Naming Stuff

Lately I’ve been thinking every poem I write could begin with the words, “Well yes and…” and, in fact, those words may make a good title if I can ever get a book together.

They suggest that what follows will acknowledge, affirm, and supplement what a reader already knows, which seems to be all I can hope for. I rarely manage so much.

In Poetry and the Body, John Vernon says, “I think I am choosing, selecting my words, but words just as often choose me.” Sometimes I feel like a medium—at my most fluent, I don’t feel I’m doing anything special, simply condensing what’s already in the air or divining what’s just under the surface. This sense of the experience leads Vernon to call poetry “a dance of words in the mouth” and to assert writing is finally “gestural,” more revealing in pattern than content…more revealing, even, than it intends.

I know how shamanistic—or loony—these statements may sound, but they arise from a concrete observation: the words writers take such pride in choosing and arranging are ultimately limited.

According to Vernon, our consciousness “wakes up” with language and, as we’ve never really known a time without it, we grow used to words’ power to organize the world, to classify and categorize and order. We forget that language also extricates us from the world. We can come to believe words are the world when they only really describe it. We seek control through language as if it could remake what it depicts.

Vernon asserts poetry exists because the world ultimately resists naming. “Language” he says, “sifts everything through its categories and types, and the world is the deposit left over when language is finished.”

While even a poem needs some measure of rationality, I’m skeptical when I know exactly what I’m doing. It sounds eyes-rolled-into-the-back-of-my-head crazy to say so, but a rhythm often occurs to me before the words. I might write a line in blankity blanks blank blanken and then substitute actual words for my place-holding nonsense. Which makes me wonder which comes first. Are the words the real placeholders, something to fit dim music I hear? I prefer not being sure. I’m not out to write nonsense, but I’d rather suit words to a feeling than the other way around. I want to be no more clever than necessary.

Vernon says, “We need poetry because names die, because objects resist their names, because the world overflows and escapes its names.”

And if you can’t name anything—for long—wouldn’t it be nice to communicate that we share that state and still try to say what we mean anyway?

In light of Vernon’s observations, acknowledging, affirming, supplementing an unnamed and unnameable world seems a good dream. Nothing is as satisfying to a poet as a nod. It declares, “You’ve said something I almost knew. You’ve made some music in words audible at last.”

Writer’s Block

The friction of traffic
wears deep, digging
inescapable grooves,
and this morning the city
looks like an underlayer,
a landscape exposed
by abrasion, carved
from what might swell
without me. The world
sinks exhausted,
spent from carrying
all I’ve taken from it.

Lazy Is As Lazy Does

“Lazy” is a much more slippery term than it ought to be. What passes as fruitful activity can just stand in the way of what you really should be doing, and sometimes doing nothing produces positive results. Sometimes, whether you are doing something or nothing is a matter of interpretation.

For the last few days, since I finished teaching summer school last Friday, I haven’t made good on my intention to plan for the next school year, haven’t read anything from my formidable selection of summer reading, haven’t attacked my self-improvement list, and certainly haven’t done the chores I should have. I thought I might use this down time to reread material for my classes in the fall or gather poems for a manuscript or work on a gallery webpage. Instead, I’ve been doing painting after painting—chain painting like a chain smoker, just finishing one

to begin another

and another

and another

and another

And all of these are only details from larger paintings.

And, until now, I hadn’t given a thought to writing a blog post either.

Jules Reynard, a nineteenth century French novelist and playwright said, “Laziness is nothing more than the habit of resting before you get tired,” and by that definition I am the laziest person I know, believing myself worthy of a break even before I’ve actually done anything to take a break from.

Gandhi said “Indolence is a delightful but distressing state. One must be doing something to be happy.”

In a defensive mood, I might say I AM active—look at all the art I’ve produced over the last few days—but laziness is in the motive, not in the effort. Knowing painting is what I’d rather do makes painting lazy. A diligent person turns to tasks that are not only necessary but unpleasant and arduous. Arduousness in art doesn’t count…because I enjoy it. And, at the end of the summer, I know I will judge this time by how many of those unpleasant items I accomplish. I won’t be as proud of myself if I only get to cross out “Paint” or “Watch the entire Battlestar Galactica series.”

I try to believe the scholars on the other side, people like Soren Kierkegaard who called idleness “The only true good” but I never really succeed. And I’ve never been good at working for rewards. I’d rather skip to the rewards or, better yet, have the work be rewarding. I know my trouble, an unrealistic sense if how deserving I am. Don’t I do enough during the school year to earn some time off? But I can say that every day until it’s the first day of school. And if only I could stop believing I will say it until then.

Every teacher knows July 4th marks the psychological midpoint of summer, the moment when time stops looking expansive and “back to school” ads begin to grow like dandelions.

If I put half as much effort into doing things as I do agonizing over not doing them…

You complete the sentence. I’ve got to go.

Another Chicago Monday

Even in the city, I still sometimes see
the color on color of sunset on wheat,
dying flames guttering on a patch of gold.
Here, the last sun on a steeple’s face
illuminates something far away.
You stand in gray. The air has another
quality chilled in its current
between buildings. It carries voices,
without authors, speaking sentences
with not one intelligible word.
But it’s the same. The evening finds you
away from yourself, already dreaming.
That must be how hope works—
a belief apart, light shining elsewhere.

A Match Ill-Met

Many writers and painters and creative people of all types say they don’t want their thinking to outdo their doing. Minimal self-consciousness is their goal, and they don’t want to be distracted by matters outside the work. Let the particulars of style and technique take care of themselves, they mean to focus on the subject.

Me too, but I can’t help myself and periodically have to ask what the hell I’m doing. Perhaps I spend so much energy with the technical parts of creation—I’m prone to screw up—that I’m not proficient enough to let subjects rule. A few times in my life, on stage, I’ve been so well-rehearsed words came out without guidance, but those moments seemed otherworldly. Nothing similar happens while I’m painting or writing.

I can’t help thinking—am I doing this right?

Reading John Ruskin’s Modern Painters recently reminded me how far off I could be. He was in another grumbling match with metaphysicians over where the quality of a thing resides, in the observer or in the thing itself, and he turned to poets who engage in pathetic fallacy that assigns qualities to things.

Ruskin believed the power to create impressions lives not in us, but in the things themselves. Artists only fulfill that inherent power. He explains

This power is always there, in the thing, whether we are there to experience it or not, and would remain there though there were not left a man on the face of the earth. Precisely in the same way gunpowder has a power of exploding. It will not explode if you put no match to it. But it has always the power of so exploding, and is therefore called an explosive compound, which it very positively and assuredly is, whatever philosophy may say to the contrary.

The artist, Ruskin says here (and elsewhere) elicits the greatest pleasure when he or she offers something “true” and unleashes the inherent power of the subject. According to Ruskin, the moment an artist says what something does or is, art dissipates. You must realize the power of the thing, not posit some other power. You will put readers or viewers in an impossible position, suggesting that, if they can’t see what you say, the problem is theirs. Ruskin explains that you can’t assert “all gunpowder is subjective and all explosion imaginary” or you will make someone into “an ill-made match.”

“The temperament which admits the pathetic fallacy,” he says, is “too weak to deal fully with what is before them or upon them.”

Ruskin offers a proof from bad poetry. Where Homer has Odysseus ask his dead crewmate Elpenor how he reached the underworld so quickly, Alexander Pope has Odysseus ask:

0, say, what angry power Elpenor led
To glide in shades, and wander with the dead?
How could thy soul, by realms and seas disjoined,
Outfly the nimble sail, and leave the lagging wind?

I share Ruskin’s impatience with Pope, so it’s easy for me to agree something is wrong here. There’s no “angry power” in Odysseus’ curiosity, no “outflying” or “nimble sail” in his simple question. All that’s in Pope’s head, a solipsism. And this passage isn’t about the subject, which Pope saw as nothing new or noteworthy, but the artists’ artistry. Pope said elsewhere, True Wit is Nature to Advantage drest, / What oft was Thought, but ne’er so well Exprest.”

That “oft’s been Thought” insinuates no new explosiveness to discover in things, and his “so well expressed” implies the artist’s powers come before the power of the subject. Contemporary artists have more in common with Pope than Ruskin. Ruskin’s idea that the artist is a medium to nature’s power has lost out to artifice.

If Ruskin is right that an artist’s job is to release the power of the thing itself, then we are all in trouble. Contemporary creativity allows the artist so much more license. We’re free to declare anything gunpowder and celebrated for doing so. We never hesitate to create ill-made matches. Not appreciating art is often the perceiver’s problem. The specialized and rarified realm of Art sits on a mountain of self-definition. I think Ruskin might say we’ve changed the landscape to get place ourselves above the true business of creation. He might say we want to regard ourselves as above the power of things.

And where does that put me?

Ignoring Ruskin makes life so much easier for artists, which makes me think we shouldn’t ignore him. I suspect ease and feel myself doubting any aesthetic relying too exclusively on fabrication. Yet, my work is full of the most pathetic sort of pathetic fallacy, and I paint mostly abstracts that have no true Ruskinian analogues in the natural world. They are synthetic gunpowder, if that, and I’m asking viewers to be acetylene torches, not just matches.

I hardly need another source of self-consciousness—my doing should outdo my thinking after all—but I’ll listen. I can’t abandon abstracts or pathetic fallacy, but maybe I should ask how synthetic my synthetic imagery is. Maybe I should ask if what someone reads or sees has some place in this world as well.

In the end, Ruskin is willing to acknowledge that an inspired writer, “in full impetuosity of passion,” may turn to pathetic fallacy, “may speak wisely and truly of ‘raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame’,” but if a writer “cannot speak of the sea without talking of ‘raging waves’,’ remorseless floods’, ‘ravenous billows’,” he or she is “the basest sort of writer.”

I don’t want to be base. I’d like to see power in things. I’d like to find gunpowder ready for matches.

Faded Ad

An ad for what was once a new way
to dry clean now pales in the window.
A suited man and pant-suited woman
still pose A-shaped and proud,
though block capitals shout in gray.

Her once colorful blouse,
his conservative jacket
are shades of butterscotch.
I pass that window everyday
and sometimes approach hoping
they have become ghosts at last,
their exhortations silent at last.

The owners can’t dim the summer sun
or dull plate glass collecting light like a lens.
but they could take the faded models away,
rewarding their ardor with peace.

I mean to stop and say so, but never do.
Their faces are nearly one color—
nearly as white as this page—
still I think they’re smiling,
and I catch myself wondering,
what would I want,
watching invisibility rise
to drown all that endures?

A Eulogy for George Carlin

Perhaps my favorite George Carlin routine was his rant on “stuff.” As was often the case in his routines, he starts by alerting his audience to the absurdity of something and then, in a torrent of repetitions and distinctions, overwhelms you. By the end, he exhausts the word… and sometimes you.

Others are more qualified to address Carlin’s “process”—I don’t know how he rehearsed or how much—but so much of Carlin’s manic energy was magic. No one will ever equal him in the humor of lists—seven was an absolute minimum for George Carlin. He let the lists rain down, and his timing was so masterful he sometimes seemed a shaman. His quirky dance seduced you, and his endless renovations and innovations on a theme became a sort of conversion.

The job description “comedian” never fit him well. More accurately he was a satirist, his true business covert. In the tradition of Jonathan Swift, Carlin presented a mirror where people might see everyone’s face except their own. As indirect as his blows could be, he hit hard. At some point, the universal “you” changed into the personal you. The “you” that initially included Carlin sometimes didn’t in the end. The audience lay on the pyre.

As a satirist, Carlin was an equal opportunity offender. No spectator survived the evening without feeling targeted at least once. Watching George Carlin—especially late in his career—I sometimes laughed, sometimes felt defensive, and sometimes argued back at the screen.

He hid less near the end. At times his bitterness was explicit. But Carlin’s rift on “stuff” finds him in wiliest form. He never uses the word “materialism” as he targets Americans’ materialism and our belief that happiness is just a thing away. “That’s the whole meaning of life,” Carlin crows, “trying to find a place to put your stuff.” We organize our lives around “stuff.” We build houses—really “piles of stuff with covers on them”—to protect our stuff and buy new homes so we can buy more stuff. We travel with stuff, resent other’s stuff, and worry which stuff should be with us at all times.

Carlin was hardly the first person to insult us so. In Walden, Thoreau wrote that our possessions possess us. Thoreau famously said, “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to leave alone.” As we accrete stuff, Thoreau argued, we give up freedom and flexibility in proportion. Worse, we become accustomed to our diet of excess until it takes more and more to feed us. In this matter, as in many others, Thoreau proved prophetic.

But Thoreau wasn’t funny. He was a scolder, a proud party pooper, and, where Thoreau revels in hyperbole and spleen, Carlin could draw people in before springing a trap. He could be late because he was looking for a place for his own stuff. He didn’t start out, as Thoreau did, playing the exception. In the end, he obviously wasn’t.

Sure, Carlin had a Thoreauvian guise too. In his bitterest work, he attacked openly, and some critics slammed his later work as dour and, particularly damningly, preachy, not funny. Yet, while some of his routines did amount to, “People are so full of shit,” you knew he was willing to exempt you during the performance, as long as you didn’t exempt yourself afterward.

And he always made me laugh—he was certainly more funny than Henry David. I will miss him. The world needs Carlins as much as it needs Thoreaus.

Painting an Old House

The places where paint chipped
I glimpse the wood,
the grain a confession
of wood’s true nature
as if, palms proffered,
it means to convince me—
“I’m holding nothing.”
I’m holding the brush,
which pushes a bead of paint
over the gap. This white is
the sort of silence
perfect from a distance,
a way to do things,
preserving by covering up.
Sometimes I can separate layers,
all the misbegotten
shades and whimsies
of other times, but my task
is to hide and not to play
archeologist. I scrape
only when necessary
and just to give the next coat
a chance. Later someone may
strip it all away to discover
if what’s underneath
has any beauty of its own,
but I can’t be so ambitious,
I must satisfy for what—
at least today—looks better.

Descriptive as Hell

I‘m teaching summer school right now, leading some rising freshmen through their summer reading while helping them learn some of the essential skills they’ll need in English in the fall. As is my custom, I’ve also been doing some assignments with them, including one described in this prompt on The Catcher in the Rye:

Stradlater’s English teacher gives his class an assignment: write a descriptive essay. Stradlater, busy with Jane Gallagher, asks Holden to help. Holden’s good at English. He knows, according to Stradlater, how to put commas in the right place. Because reality often imitates fiction, you will write something “descriptive as hell.” Be like Holden. Just as Holden describes something important to him—Allie’s left-handed fielder’s mitt—you should describe something important to you. If you pick something that matters, your writing will matter. Your writing will be fueled by your object’s significance.

So I’m going to be lazy today and post the essay I wrote in response, entitled “My Friend Phileas”:

People don’t really get to define themselves. Most of the time they reveal themselves when they aren’t trying to, as they engage in some simple, mundane task or speak and gesture unconsciously. These moments present the observer with a sort of core sample, a random poke in the soil that reveals the quality of the field. In the case of people, a single instant can characterize the whole. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could assure those core samples were always rich earth instead of sand or manure?

Possessions are different. The things you choose to cling to are a deliberate reflection of what you value, and the thing I value most is my Waterman fountain pen. The specific model of the pen is Phileas, named after Phileas Fogg, the main character of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, and it looks like a pen he might have carried. It’s suitable for daily use, easy to care for, and—I like to think—not at all weighty or pretentious. It’s sleek and small, not bulbously self-important or anything dignitaries would use to sign legislation or treaties. It’s plastic. The marbled resin of its body looks like stone, and it has three gold bands near the top, the middle, and the bottom, but it isn’t marble or gold. The bottom band includes a decorative tab that looks a little like a crest or the sun rising, and my use of the pen has worn some of the gold away. Underneath, it’s the color of tin.

I’m always trying to convince people the pen was a bargain, perhaps because I’m worried they’ll think me extravagant or wasteful. When people ask me about the pen, I always have to tell them how long I’ve had it and how much I originally paid for it—$35. I have to tell them it has cost 2 cents a day, which—I hear myself saying over and over—is cheaper than losing a ballpoint a week. Why do I feel guilty? Perhaps I like to think of myself as a no-nonsense guy who is entirely un-flashy. I’m afraid they’ll misunderstand my wielding this weapon of the moneyed class.

Actually, I can’t tell the truth. It’s the one beautiful object in my life and, after all this time, my daily companion. Every once in a while, I’ll absentmindedly leave it somewhere—my bedside table or my desk at work or next to the copier or some other strange but at the time sensible place. Then I’m lost. So what if I’ve amortized it entirely, its loss would be a tragedy. As an emblem of object permanence in my turbulent life, it’s irreplaceable. So many other things have drifted off, broken, or become obsolete. My pen hasn’t. My attachment to it is the desperate grip of an anchor in a storm.

Grading papers would be impossible without it. I use purple ink cartridges and love to watch the pen filling margins with curly purple script. In meetings, the pen insists on formulating expansive and baroque doodles. Though, with every other pen, I press too hard, my fountain pen seems to follow lines already there. Something about it feels frictionless, its flow of ink steady and reliable. It seems overjoyed at what I ask it to do until it requests another cartridge.

Objects can’t truly be expressive. We make them do our bidding. But I do sometimes have an eerie sense that the ink in my pen really comes from me. A friend who also loves a pen tells me the particular way a writer angles the point wears the soft gold of its nib in idiosyncratic ways. Fountain pens, he says, are trained to your hand and stubborn and balky in any other.

But I wonder who has trained whom. I might disagree with my friend and say my pen is me…or, at least, a me I enjoy being.

Going West on North Ave.

Summer and the city
seems to empty, spirit
leaking by drips and
people seeping
into the space at their feet.

Everyone left
marches east to the lake,
so sure, so right
in their direction. Only I
walk the other way,

fighting the sun,
carrying a book
as if it were the ark,
dreaming of reasons
to go inside.