wanted to keep anyone who cares posted on my progress.

The Language of Trees

2009-03-28T07:42:00.000-07:00

Tree language is like the notes only dogs can hear. Tree roots touch tendrils ‘neath icy earth; glass twigs chatter; limbs clatter, leaves rustle. Shhh, the trees are whispering histories.

Nothing understands stillness, or silence like a tree. The pine whispers, the twiggy stick rattles, the empty bough moans in the wind: each of these sounds means something. We instinctively know this.

Trees look down on us. Because they live through seasons, trees understand and pity us. The spirit of trees comforts us. We surround ourselves with wood, cradle to coffin. In the heart of the tree and rings of a tree’s growing out into the world, we see a heartbeat echoing in time’s soft trap.

Whether tree of Life or tree of Knowledge, sacred trees of incense, or sacred trees of the Norse and Druid they are soulful. Knock on wood! Acknowledge the spirit in the flow, the life in the grain, the ghost in the door and the soul of the chair and the floor.

Tree roots like gnarled serpents writhing in the earth, bodies joined together in one enormous trunk, branching back into a thousand snaky tails shaking in the winter sky. Spring's thunderous arrival, every stick and twig burgeoning with buds. Leaves everywhere green sudden and complete.

Then the chlorophyll miracles and heat of summer, the change in the sound of green rustling from lush to dry whisper, the colorful chaos of fall, when all leaves leave. Naked, the trees take in one long, enormous golden breath, which they hold, all through snow and ice and frozenness, waiting, awaiting, spring.

The Long Count

2009-02-01T06:07:00.000-08:00

In the coming months and years leading up to 2012, there will be increased volcanic and seismic activity as well as solar wind and weather-related effects on the earth. If the Meso-American calendar is right and the enormous cycle of the turning galaxy is complete on December 21 of that year. As the date approaches more and more charlatans and con men will interpret the legends and find a way to profit from prophecy. Doomsayers are already calling this "the end of history" or "the end of time." Evidence suggests the same culture that predicted the cycle, also predicted events far beyond 2012, strongly suggesting that one cannot claim the accuracy of a doomsday based on a calendar whose high priests named events beyond that date. The excitement of an immense and world changing possible future appeals to me more than the fear of its end. http://tinyurl.com/37kdr4

Time, timelessness and the void

2009-01-05T14:15:00.000-08:00

Fewer than five centuries ago, Pope Gregory placed the Gregorian Calendar's mathematical model on our concept of time. Lillius and Calvius and dozens of Vatican mathematicians worked endless hours to figure out how to adjust for what the stars and sun and moon counted out, which they calculated was drifting a bit from the Julian Calendar, the previous model. A model for measuring time that is linear and narrow and focused entirely on one point in time is a totally Western idea. Other cultures besides the Judeo-Christian one, might measure time differently and might impose entirely different frameworks, but these are not taught in our schools.

The very idea that one could look at time in other ways than as a linear string of events goes counter to our own individual experiences. We are born, age and die. We are all "Button Benjamin," and not the other way around. Anyone with children, and then grandchildren, etc., knows this in their very flesh and blood.

Yet some civilizations, some human intellects, could comprehend this concept. In fact, their calendars are more predictive and more accurate than our own. Most interesting to me is the Meso-American system, which incorporates cycles of the moon, in addition to numerous eclipse and comet cycles, and counts back some 3,111 years before the year one on the Gregorian Calendar to the beginning of the cycle it was made to measure.

The initial date, the year one of the Olmec and other Middle American Natives, refers to an ancient beginning, a change that these peoples, (who may have been predated by ancestors who lived through such a transformation,) considered just as real as the birth of Christ. These peoples counted accurately and studied the stars and their cycles and concluded that time was not linear. They believed that just as the sun and moon and stars revolved through repetitious cycles, (the entire galaxy, indeed the universe,) passed through an enormous cycle, known as "The Long Count."

To accept that thought is more than most Westerners can feel comfortable with. Not that time could not go back thousands and forward thousands of years, but that what looks like a straight line could, just beyond our vision, curve subtly and curl back around like a great serpent with its tail in its mouth. To get past the myth and look up at the Milky Way Galaxy and see what was studied for thousands of years, perhaps to understand an event so cosmic that their ancestors could not explain, takes an enormous leap of the imagination.

I am not certain that my mind can make this leap, but part of me can stay open to the idea. Watching the effect of solar wind and cosmic dust that always has and always will touch us unseen. Trying to understand what might motivate a civilization to adopt such beliefs and evolve such elaborate mythologies, completely outside of my own, interests me. My curiosity is piqued. I can picture myself back in the jungles of the Mayans, that canopy of stars whirling overhead. I can almost hear the high priest explaining the Serpents turning and how, when the complete cuircuit is made, the planets will align, The Long Count will "click" like a giant clock, be completed, like a giant bell at midnight striking, and the cycle will turn completely over to begin once again.

A New Planet

2008-12-16T14:54:00.000-08:00

Sputnik, silver spider in the air, shook us in our beds. Then when the Vanguards and Redstones failed again and again, and finally The Right Stuff, clean cut Glenn and Carpenter and Shirrah and Armstrong, and so many more. We were entirely more aware of our planet than any generation before us, not only for these positive Star Trek dreams, but for the dark nightmares of mushroom clouds and ICBM's, shelters and survival stockpiles.

Those of us who came of age in the era of satellites and space exploration were raised on TV and Rock and Roll are all over the internet now. The post WWII generation includes the innovators that created a culture of communication that is fed and feeds innovation. American culture has spread over the world and world culture is drifting into America from wine choice to AlJazzera and Al Queda to the internet itself from Britain and Berners-Lee and all the other cultural transformations our generation has experienced. The new webs that are world wide include many that are rarely considered or even visible to anyone but those entangled in their data. I think boomers and their children and grandchildren are evolving and will have more to offer and more innovations to create and spread.

Social Media is rapidly knitting profound new relationships across country and culture and chasm. The consciousness of humanity is becoming more capable of expressing Jungian concepts of archetype and collective unconscious. One could even argue that information overload has and will continue to push the mind to evolve. We know that focus and attention can create new pathways and synapses in the brain. As much as I fear the emoticon infested abreviated, vowel-deprived world of "txting," I don't fool myself that I can prevent the changes it will create in my culture any more than I could prevent the predominance of rap music.

The new technologies of communication that link us all, in spite of all the reactionary, conservative, jingoistic, one-worlder paranoia that resists them, are changing what it means to be alive on this planet. The cross-cultural myths of Joseph Campbell and the stories that timelessly connect the whole earth are being exchanged and intertwined as humanity mixes races and myths to reach toward the clichéd "Age of Aquarius."

Three Mornings

2008-11-22T07:53:00.000-08:00

White frost coats the black earth. Dark water solidifies, turning a brown puddle white. Scraping the windshield, I hear leaves whispering. 3:46 PM Nov 19th from web

Frost, thick on the windshield, an image of blindness, white and complete. Driving in the dark, while glass, small hole, more melt, clears. 7:24 PM Oct 20th from web

Mu Ch'i painted persimmons with few strokes, ripe and sweet. Like persimmons, we are nothing like our true selves until bitten by frost. 2:27 PM Oct 17th from web

The Opposite of Overwriting

2008-11-18T16:26:00.000-08:00

I have been working on a new idea and have been away from the blog, per se. I have kept up my twittering. I have kept up my quillpill stories. Anyone who has an interest in my experiments on brevity and these new ideas on the Zen of the moment, will find examples of what I am currently exploring in my work. The blog, I realize is becoming my way of thinking out loud about writing. It is a kind of talking to myself that I am sharing, unashamedly with anyone who wants to overhear it. In the spirit of a gift I am leaving my creative work out in the open without a desire for profit, merely because I have made it and it has no value unless it is somehow shared with someone.

I am not going to quote sources ancient and modern that I have synthesized. I would have had to written down the exact words and the citations at the time. I can't be bothered. It slows me down. An example, an article I was reading about ancient India, in a time when the speech and conversation of the court was elevated to poetry and opera. One of the court poets was quoted as saying a poem must be like an arrow, shot directly into the reader’s soul. That is how I remember the quote but whether these are the exact words or not does not matter. What matters is that is how I received the thought, absorbing it so completely and agreeing with it so deeply that I can not forget it, at least this version of the thought that I remember in this moment and I am almost forced to bring it to others.

In trying to understand why I have spent my life, practically from the time I learned to use words, writing poetry. This has been a long, lonely, difficult struggle to understand words, to play with them and learn to use them in ways that make harmonies and rhythms. I have come to realize this is not a choice but an obsession. There is little practical use in reading poetry, poring over dictionaries, searching for and memorizing obscure poems, studying poems and trying to craft them, taking time to cherish words and roll them on my tongue, holding them in my mouth as they escape from my lungs and relishing the vibration of the sinews in my throat. It is a great waste of time when you have mouths to feed and work to do. As a career, poetry is as impractical as ballet. Perhaps even less practical. There are not countless parents dressing their children in frock coats and berets, queuing up to purchase poetry lessons. It is not as if it has ever been a choice for me. I have written poems since childhood, most of which will probably never be seen by others.

What I have been thinking about lately is that I write closest to my true voice when I am least self-conscious. If can completely immerse myself in the act of writing, in the moment when something takes me and from the idea, a word forms in the brain's synapses and fires my fingers at the keyboard. I can find a Zen like state of focus, one which blots out the world and yet totally enters it. That consciousness is as thin and delicate as a fingerprint on the keyboard. It is a fragile as surface tension.

Here is an example of some new work, written in bursts of 140 characters at a time, while rushing though the prosaic parts of earning a living. I stop and like throwing a dart, try to nail down the theme that I have been mulling over in my mind.

This piece was made of two tweets. They happened in the same hour of the day when I had no time to write but had an idea in the back of my mind for a while before throwing the darts.

Prose won't hold some notions.

Some inklings refuse to be contained
by the mundane and will only yield to
broken lines, rhymes & rhythms of
thought in poems.

Words - what crude tools to
carry thought.

Yet thought is naught
without a precisely built
container of words,

symbols for breathy
noises that carry it
from tongue to ear.

Trillions and trillions

2008-10-11T09:12:00.000-07:00

I was in my grandson’s Montessori pre-school class the other day, admiring the wisdom and warmth of Maria Montessori’s vision of how a child’s natural curiosity can be used to build a basis for learning. It was grandparent’s day and my wife and I were deeply interested in anything our grandson had to show us from the tadpole growing little legs to the beads used to learn the concept of tens. After the joy of the experience on a crisp and sunny autumn day, the image of the beads remained in the back of my mind.

I kept thinking about how wonderful the visual aspect of the beads translated simple mathematical concepts and how if I had had that same toy to play with as a child, I would not have struggled as much with math. The toy is simple. A single bead is in the first place, in a miniature basket, a beautiful glass bead with a luminescent coloring. On the next square are ten of these beads on a wire, like a small glass caterpillar with ten segments. The beads, aligned in a row, perfectly show the quantity with immediacy.

On the next square of cloth, ten rows of ten beads are aligned on the wires in a grid of 100 beads, a concept that makes the idea of “ten squared” a visual concept that one can pick up and play with, count one side of and the other, count all one hundred beads in the decades like an abacus or rosary, an elemental handling of this abstract idea of mathematics. Finally, the last cloth square is a cube of beads, ten stacks of the ten-square 100 bead squares, wired together to make a gleaming glass cube like a giant glittery grain of salt or sand you can hold in your hand. The effect of holding one thousand beads in one hand is instant, the mass and weight, the size and feel, simply illustrate what it means to “understand” an idea in a concrete way.

I would like to use Madame Montessori’s brilliant visual illustration to conceptualize for you what a trillion of anything looks like. The cube of glass beads in the above math manipulative is the beginning of seeing what we have gotten ourselves into. Until we truly see the depths of our problem, we will never be able to see our way out. The thousand beads of ten, ten by ten stacks, is but one small part of this understanding, but it is the basic building block of my illustration. Consider its size to be approximately 3.5 inches by 3.5 inches by 3.5 inches, a solid, hefty cube of beads.

Now, imagine a thousand of these, which would add up to 1,000,000 beads or 3,500 inches of glass beads, a cube that would stretch 291.666 ft., or just under one football field of glass beads in length, breadth and height. One thousand of these stadium-sized cubes of glass beads would equal a cube of beads 55.23 miles high, wide and deep. That is an hour's drive at fifty five, a little under a thousand of those football fields. Now imagine not ten but 11 of those cubes, stacked up like baby blocks, glittering in the sun of an autumn afternoon. That, my friends, is the legacy this generation is leaving for its grandchildren. It kind of makes me ashamed of the baby boom.

Loss and Love

2008-10-03T17:41:00.000-07:00

What else is there to write about? To live is to slowly lose one's life to the heedless rush of time. The only way time can be stopped is when you can leave yourself and with another, become a new one. This becoming may melt through the throes of lust, the heat and juice of passion, or assume the slow osmosis of a long time together, learning so well the ways of another and becoming a family , a couple, a pair, absorbed each into the other's life. Love can transcend sex, species, sanity, separation. Lust can transcend logic, common sense and all reason. Whatever the cause of the loss of self, the result is always the same, a greater loss. That loss might be simple as uncoupling, or complex and difficult as divorce, or plain as death, but it always comes and it links the two together in a way that transcends language. It is in those depths the poet swims, dark and warm and surrounded and then cold and completely alone.

Carving a tower in my heart

2008-09-24T17:07:00.000-07:00

In Italy, in the Middle Ages, before forts and walls, the nobility would erect elaborate impenetrable stone towers where they might retreat to withstand a siege or raid. Some cities had as many as a hundred of these bristling needles on the city skyline, narrow little skyscrapers too smooth and high to climb, to steep to scale.

All around me, politics and economics, passions and fears, attract my attention and pull my focus off of writing. My mind wonders to the temporal rather than the eternal. My heart is taken by this charming child, that lovely scene, another debate or song or headline. The demands of working with every word to make it just the right word, in the perfect order are complete. One cannot divide the self and keep the mind on point.

I am carving a tower in my heart, far from the concerns of today, or even tomorrow. I must make it high up enough to see what is coming and what has gone before, to take myself out of the temporal and the temporary and instead look deep within to evoke my very essence.

Updates

2008-08-18T17:46:00.000-07:00

In the final galleys for the second edition of Coal & Ice, I am working hard to finalize them before the end of the month. Quillpill story: The Golden Room has grown another half dozen pages. English Journal has accepted Rumination for May of 09 publication.

One way I address the time wasted blogging is that it keeps me focused on the idea of writing. I need to spend time every day putting words on paper or keying them into a computer. Without making time for writing, I get less and less happy with myself and harder to be around. The act of thinking and recording those thoughts, editing and shaping them, helps me approach my imperfect life with more attention and less stress.

I am also forcing myself to read books, outside the internet. The blog has become part of a larger context of my work. It is one way to express myself and a means to weave the various strands of self expression into a whole.

Progress on several fronts

2008-08-02T18:27:00.000-07:00

I am well on the way with "The Golden Room" my newest story on Quillpill. The challenge is for me to write a completely different story that is just as good if not better. If done well enough, one could pass the stories off as written by two different authors.

Additionally, I spent time during the month preparing the second edition of Coal & Ice for a second edition. The cover will be printed in color and the poems and stories in black and white in a perfect bound paperback available over the internet. Watch this space for links when the proofs and galleys are returned to the press.

Finally, speaking of links. I include this link to the Private Photo Review, the Poland issue: http://www.privatephotoreview.com/en/review/private.php/riv/63/page/8. My poem is featured on this page, but the pages are captive of the unique band of peasant performers that haunt the photos. This spontaneous theatre has existed in primitive for for centuries in the peasant-filled countryside. The people spend the winter developing plays and before the spring planting, perform for their neighbors their folk-inspired masterpieces. This sort of spontaneous creativity and experimentation among the less cultured of Poland gives me a little kick in the pants and an inspiration to create more.

One more new thing

2008-07-21T14:46:00.000-07:00

I just finished "Three Sum," my tragicomic take on the "Swingtown Seventies" up on Quillpill (www.quillpill.com). I have started another, The Golden Room, which begins, at least, with an historical true story. I love the form that lets me give intensely in small pieces as I have time. Time is limited and focus and attention help me use it most efficiently. I look forward to having more time and/or focus.

"Three Sum," is funny, sexy and yet tense and off-kilter. I have a half dozen stories planned about the misadventures of some adverturous people of that era. Having lived through the pre-HIV era, I observed many a story of twisted desire and tragicomic fragility. I hope to write more of them as time permits. The Golden Room is completely different, inspired by Borges and other Magical Realists.

The idea of writing brief bursts as often as possible, almost on the public wall, appealed to me. I felt everyone knew that I had this project and I just had to keep working on it. Not only because I felt an obligation to finish what I started, but I could imagine readers as anxious a myself to see what happened to these stupid kids. I had to fight the urge to be more grafiti daring, to get sleasy or push the envelope. The form and subject demanded restraint. I worked hard to keep the story absolutely true, taut and minimalist and yet full of irony and humor. I hope to get some reactions.

OMG, is that a word?

2008-07-08T14:45:00.000-07:00

From ancient times, philosophers have felt the next generation brought naught but a de-generation of the culture and literature of their times with its new obsessions and successively less complex cannon of common experience. Culture has always involved vulgarities and hidden aspects, but never have they been so numerous or accessible as during the Instant Age in which we live. The various cultures are blending and morphing from the basic Ameri-culture that has tried to dominate the world. Everything from porn to spam pervades our in boxes. We live at arms-length, reaching though the keyboard to the Common Mind. What transformations are to come?

When text becomes a series of code words for standard cliche, why should we be surprised? Thumbs get tired and so much of adolescent dialogue is cliche after cliche. It saves time to use the shortcut since nothing less is expected, and nothing more is inappropriate. There are text poems and text novels. There are bloggers writing about blogging and blogging about writign. No more are we limited to paper or the size of the "public" we "publish" our thoughts for.

Hip Hop and text has pervaded the youth vernacular to the point where high culture is considered square, or uncool. Poetry, however has kept a level of respect across cultures as an art form that is wedded to music and performance, tangled in the ideas of "voice" and "soul" and transcendent of barriers. Part of my personal mission in life is to promote and proliferate poetry. The web is perfect for this strange literary branch, modern poetry, free verse, text and intensity, how much more made-to-order can an art form be?

Status Report

2008-07-04T06:54:00.000-07:00

About a third of the way through the second edition of Coal & Ice. My goal is to have it on Lulu by the end of the month. Working on a childrens book about the mystery and magic of words. Posted part of part two at Quillpill. Trying to post on Twitter every day. Stopping by here whenever I can catch my breath.

Ongoing

2008-06-24T16:47:00.000-07:00

Part one finished. On to part two. To keep the story interesting and lead the reader deeper all the while keeping to the single syllable as much as possible. The challenge continues.

More on quillpill

2008-06-21T08:11:00.000-07:00

I can post dialogue now. I just have to post it a line at a time. The software seems incapable of allowing a single word to exist on one line. It would be very hard to write poetry that way. This will cut down on the amount of dialogue, which means more focus. This short, short form requires a great deal of attention to detail. One word, one letter, one punctuation off and it goes wrong. It has a certain zen-like focus that I am attracted to. The precision of the challenge means that the story advances slowly and deliberately. Bugs out, I press on.

Experiments are always tricky

2008-06-18T14:46:00.000-07:00

I am writing every day on "Three Sum," a piece of short short fiction and trying to post to quillpill, a new site that allows folks who are on the beta (lucky, I guess,) to post 140 characters or less. I have posted three times out of ten attempts. Twice it was intentional. The other times were frustrating because some sort of glitch is keeping me from posting dialogue, even though it is well under the character count. This is extremely frustrating because short dialogue is one of the things I do a lot of. Here is an example that I keep failing to post:
“Joe,” Lee asked, “Do you think she loves me?”
“No.”
“But, Joe, she slept with me.”
“Slut.”
“She’s not that way.”
“They’re all that way.”
This little exchange advances the plot, tells us Lee is in love and that his confidant, Joe is a cynic. It reveals the state of the love affair and how Lee feels about his lover. I hate to hit this sort of wall so early in the process. I had about a dozen of these little bits and they are all stuck in limbo. I am rethinking how to approach it. I tried different punctuation, substituting < & > for " & " but this created a page where only two words "Lee asked" were shown. That really made the story fall apart and the author look dumb. Part of being "published" that is exposing your creation in "public" is the opportunity for embarrassment. None of us likes to appear stupid. I am wrestling with my eagerness to put more work out in this form because it is both an experiment in progress and an opportunity for failure. I guess everything is.

To Blog or not to blog

2008-06-09T17:10:00.000-07:00

“Don’t blog. Write.”
R. Hobb

That is “Robin Hobb’s” advice and in some ways it is very good advice. If you read her essay, missive, open letter, whatchamacallit, (see writer's blogs) you come to the conclusion that this is a smart lady and that much of what she writes makes sense.

But then, I still am bringing her rant (her words not mine) here, to put out on the writing about blogging, blogging about writing kitchen table. I can take a pencil and prod it, turn it over, probe it, put a light on its underbelly and opine using the exact form Ms. Hobb detests. That may be a tough task if you are just starting out in the writer's career path, but I have been on this trail for more than 50 years and have no fear. Although I see have seen some measure of success, poetry and poverty are intimately connected, and success as a academic or a grant writer has never been part of my makeup. But I have been doggedly writing, putting letter after letter, sentence after sentence, since my pre-teens. Whatever Ms. Hobb knows, I see no reason to believe I cannot conduct a thoughtful counterpoint to her conversation, albeit one-sided for the most part, but a dialog about one of the world’s oldest activities. In the beginning, after all, was “the word.” I somethings think that will be the end, too. Perhaps, with a laugh, a good guffaw instead of a hushed silence. I just cannot stifle my wordiness enough and so I have to stand up for blogging, I have to respectfully disagree.

I am not about to get in the rebutting rut. She makes many good points, but most of them seem to be based on the idea that blogging is a sheer waste of time, as opposed to entering the jaws of the book publishing beast, clawing your way down its throat and oozing through its entrails. Blogging has to be mundane because, even though some desk jockey makes the decisions and suits and number-crunchers follow it all the way to remaindering, books are serious, real, literature. Anything you don’t write and rewrite and edit and rewrite again and then hard bind and sell for $45 is pretty much unfinished crap.

I see this more as Ingres vs. Monet argument. If you have ever seen these two painters, you know that the former was a classicist whose paintings are almost photographic in their accuracy and the latter is an impressionist whose paintings can appear casual and sloppy, especially if one gets too close. But standing back, one does not see the fine, single-hair detail of the neo-classical and the sloppy, seemingly careless swirls of the impressionist disappear into the whole impression, one of absolute accuracy. They are two completely different things.

I am not suggesting you read this blog from the back of the room peering at the screen with squinted eyes or binoculars. But, for me, it is about the bigger picture, a reflection on a lifetime of writing, about the idea of writing, the why and wherefore. And I do put real work, labored over work here, published and unpublished, mostly brand new and worked over to the point were I am finished in the sense that Auden said, “A poem is never finished, it is merely abandoned.” It is a big decision to put a poem out in the light and ask any person whose eyes it enters to write back, to let me know what they think, to react. I see it as making the poem "public" of "publishing" and part of the process of my ending my association with a piece of my work. I don’t want to keep it, having come to the conclusion that I am abandoning it. I want to get it out, out there, away from the huge stack of other things that I don’t feel I have put enough effort into yet to claim that honor.

It took me a while to write about Ms. Hobb’s blog. I found it a very pragmatic, intelligent and logical essay; yet olde Gutenberg thought, a very narrow and German sensibility that allowed for all of us to read from paper, from the page and from that technology. From that kind of making public all sorts of new forms grew, the story, the novel, the book of poems and stories, the opus of great classics, not to mention the publishing business. However, that was not the actual primordial writing. Writings had been there in monasteries and libraries all along. The difference was the technology allowed readers to multiply and to become a market. Now, I am watching the technology shrink the number of readers. Amazon is leading the way, as are all the internet texts, to a new way of looking at the page, the process, the experience of reading. Trees are going to stop dying and poisonous inks are going to stop being made. All the fuel in all the trucks that truck those books is going to be saved.

I don’t pretend to know what will happen a hundred or a thousand years from now, but I believe this juncture in history, is the beginning of the end of the book. It is a time, as were all the eras before, when technologies can transform our lives. Just as we are different from the age of Gutenberg, our grandchildren will be different from us. I think there will be new forms of entertainment, new kinds of reading/writing experiences and new forms of literature. I may not be riding that wave then, but I am experiencing the surge of the surf now that feels like change happening and I am part of it. And that vision allows for blogging, encourages it, sees it as the beginnings of something new.

I allow myself to blog, as long as I have spent time working on my non-blog writing. The blog itself lets the writing in and vice versa. I write and react and report on my writing life on my blog. It is one of the best parts of my being. As I create fiction from the reality of my thoughts, I plan to learn from my experiment. To push the paradigm even further, I was thinking of starting a novel about a blogger.

The Death of Gutenberg

2008-06-02T15:03:00.000-07:00

The printing press died when the copier was invented. But though we still read, our eyes are focused more and more on a screen and paper is disappearing into the pixels. To think we might one day be able to let go of the page, to stop the holding of the finger between pages, the finger-licking, the turning and turning back again, then folding the corner or placing a bookmark. It is a thought that releases a certain longing and regret in the heart of anyone who has loved a book, who has held one close in the dark, or ruined one’s eyes straining to read in a pool of poor light. The book as an object is an ancient icon and even though the hard copy may disappear, or else be considered rare, they things we read might be changing. The written word, thought still expressed in letters, words and sentences, will change. Literature will change. All reading and writing will change as the web changes how we find what we read and respond to it.

Breaking the Palomino

2008-05-30T14:24:00.000-07:00

John knew what he was doing. He knew the Palomino did not like riders.
His father alone could ride him with strong working of rein and bit but
no one else ever did. Except the fat kid. Earlier they’d been fighters,
rolling in the dirt. John had Fatso in a headlock but the kid stood up

and ran straight into the side of the barn with John hanging on, until
the third time when John hit his head and nearly tore the kid’s ear off.
That was before the horses came in from the pasture, down the hill
into the field and the kid asked to ride. John looked at his big soft

body and laughed. “Sure, I can arrange a ride. Let me get your tack.
That’s rider talk for blanket, saddle, bridle and reins. You’ll learn. “
The fat kid did what he was told. When the big horse reared back
the kid hung on like snot. He stayed there through buck and turn,

kick and spin. He held on and pulled down on the reins until the damn
beast stopped and stood like a statue. “I was pretty scared for a while,”
the fat kid said. He sat up straight in the saddle. His swollen ear had
turned purple. John hated how it all came out. Hated the fat boy’s smile.

They rode for an hour and when they came back John’s dad was there.
“See you boys been riding,” he said. “It’s my first time,” Fatso said.
John’s father laughed. “You must learn fast,” he said. “John, take care
of the horses, while us men clean up for supper.” The sky turned red.

Wawel

2008-05-28T14:20:00.000-07:00

Five thousand decades have passed
since the dragon with a taste for virgins
was slain by Prince Krak. The jewels
of royalty and the chambers of the rich
rise above the cave where the bones
mounded before the open wound
in the earth. The stench of rotting
flesh and the fiery belches of
the beast, led the brave knight
deep within the bowels of
the hill, to slay the evil thing.
And while the mass is said
and the choir sings, the beast
awaits within. Where once
again it will awaken.

# # #

The Dead Tooth Fairy

2008-05-26T17:20:00.000-07:00

When you find out it’s a lie just like Santa and Easter Bunny,
the whole thing comes tumbling down like crumbling cake,
It may be something you can laugh about. But it is not funny.
People lead you to believe in magic and then pretend to make
the lies come true with money and presents and made-up stuff
so that you don’t know who to trust. I mean, how can we take
anything you tell us for the truth? What is important enough
not to lie, if not for Saint Nicholas and coloring Easter eggs?
Now, you go and kill the tooth fairy, and tell me “Get tough,
from now on your teeth are permanent. It was all a mistake.”

# # #

Childhood’s Hill

2008-05-24T10:34:00.000-07:00

At the age of nine, I climbed, crawled vertically up the hill
over rocks and thorns, through nettle and brier and berry cane,
hand over hand, a ladder of roots and rocks to the top. Still
and windless, where looking down on the house to ascertain
the new perspective from the height, I saw it shrink down until
I realized my life was an atom, in the larger world, a tiny grain.

Half a century later, the climb is locked in chains of change.
What was so mountainous, seems smaller now, but uphill
made more difficult by the touch of time and a twinge of pain.
From the summit, the house appears a toy, and smaller still,
here, out of breath and bone-weary from the sweat and strain.
I remember, then I was out of breath and had to rest until
I could descend down into the yard as it all loomed up again.

# # #
.

A word for time

2008-05-22T20:00:00.000-07:00

Time steals so much from us, you would never
think, a feral trader, she leaves a token in place
of what was taken. The tannin in the grape, the rind
on the cheese, left in lieu of nothing more than passing
time, touching all things: lining, folding, graying, fading.

The heart, is improved by age, slowing and deepening;
its beat like an old drum to a longer and stronger rhythm.
Some think it weaker and worn by the years, but lovers
know it beats better when it has beaten so long for another.

Each year, the time our sands started, turns round again
to remind us how little we have but each other. No one
can ever give us more and deep inside we know it.
We need to take the time before time takes us.
Someone, now gone, wrote this in the beach sand.

The Earth Quakes

2008-05-19T17:29:00.000-07:00

Poetry was once just another way to touch other people's minds. The game built up around it in a culture, whether academic or publishing, is irrelevant in the new world of the web. The world is now, a world of poets.

Chung Du, in Sczechwan Province, where the recent earthquakes killed thousands, was known as the city of poets. People recited poems in the streets and parks for centuries. The city had a living tradition of honoring the power of the word and how the use of just the right words to say the most jewel-like thought, distilled to its essence, is vital to life and to the spirit. Their honor for the ancient art of word painting and story telling, the art of seeing and saying the deepest thoughts, was part of the history of the area.

Among the cries of mothers calling, of wives and sisters crying and calling out names, of children crying out for their mothers and fathers, there are poems floating in the gray dust. Pages swirling from open rooms. Young poets lie crushed at their desks, ink and blood on the rice paper. Old poets release their last song, crushed from their lungs by fallen concrete. Nothing is less abstract than concrete.

The Twitter Experiment

2008-05-18T18:47:00.000-07:00

To twitter, to warble like a caged bird some demented mating song, not truly seeking a mate but reaching out to other souls caught in the connective tissue of the world wide web. I have a new game, twittering is using 139 characters to post on twitter, on line and on phone, exactly what you are doing at the moment. When I can, I am twittering within that limit and trying to introduce a poetic thought in the intricate techno biocosm of minds and machines with electron harmonics that penetrate mere communication and either evoke an echo from a similar soul, or follow on with a new original thought, leading to conversation. Either way, an experiment, a limitation, not quite a format but a de-finus to bring to an end the word.

My latest twitter post: "Media Quake, social net quaver, spider-web quiver, sensational shiver, sensual shudder, ticklish tremble, vector ray vibrate, terminal twitter."

None of it makes sense and yet every word was chosen for its twitterisciousness, its taste on the tongue and its corresponding note in the hammer and anvil of the ear. My challenge is to do this regularly without robbing from my other writing.

Why September 11?

2008-05-14T18:39:00.000-07:00

09/11/1683, Vienna

How long the Muslim memory must be,
to recall so intensely the Turks and Tartars
fleeing like girls from the Hussar’s heavy
cavalry, in the Siege of Vienna. The stars
have shifted in their spheres. The zodiac
become a string of satellites and King Jan,
a figure in a painting on a wall. Attack
and keep this in your heart, all loss gone
beyond a dozen generations, yet still fresh
in the fratricidal hearts of Atta and the boys,
now charred to ash in old New York. Flesh
seared off and evanesced, like the sad joys
of patriots singing drunken songs in a tongue
no one cares to learn. How long must they
remember, the Sultan’s loss, the sadness sung,
a piper's gross ghazals for which we all must pay.

# # #

The Mobile Novel: Starting Out

2008-05-13T14:46:00.000-07:00

The Mobile Novel: Starting Out

I thought this was a crazy idea. Now, I think it is brilliant. Noir and California, like pinot.

Mother's Day

2008-05-11T19:49:00.000-07:00

These named days claim us in ways we usually ignore. Each of us would like to think we sprung whole from the our father’s mind, complete from his brow in god-like innocence. The seamier thoughts of our parents’ intimacies and the corporeal essence of reproduction is usually taboo. We are not much interested in imagining our own conception. So the idea of the archetypal mother remains child like, virginal, or at best, abstract. The intensity of birth is soon forgotten in the joy and work of caring for a child.
Unless, that is, you have been present at a birth, looked into the glowering eyes of a new-born fixing you like a bug on a pin — an expression of mixed curiosity and discomfort. The child is an alien, ripped from his/her womb-world, where all needs were met instantly in an insulated water-filled globe. From another world, almost tube-fed, the fetus flowers into a human being, from a squirt to a zygote, to a dodecahedron sub-divided, bi-sexual squid into a complete child, screaming, gasping for breath, crying and angry, torn out of heaver by the head into a cold, laser-bright openness filled with other creatures you are completely dependent on.
The power to give birth, literally to give life, attaches us to the life-giver for our entire life. This sort of cosmic connection goes beyond words, into the realm of the mythic.

Creative Conversation

2008-05-10T15:05:00.000-07:00

Social networking has all the potential of a good conversation, except you can exchange ideas and “feed” off the thoughts of dozens of souls from all around the planet all-at-once. Add to the mix the ability to access the conversation at your convenience, to drill down into any discussion that interests you or drop out and go to pee without losing any of the gist of what is said. The excitement of where this is going is part of an electronic awareness and as a matter of course becomes the subtext of all topics.

The mind seeks feedback and new ideas spring from synapse stimulation with thought streams flowing like bio luminescence through the ocean. Facelessness helps, as well. No body-face hang-ups to pull you to or push you away. No beauty to enchant, and conversely no bad breath, body odor, warts or freckles or scars to distract us. As technology pushes forward into more complex and intricate webs, these conversations will grown richer, more fulfilling, more enlightening. Other currents will ripple in, led by the articulate voices that call us like schools of fish to swim in the depths.

I am intrigued by collaboration and experimentation and interested in the creative potential that blogging offers, the conversation, if you will, of fellow cursor clickers, cliques of enchanting creators collaborating on a developing dialogue.

Monologue in a crowd

2008-05-08T20:10:00.000-07:00

Facebook, Twitter, Friend Feed, My Space, You Tube, Metacafe, all working their own angle on the communication revolution. If one is experimenting, one is everywhere and nowhere all at once. One is many and yet no one. Many self-absorbed egos prattling on about what they are doing at the moment, or better yet, hiding behind a camera, like a high tech voyeur doing digital video of his/her bathroom mirror. Dipping my toe in the digital river, pulling it back boiled to the bone.

Three Baseball Card Poems

2008-05-06T18:18:00.000-07:00

Writing, like reading, is an anti-social activity

2008-05-05T19:38:00.000-07:00

I write alone, in my room, with the door closed. I focus completely on the monitor like a flashlight in a dark room, there are rings of awareness within that focus, but outside my periferal vision, the world fades to black. I am so intensely concentrated on the cursor, I might as well be that blinking little vertical that words trail after appearing as it moves across the page. I am the same when I read. The world falls away and I am lost in the story, the poem, the page. I can be interrupted, ripped from my trance, taken away by reality, but that is never my choice. I would choose to stay until sleep or hunger or love, in other words something my mind sees as more important than the moment.

Now, I find a hornet's nest of activity circling the web known by many names but which I will refer to as social networking. People gather around common interests and exchange information, comment, gossip, pass judgement, share sh*t, connect. I read that in Japan, the majority of best sellers are written for the cell phone. My mind warps into where this is all leading, how art and self-expression and society are transforming. I have always been an experimenter, a post modern, jazz-oriented, improvisational creature. The future is pulling me in new directions.

How writing is changing

2008-04-27T18:46:00.000-07:00

OK, so I read in the NYT that nowadays it seems there are more writers than readers. Fewer and fewer people are reading and more and more people are writing. Sometimes I think I am only writing for myself. Sometimes I think that is what the writing obsession is all about.

The self-publishing biz is burgeoning. The bloggorhea is boundless. The vanity presses are hooking them in by the boatload, so many suckers that Borders is getting into the biz, offering editors and publishing for a fee, though when it comes to shelf space, not so much. The concept is transforming just as everything the web touches is transformed. I read stories about web-based companies that pop up, grow and blossom into billion dollar ideas. I read about China having bypassed the US for online activity.

I Googled my name and found three dozen listings some in foreign languages, reviews and links from all over the world. This ethereral connectivity spreads through the electrons and photons, from mind to mind. No one knows who reads these words and what they think.

I have had a website since 1993 and my own URL since 1998. I taught myself Photoshop and HTML and in a matter of months wrote, er...created an interactive sestina called BLOODLINES (www.boiarski.com) and just put it out there. I got nominated for a webby, more properly the Perranoski Prize and featured by a German design site. It is all sort of happenstance. Yet, I see it as part of my pattern since my first days of writing when I was not yet a teen.

My first story was a science fiction story based on my personal fantasy of being an alien. I came to this conclusion because I felt I did not belong in the family I was born into, and was adopted. My baby pictures, my memories, photos of my birthdays and family events, were evidence that I was indeed born into the family I had. However, I never felt at home there. I imagined that I was somehow spirited into my mother's womb by space creatures.

My fantasy, as I walked in the woods, was that there was a certain tree somewhere that I had not yet found that was really not a tree at all, but a cleverly disguised device masquerading as a tree. If would but pull a branch, push a knot or the scar of a broken branch in the right combination, the tree would somehow transport me back to my real home, on another planet. I read that this alienation fantasy is quite common among artists. especially those who had suffered some sort of abuse. I have even had conversations with others about similar fantasies. But, in truth, I still search for that certain tree.

Poem/Song Lyric

2008-04-25T14:36:00.000-07:00

Nota Bene

“Unto what may the fetus, it its mother’s womb be likened?
Unto a notebook that is folded up. Its hands rest on its temples,
elbows on thighs, heels against buttocks, its head lies between its knees.
Its mouth is closed and its navel is open…when it comes forth into the
air of the world, what is closed opens and what is open closes.”

From the Babylonian Talumud, Chapter 3, folio 30a

The notebook is open now and the furious scribbling begins,
All the small things get noticed, the violet, the Japanese beetle,
The wind when it caresses, coupled dragonflies hovering.
So many notes fill each page, all the minutiae from the crack
In the sidewalk to the lightning leaping across the night sky.

Each chapter is there dissolved in time, a crystal of stimulus
And it will be recalled, a page turned back to reread again.
But the writing must continue, furious and focused. Each
Insignificant detail must be recorded by the eye and ear.

Nothing gets past us. We may not even be aware of the
Record but it is there, waiting to be misplaced or revived.
At last the notebook full, the ending weakens. The cliché
Of Death like finis at the end of the movie. As if one
Had not taken one last notice of this emptiness.
No one would believe this. No one.

# # #

Play: A scene from Industrial Strength, a work about work

2008-04-24T19:09:00.000-07:00

What follows is a scene from a play written for a particular talent. David Jon Krohn is an actor, a mime, a dancer/choreographer, a juggler, a wire walker, a technician and an electrician. After a series of long conversations about his work and his life, I wrote this play around his talent. David plays "The Electrician," the central figure in a play about the kind of physical labor that I believe will one day be lost to the robot and the computer.

The play included fire eating, juggling, arc welding, plaster-board workers on stilts, power tools, dances, songs, poems and a fly in finale, where the electrician, suspended with an invisible chord from a two-ton crane, levitated over the audience like an angel.

This country was built on the backs of laborers who expended their lives in the hard work of providing for their families, surviving in a society that lacks respect for honest labor and grew from the sweat and blood of millions of unsung workers. This play honors the workers who created the very substance of our lives.

What follows is just a short scene from the 70 minute play, Industrial Strength, which ran for two seasons, performed in a working factory, the Wanner Metalworx, an operating metal fabrication plant that allowed the company to set up during the weekend. In many sold out performances, during two separate summers, the show played to standing room only with standing ovations. The theatre was created out of nothing, lights strung, folding chairs set up, a ticket taker at the door. We broke not only the fourth wall of the stage, we broke the theatre with a play housed temporarily in an industrial district that is now becoming gentrified loft apartments. This scene begins on a suspended platform above the audience, after a fitful dream, the electrician wakes and dresses for work.

The Electrician:

"Work. Energy required. Movement, required.
Must have movement over distance.

Power?

[Taped: The wind of time and space has worn away
the night and the light breaks in
like a blind thief to steal the rest.]

(Tape ends and the electrician continues awakened from the dream.)

“Power is defined as the amount of energy required to move one pound one foot
in one second - foot-pounds-per-second.

“Some days, I don’t have the power to move one foot,
which feels like it weighs a ton, one inch off the ground, for one second.”

(The Electrician climbs down.)

[To Self:) "Rubber souls, rub her soles, rub a dub dubber, royal black rubber stack soles, socks with no holes. It’s cold. Long John, long John, he had the strangest shoes he had a heel in front he had a heel behin’ and you never could tell which way he’s gone. Coverall, cover me . Cover me all. Coveralls cover me."

"Can’t be late. Where are my tools? Where is my tool belt ?"

(Two crew members put on his belt.)

“The belt is a vestment of tools.
My tools are my armor.
My tools protect me.
My hands protect me.
I gird myself in tools to touch the fire in the wire."

The Crew

“My tools are my armor. My tools protect me.”

The Electrician

“My life is in my hands with the tools
Hand tools in my power belt bring power to my hands.
Without these hands there would be no power.
No wonder I protect them.
I will not be grounded. My belt will protect me.
The fire will not pass through me.

The Crew

“My tools are my armor. My tools will protect me.”

The Electrician

(He removes each tool from the belt, shares it with the audience and hands it either to a crew member or an audience member. A crew member takes it and reverently lays it down.)

"Tester tells me if the wire glows hot.
Hot is an awl in the eye, a hole in the heart.
Hot is death, sure enough.

"These are my hand tools. They keep my hands working.
They keep me focused on my task; extend the power of my hands.

(He juggles the screwdrivers)

"These are drivers, Phillips & flat blades all insulated for their purpose
to screw the power, to wire it to the line, to pour it through the sockets. Torque!
This is a speed driver. It torques fast. Torque! Torque!

"Here’s my big hammer, handle it thus. Bam! Punch a hole. Bam!”

The Crew

(Throughout his speech, the crew repeats key words to stress their impact: Torque! Bam!, etc.”)

The Electrician

“Torpedo level, Magnetized, sticks to steel.
Box or pipe it’s straight and square.

"Square is important in times of stress. (Crew begins square box step)
Square comforts us. Keeping things square is part of the ritual, straight and perpendicular is secure.

"The squarest work is the surest work. Precision is protection.
Tape, mounted so I can measure and still it stays in my belt.

"Tiebacks keep it neat, or hold it in place until I strap, screw, or anchor it down.
Crew starts to stagger during box step, getting more off-balance.

"Nothing is left loose. Loose is not safe.

"My belt protects me. My tools encircle me.
Even if I accidentally open it, He opens belt and spins around my belt will not fall.

"Electricians work with fire the way lion tamers work with cats.
The predictable, learnable part is a matter of nerve and practice.

(A Crew member hands him a torch. He eats fire."

"But the danger comes when your back is turned,
when you think you understand,

(A wrench falls, clanging to the concrete.)

"when someone drops a wrench from up above or a wire gets crossed.

(The electrician stops, walks closer to the audience, and in a more intimate tone says,)

"I saw a guy on a job once

(Movement Crew “explode” arms, fall to prone position.)

"the fire blew out his elbows;
and as he went to his knees, the fire blew off his kneecaps.

He was dead before he hit the ground.

(Preacher, a member of the crew, Rises up and says)

“Born to toil! Born to die!”

The Electrician

(He goes back to the belt, fondling each tool as he takes it from its holster.)

"Cable knife, wicked blade. Hooked, like a weapon.
locks into position to skin service cable.
Drywall saw, quick-toothed, rough-cut access wires within walls.

"Inside that darkness one needs light.
I carry my own on my belt.
You have not known darkness until you work with high voltage blind.

"Small crescent. Adjustable, Many wrenches in one.

"Grippers: Channel locks snap open to accommodate any size object I need to grip.

"Bent-back dikes, diagonals, slice on an angle through solid metal
clean and close to the wall

"Lineman’s pliers, Kleins, the best. What’s in a name? Quality protects me.
This part grips, this cuts, and the jaws don’t touch.

"And these, solid, long-nose pliers, Notch strips insulation, then I twist
and cut the wire with this. Screw the wire into the terminal,
Torque! and I’m done to a turn.

(Begins a paranoid gathering of tools, reloading his belt.)

"My tools protect me. My belt girds me
I will not touch the hot wire My dream of white fire and burnt skin will not come true.
"I will not fry, I will not die. I will not be grounded.

"My tools bring power to bear. Torque! Screw! Hot ... it’s hot!
Watch the wire! Screw the power! Electrician runs off

(Preacher)

“Adam was condemned to live by the sweat of his brow. Adam was damned to toil and
worry and die!”

(Music begins. Actual factory sounds arranged by experimental composer, Keith Fleming)

( DC Generator for crane turns back on.)

.......... SCENE 8 ..........

Movement Crew: THE DANCE OF THE TOOLS.

They perform phrases of tool-inspired movement and then move up the bay toward the crane with the electrician approaching them. As he passes they light him with hand-held work lights on extension cords.

.......... SCENE 9 ..........

“The Electrician”
(Entering suspended from a crane like an angel)

“The clouds kiss and growl before they gnaw holes in each other.
Grumble and flash. Their moisture fills the air.
Fronts collide and winds blow. Lightning forks. Thunder cracks.
That’s power. That’s electricity. Molten white and firing. Fire-ring.

(He descends, lowering himself with the controller, from the crane)

“Sometimes, you have to work the wires hot,
everything is insulated.

(Juggling the tape rolls as the crew circles)

“I insulate with tape: Insulation is part of the ritual,

“CREW”
ALL Crew say colors with electrician .

green, ground;
white, neutral;
black, hot.
green, ground;
white, neutral;
black, charred.
green, ground;
white, neutral;"

This is a small sample of a complex work, too complex to present in writing, the acting and the location made it come alive, but it imparts a flavor of the evening, filled with darkness, the smells and dirt of an actual factory.

Limitations can be liberating

2008-04-22T19:04:00.000-07:00

Writing while driving

2008-04-21T16:57:00.000-07:00

What follows is an experiment in creativity. I am trying to challenge myself to write in ways that force me to get out of my habits. The thought is that one can create new kinds of work if one gets away from old habit. This was written while driving on I-70 headed West from Columbus to Dayton.

Doing two things at once

Prism of my cracked windshield refracts
Across the pages, a slash of colored light
Layered like spilled fruit juices
watemellontangerinelemonsugarmellonblues.
I turn the wheel and it disappears.
A red rabbit blurs by.

Sun glares intensely on the starred
Rear window of the white car ahead,
I can’t make out the driver.
Moving snake of ink tracks
Across the page, making a road,
Where time stops thought;
Pours content like concrete
Into the void of the page.

I accelerate to 60,
While writing: sumac, locust,
The bony white body of a sycamore
As they loom up then zoom
Peripherally, like roads going off;
Like the road my hood is eating, all part
Of the blur of blooming that retreats to
The black at the back of my head.

The splash of light is back, quite
By accident, the road winding to the right.
I am now doing 52, behind a white-haired man
In an old white car. Here are two black men
In a big blue car. A black couple in a silver
One. They have all lived on the road while
I scrawled words at the wheel.

Boats across the green median, pulled by blue
Pickups and in the sky; a red-tailed hawk floating
In another time. A canoe overturned on the roof
Of a green Barracuda strains against its bonds.
The prism flickers on the back of my hand,
Moves up to cuff my wrist, crawls up my arm
Into the shadow of the visor and is gone.

Suddenly slowing, the traffic grows so thick for a time
I have to close the tablet and put the pen down.
Hay in cylindrical bales, fields of soybeans yellowing.
It is easier to write at 55. Not to mention the savings.
I notice that I mistook the white-haired woman in the white
Car for a man. Distracted, I suppose. Lost focus.

The prism lies quiescent on the journal.
I pass the woman again and come up to
The couple in the silver sedan. They have
Two children who wave. I wave back and
Pull around them, accelerating. The prism fades.

Black and white cows in an open green field,
Car-high corn fields, green blades fluttering,
Traffic closing in and braking down, 40, 30, 15,
A wreck burns on its back, a red rabbit in flames.

# # #

Blogging about writing, writing about blogging

2008-04-20T19:34:00.000-07:00

As a writer, I have been watching the warping of the arts that the internet has been encouraging for many years. I first put up my artwork and poetry in 1993. Since that time, I have met many people and been more and more interested in how this dance of electrons is changing the world of communications, the arts and my fellow human beings. I have come to the realization that I am fascinated enough by the torrent of change in the stream of atomic pixelization to dip my toe in it. I have always been an experimenter. I have written about every type of work one can and now I am going to start blogging. I hope to produce something new every week and share my other work with the world. Anyone who wants to communicate and think out loud with me is welcome to join the conversation. My only rule is that I don't want to talk politics or any other subject unless the conversation is done creatively, that is in a creative form.