Tumble

Oceans perchance can be forgiven for unawareness of their own power. Such pelagic giants have concerns far larger than humans and animals. There is some suspicion that marine giants such as blue whales have insight into the machinations of the deep, but are notoriously silent in the relation of that knowledge. Silent, that is, if humans have not yet learned to listen and understand. As a species humanity has vast distances to cross before viewing even the outer walls of true understanding. In the interim humans have no need to comprehend titanic unself-consciousness in order to understand its effects. Look no further than the tide line, with its jetsam and wrack and faunal remains.

Freed from the shackles of economy and utility, beach combing is more about meditation than acquisition. Serenity can be found along the tide line while executing a patient search for that which is of interest, interest being defined as “you’ll know it when you see it.” The flotsam of ships afloat and under the waves. Natural curiosities. Shiny things. Strolling along the scalloped edge of retreating waves, a curious mind cannot help but be entranced by the leavings of the tide. The stories that could be told by shard or shell!

Stories are the root of the exploration. Every rounded lump of glass is an essay. Every man-made object is a codex. Every animal carcass, large or small, is a tome. All await the eyes and mind of the reader. What do we want to know? When his students were stuck for inspiration, the architect Louis Kahn advised them to ask materials for advice. “What do you want, brick?” was his famous question (the answer: “I like an arch”) and it was pointedly about creating engagement. To encounter a faded crab carapace or burnished chunk of driftwood is to be graced with an opportunity for wonder. Surely the sight of pearlescent fish bones fading into sand makes one pause, ponder, and ask “What brought you here?”

The tide line intrinsically serves as catalyst for the asking of that question, which in turn acts as mirror and reflection. Lying amongst the calligraphy of cast up seaweed are chapters and verses, tales of creation and life. The hummocks came from somewhere to end up here in the now. This state of affairs is the human condition writ large. People are not lumps of seaweed, obviously, but we know more than we can say about being carried along by currents we cannot fully perceive only to end up in places we may not have expected to inhabit.

Wandering along the laminar edge of the breakers’ last hurrah, there is much to be seen that is unremarkable. The homogeneous grit of sand interspersed with drab pebbles and uncountable shell fragments represents “beach” to many of us. This is ordinary. This is as it should be. The ordinary is crucial as it serves as backdrop to the extraordinary, those bits of glitter and opalescence that beckon fitfully to the eye as they are rocked by the waves. Especially in the sunlight the fragments call out. It is nearly impossible to resist the urge to bend low to pick such treasures up. We see them. We know these irregular shards as shells and as pages, cast up from books not written by the hands of humans. But they tell stories. Stories of long journeys and hard experience. Once they were whole, now echoes of something larger. The form is still here, different from the “used to be” which existed in that time referred to as “ago”. Different, but beautiful all the same. A pearly fragment in the surf is not so distant from us, tumbled as we are by circumstance and fortune, to emerge from the chaos with burnished edges and wondrous tales to share.

Book Soul, Book Heart

Field notes, 08 May 2014. Alone, expectant, waiting. For what?

Where resides the heart and soul of a book? Not the story inside it, perhaps, but the thing in itself. I cannot imagine the devoted reader that I am, cozying up to an ebook or tablet. 

There is no life in the machine. 

Digital pages do not rasp under the fingers, nor does the light reflect from them with any warmth. Silicon, glass and aluminum react to the fingertips and the blood running through them. But that blood does not carry logos on its way back to the heart. Ultimately, electronic readers seem not tactile enough to satisfy me.

Wind outside. There is no music or television chatter, so the rustling of leaves I hear through the walls. My mind loses its place. The book is replaced by the voice of Marcus Aurelius, speaking softly in the temple of my head.

"Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one."

The book I set on the nightstand before it slips from my fingers. The wind stirs the trees again, sounding for all the world like a dead emperor whispering from the yard. I roll over, turn out the light, hoping to dream of that good man to be.

A Brief Word on Words Not Yet Spoken

9:44 PM. It was a good day, in that I experienced some contentment. I have decided I will read, later.

A brief word, ladies and gentlemen, if I may scrawl a bit. I confess to you that I just spent the previous ten minutes or so standing in my living room with a book in my hand and another in my head. I was reading the one and thinking about the other. The decision on which one to read kept me still.

I say book in my head, but there is a physical specimen on my shelf. Each of them is a tome of natural history, written by two different authors, each of whom I greatly admire. Different styles, the two of them, one austerely spiritual---is this possible? I think it is---the other poignant, sharp and comedic. One book is about the ends of the earth and the other a travelogue on the deep Congo. I was inspired to read at least one of them by words in my head and the silences between them.

What Antarctica and Africa have to do with the things I find myself wanting to say to the people in my life, including one who may not yet be of an age to receive these freighted words, I cannot tell. I simply don't know. I will do my best to find out.

Of late I am often possessed of the urge to write of the things I hear inside. I feel the pressure, I hear the shouts and whispers, the sighs and curses that my mouth-heart want to spill. There are many things to say. Yet I have not found the courage to speak. This is a dam I have not yet determined how to break.

In heartbeats the voice seeks itself. Mine pounds inside, seeking fulfillment on the outside. But I am not ready. The stories are not ready. The blood in my veins flows like water seeking its own level while my heart rehearses the words in silence. They will find the surface, when they are ready.

I place one book on the shelf, gripping another by the spine. It fits in my hand like a the nudge of a long-lost pet, finally arriving home. I will read of the silences at the bottom of the earth, and in them, perhaps break my own.

Magpie Tales 154: We Are Made of Books

Central Library, Manchester, U.K., by Robin Gosnall via Magpie Tales

Cleverness fled, I think, when I saw the prompt image for the week. It is not fair for others to know of a weakness of mine. A weakness not only for books, but for the structures that house them. Buildings are what I mean. Edifices. Repositories built of wood, brick and stone, concrete and steel. Not the soulless silicon hearts of server banks and tablet computers. Such barbarities are convenient, even necessary, but they do not hold my imagination or reverence.

The first thought in my head was of the "Library of Babel", the interlocking, infinite hexagonal halls described by Jorge Luis Borges in his short story of the same name. His exploration of the idea of a Library I find by turns to be fascinating and disturbing. Fascinating and disturbing also being apt descriptors for the universe, which Borges aptly equates to the library in the opening sentence of the story. I do not recall ever having been so startled by the "shock of the familiar" upon reading such a statement. The universe as library, ah, how did he know?

The second thought was of the main library in the city where I grew up. The library was downtown, a short drive for us and one we visited often until a branch opened up much closer to our house. I spent many a sojourn there as a lad, in tow to my mother, happy to browse amongst the books that fired my imagination and captivated me. Little did I know then that it was the universe itself writ small, and somewhat like that described by Senor Borges.

I drove past that old building multiple times on a recent visit to my hometown. It has been decades since I last was in it, and I am not sure that it is still a library. I think the institution moved elsewhere.The memories, however, are still there. I felt them stir in my mind and heart. I longed to go back there to sit on the floor and pull slices of the universe off the shelves, losing my self in the infinite. I know this is not possible, exactly. But like the narrator of the story, I feel I will forever wander those halls while searching for that single volume of infinite pages...which is really, quite possibly, my heart.

The Tao of Harrison

I owe a very special thanks to my good friend Rich, who writes a column called 'Popular Forensics' over at Open Case .com, for giving me directions that lead to the following quote:

Shortly after Dave killed himself, I reread “How Men Pray,” and I remember wondering whether, in the midst of Dave’s torment, he might have found consoling Harrison’s belief that a writer is someone who “consciously or unconsciously takes a vow of obedience to awareness.” Perhaps he would have smiled at Harrison’s belief that the writer’s gift, and curse, is one of “excessive consciousness.”

It is from an article in OutsideOnline, written by Tom Bissell about one of my favorite authors, Jim Harrison.  The article is longish for online material, but its very good.  I recommend it for the curious.  I don't often buy into coincidence, but that last phrase of "excessive consciousness" made my jaw drop.

I read that, and for a few moments, I truly believed that I might, after all, truly be a writer.

Comfortable In My Obsolescence

Wandered the bookstore the other day, tracing the strands of my divergent memory, trying to find not my lost shaker of salt but the riding crops for the horses that are my thoughts.  I tell myself to stop buying books until I have read the books I bought the last time I told myself to stop buying books.

I was unsuccessful.  I ended up buying Seeds and Thoughts In Solitude, both by Thomas Merton, and a paperback copy of Meditations, written by Marcus Aurelius as translated by Martin Hammond.  I already have one version of the Marcus Aurelius work, but (flashes his geek credentials) I wanted to compare the two and see how the different translators interpreted the work.

I hear some of you saying "Gumbo needs to get a life".  A fair cop, I suppose.

I worry sometimes that I do not have a life, outside of the tesseract that is my head.  I love to read, mentally tasting words, chewing on them, delighting in the tang and savor.  I know that writing and reading are integral to the way I view myself and my station in the world.  Words and language and ideas are sinew, bone and blood...the air in my lungs, the beating of my heart.  The page and the book (especially the book) are avatars of what I want to be.

And I am so afraid they will soon be obsolete.  I had the chill settle on my heart, standing in the bookstore and reading passages from Merton and Aurelius.  Their words reached across decades and centuries to grab me by the heart and jolt my mind with electricity born of the pen across the page.  I felt the chill of obsolescence in the middle of a bookstore, because there are so many pages, so many books in me, and I have not yet begun to write.

I hope I am not too late

On Not Writing Fiction

Looking back over the last two months or so, I see that I have not been writing much fiction on this here Post-it pad of my mind.  I mused on that today during some idle moments without a firm conclusion to explain the data.

The poetry, I think, does not count.  Insofar as I have a theory of poetry, it is my belief that it in its own way is always speaking truths or seeking to illuminate truths.  Or even facts about our overlapping realities.  I agree the language can be elliptical, even solipsistic, but the goal seems to always be a 'Truth'.

Fiction, on the other hand, illuminates truths through plausible lies we as readers want to be told.  Some of the fiction I have written has been very thinly disguised examinations of real life situations or happenings.  Other examples of my fiction, well, they are just plain made up.  Pure unreality.  But prose fiction for me has often been a simple matter of exercise for the mind, the joy of running through a mental forest and up cerebral mountains for the sheer hell or joy of it.

I have to say I enjoy it all.  Yet, lately, the fiction has been scarce.  The reasons elude me.  Vague notions and suppositions seek to fill the void, but none seem satisfactory.  Some of this may stem from my recent reawakened interest in reading fiction.  You read that correctly: reading.  Amazing, innit?

Work and personal matters have me so tied up that I've struggled to keep up the blog writing, the blog reading (sorry, my lovelies; if only I had a time distortion device...) and correspondence.  This vexes me.  I have been advised by more than one source, though, that I need to make sure I set aside some personal time to engage in things that give me juice.  This, as a matter of personal preservation.  Reading is one of those things, and good fiction is the cats' PJ's as far as I am concerned.  So I've made it a point to spend at least a few minutes each night, no matter what, reading something I truly enjoy or something new, that isn't fodder for my geek-based information sensorium.  Maybe it is a reawakened desire to imbibe fiction without the worry of having to produce it.

A side effect has been, as you see, that I am writing less of it.  Which may be a good thing, maybe this is the time to recharge and revive.  After all, conventional writing wisdom says that to be a good writer, one must above all, be a good reader...

Magpie Tales 66: Bibliosopher

 Photo: Courtesy of Tess Kincaid at Magpie Tales

His hands trembled slightly, this old man who shuffled close to peer at the shelves laden with treasure.  He resented the small failure of nerves and muscle, these erosions of time abrading the strength he used to be.  He resented in silence.

The old man was never one to waste energy on zero sum games that failed to advance the cause of the mind.

In the middle of the row of bookcases hung an antique lamp.  A cage of copper bars riveted to a curved sheet acting as reflector, perched on the end of a burnished walnut handle.  A cord wrapped in cotton the shade of emeralds trailed away to a porcelain receptacle recessed in the saddle-colored walnut baseboard along the floor.

The old man gripped the lamp handle and flicked the switch.  Warm, golden light flared out over the spines of the books facing the man, eager faces of linen and leather adorned with tattoos of gold and silver turning to the sun.  He allowed himself a smile.  The metaphor never ceased to amuse him; he took great pleasure in imagining the library to be his personal garden, watered with attention and interest, bursting with blooms of words, glorious words written on petals of muslin and rag, linen and vellum.  He drew a deep breath inhaling the deep scent of old paper and eternal contentment.

Today, the old man was unsure of what for which he searched.  He stepped slowly, softly to were he last recalled seeing his old friend Borges.  There was a volume there, clad in black leather with the name inscribed in letters of fading silver.  His eyes were unsure, even with the light, but his hands never failed him.  His fingers came to rest, and they knew.  Gripping the spine ever so carefully, the old man pulled the book from the soft embrace of its lovers, and held it to his heart.  Today, he would know if briefly, what it meant to live forever.

Happy Friday: The Nice Files

Let's just get it out there that this week has been a stinker.  Not catastrophic, not my-house-just-fell-into-a-volcano kind of bad, but a stinker all the same.  A big, greasy wurst of Too much to do, wrapped in a charred pastry Blanket of Angst, topped off with a nasty dollop of Too Many Bills.  Oh, and I was going to be home later than usual.  So it is safe to say that I was all prepared to get home, change into my sweatpants and hide under the pillows on my bed.

Fortunately, there was an alternative waiting for me, times two.

NICE THING #1:  The tea I ordered a week ago, shipped the cheap, slooooow way, finally arrived and was perched on my doorstep.  Hooray!  I likes me some India black tea, of the Assam lineage, and now I have fresh malty/smoky/brisky to warm me up these chilly mornings.

EVEN NICER THING #2:  Earlier this month, I commented on this post by Unmitigated, and made a remark about a book in the background of the photo.  Well, to my pleasant surprise, the lurvely and thoughtful Mary replied to my comment and offered to send me the book if I would read it.  So today, in my mailbox, was the package containing the book*.  How about THAT, dear ones?  That is all kinds of nice, and that made my day.  In New Orleans, they would call that a 'lagniappe', a little something extra, which warms the heart.  If you can, drop by her place and say hello.  Thanks, Mary!

*"The Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller" in case you wanted to know.  Yeah, yeah, I'm a geek. 

Feeling the Split

Tonight, a very rare occurrence at Radio Free Gumbo:  I had to turn off the radio because of the song that came on while I was winding down.  It was "21st Century Schizoid Man" by King Crimson.

It was too much.

I like King Crimson, but their music in general, and Robert Fripp's in particular, can be a bit of a mood thing for me.  When I'm ready for it, it is good.  High-energy prog rock, groovy, man.

When I'm not, it's too jittery.  Too all-over-the-place.  Too...disassociative.

So it was tonight.  I couldn't make it to the guitar solo.  These days I'm a little too close to a disintegrative state of mind and the music was widening the cracks.

So I turned it off, and read a good book.  Good to be back together.

The Only Bargain That Matters

Taking a cue from Schmutzie's "Grace In Small Things", how about this: I was wandering a local branch of a well-known chain bookstore as I am wont to do when seeking free or low-cost entertainment ('cause that's how I roll sometimes), and what do I spy with my little eye? Behold:

Pretty cool, no? Well, to make it an even bigger jar o' awesomesauce, this tome was on the BARGAIN BOOK table. So I snagged it, for less than the cost of a burrito at Chipotle. Grace in small things, indeed!

This post dedicated to Dawn B., who reminded me of this book, a little while ago. Word!