Trillions and trillions

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

“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.