{radical acceptance}

"An old, old woman who has been living in the same town for many years. She sits by her window and thinks
what does she think about" {*}

The barking dog in the yard next door that belongs to the family with three children although you wouldn't know there were three children you never see them and they never play with the dog who is left outside and barks barks barks day and night and it never seems to quiet down a bit, joining in the fray of Good Humor Ice Cream Trucks and fire engines and the blaring of the air raid siren the first Tuesday of the month at one p.m.

although no one is certain whether the siren is for tornadoes or a Soviet air strike, neither of which has ever been a problem in this town, given that they are just far enough east to be out of tornado alley and something about the air currents or trade winds or Gulf Stream current or forestation in the region means the town is considered safe from the scourge of twisters, and it would be a very misguided Soviet attack indeed that hit the town instead of one of the cities several hundred miles away; why would they bother with the air raid siren for an attack on a fairly distant city, anyway, and wouldn't the planes have to come from Cuba rather than some mysteriously undetected aircraft sauntering over the Pacific and the U.S. airspace or maybe Mexican would undoubtedly raise some FAA eyebrows, and Cuba just seems audacious and unlikely given that entire Bay of Pigs fiasco which was just a media circus act of propaganda anyway, it never made any sense for Castro to take on Miami and who was president then,

it must have been the Kennedy boy, all polish and no depth, not like presidents are supposed to be, a bit rough around the edges and going jowl-ly and with an insomniac whiskey burr to their voice which soothes rather than seems seedy, those cigarette and burnt out on drugs voices that you hear now in panhandlers but politicians now are just so smooth, so practiced,

not like those town meetings which would last until three in the morning, shouting matches which would turn aggressive over property lines and tree lawns and aquifer zones and land taxes and what a nightmare it was getting the school bond bill passed, that had only made it through because the wives of the Selectmen had had a pre-Town Meeting luncheon and agreed to put a bit of whiskey in the coffee urn, not too much, but just enough to mellow out some of the more bombastic and enthusiastic members of the citizenry so the rest of the town could get the raise of three cents per thousand to fund the opening of a high school in town, rather than busing the kids over to the next county, even though the education there was perfectly good, but it was reassuring to see what could be accomplished when the women combined forces and saw to it that things got done, political men being all too often like that dog next door, barking barking endlessly,

and why did they bother to have three children, anyway, wasn't one enough and they never played ball in the yard or hopscotch on the sidewalk or climbed trees or sold lemonade or Girl Scout cookies or what was it Boy Scouts sold again, popcorn, maybe, or perhaps fertilizer, manly products that a young lad in a blue uniform needn't feel ashamed at offering around the neighborhood although it wasn't clear exactly why Boy Scouts needed to hold fundraisers, a group of half-wild boys building fires and digging toilets ad getting lost in the woods couldn't possibly require that much capital investment,and who ever heard of groups of men organizing fundraisers, men tend to organize events that are competitions, like auctions of other people's donated stuff, when they need to raise money, for a new Elk's Lodge or VFW Hall or bike trail,

not that Girl Scouts really needed too much ready cash, but selling cookies door to door or at the supermarket parking lot like they do nowadays, which must be from some overprotective mother's fears about kidnapping or potential pedophiles, but girls are going to spend the rest of their lives trying to find a way to bridge unrealistic budget gaps with bake sales and charity balls, so it makes sense for them to learn how to ask a stranger for money from a fairly young age, when the Boy Scouts are off hunting and fishing in the woods or starting entrepreneurial businesses of lawn care or home repair or errand running using their dad's lawn mowers and tool boxes and trucks and

-- oh, the dog just stopped barking for the first time in days, and who is that man in the striped flannel shirt walking through the gate into the back yard? He doesn't have a uniform, so he can't be a repair man or a utility company man, and he's too old to be one of the children and the wife can't be having an affair, she isn't the type who would be able to pull it off, what with all the organizing of schedules and having well-groomed hair that wasn't too showy and assignations at hotels or at home if she had no shame that ended in time to pick up the kids from school or soccer practice, no, that particular woman couldn't be clandestine if she was working behind enemy lines during a war,so the man in the flannel shirt who seems to have tranquilized the dog can't be her lover,

and god only knows why he has hoisted the dog onto his shoulders and is carrying it in a fireman's grip through the front yard to a rather unassuming tan sedan, it isn't any special breed of dog that could be resold or held for ransom, unless he is one of those graduate students who steal dogs for use in scientific labs, where they test eyeshadow and shampoo and new drugs and maybe illegal drugs, although really the university isn't that close and there are plenty of dogs that are put down at the pound each week, one doesn't need to go around stealing people's pets in order to test the side effects of drinking Coca Cola with Alka Seltzer and wearing too much lipstick and breathing air with whatever chemical scientists are convinced we need detectors for in our houses now,

and perhaps those kids will actually miss that dog now that it's gone, put up LOST DOG posters and ring doorbells and search the neighborhood rather than sitting in front of the television or computer all afternoon, missing out on their own childhoods and not forming secret societies or magic languages or building treehouses or teepees in the yard or even raising the neighborhood ire by covering trees in toilet paper and

who could that be knocking at the door at this hour of the day, the Bridge Club won't arrive until eleven and the mailman never before three, and if it's one of those men selling god or vacuum cleaners, well, this house has enough of both, thank you very much, and, oh, it's the man in the flannel shirt, but without the dog over his shoulder, and he's older than he looked, gray around the temples, creased cheeks, chapped hands, work boots. He's a bit uneasy, doesn't make eye contact, but surely doesn't intend to tranquilize me, add my body to the pile with the dog in his car?

-- "Yes? Hello?"

---

reading
the combined joys of delightfully witty verbal and visual contemplations, delivered by the New York Times
weather
pastry season in full swing, perfect perfect crepes with strawberry compote will be followed by a blow-out batch of blueberry scones / but can "The Village Baker's Wife" really be out of print?

{*} many thanks to Linda for the custom prompt!

Benevolence : Ideality : Conscientiousness

If there isn't any such thing as a goal, as completion or comprehension, if everything is and only can be about process, then the question of "what's happening" switches from "where on this road map is the town fabled as a stop on the canal" to "where did I leave the oars to the boat in the first place?"

Let's start with the boat. The canal, the only canal, the gentle lift from sea level through the countryside, escorted by donkey or diesel engine or the current or by pulling along ropes or by docking amongst the waves as ghosts of tradesmen, bicyclists, suffragettes, politicians, small boys who ought to be in school, artists who ought to have day jobs, fish in various stages of dying or escaping, the hubbub of life within the town as the boat docks and beer is purchased and maybe some fish and apples, the drama of the street for a hundred years in both directions revealed in the twilight.

The witching hour as the crescent moon rises and the crickets work on harmonies and it becomes impossible to distinguish the memory of what might have been from the memory of what was from the memory of what is still to come from the shifting of patterns and silhouettes half revealed by fading light. The water laps against the piers as the boat rocks and settles into the waves, the beer finished among tales of lost loves and forgotten memories and bridges to the future where the fish will always taste of the warmth of a late summer afternoon.

Passengers and friends rotate around the little boat to make room for the ghosts, who do not tell their tales but emanate the memory of the intensity of lives lived and worlds left behind, unchanged by the future. From the shore a fire sparks in a barrel, night vendors of kebabs and hot dogs and the pleasures of the flesh remain open for business, the wind shifts and clouds dance around the stars, obscuring the wings of Pegasus, the arm of Orion, filling the basket of the Big Dipper. The ghosts huddle closer for warmth, inhaling the vapor of the fish and the beer, becoming flesh through the stories of memories. The moon illuminates the clouds, and suddenly it is tomorrow.

An hour downstream a small child is found sleeping among the blankets, and neither the child nor the passengers are certain where he belongs: on the boat, in the town, to one of the fellow travelers, to the past, to the future. In the end, a resolution is deem unimportant; he has become part of the boat, part of the journey, a charm to ward off Sirens, sea monsters, toll collectors, unfavorable winds, sudden storms, pirates, the responsibilities of daily life, the threat of boredom.

He races fore to aft, supervises the engine, assists in the kitchen, sings grace before meals, refuses to wash behind the ears, threatens to throw the cat overboard if forced to eat his peas, charms everyone, and declines to accept or remember a name. His overalls are torn and his feet are bare, his hands surprisingly clean and nimble. He rushes ahead on shore to open locks, jumps back into the boat at the last possible moment, begs for a turn at the tiller.

Later in the day it is noted that a grandmother seems to have appeared and joined the journey; no one's grandmother in particular, not even the boy's; but undeniably a grandmother, working on her knitting and offering consolation for the tales of heavy hearts of fellow passengers, sharing bits of kitchen advice for heating shellfish or shucking corn, grumbling when the wind shifts and cursing when her shawl is blown overboard.

No one can remember hearing a grandmother curse with such conviction, but at the stunned and appreciative silence she explains that her son was a sailor who gave her a parrot one year for Christmas, and that winter the blizzards were so intense that everyone gave up measuring the snowfall or only drinking after five o'clock, and she and the parrot would pass the afternoons with whiskey in her tea and records on the gramophone and she would practice the curses, then combinations of the curses, then variations on the curses, then she took out her battered copy of Johnson's Dictionary and Shakespeare's Plays and worked up some more color for some of the more garden variety curses, and then spring finally came and she dropped her cake at the Methodist picnic and the preacher fell in a dead faint, and she hadn't been invited back to the church since, so she joined the Congregationalists, who better understood the ways of the world.

At which point we were all ready for a bit of cake and some tea with a splash of whiskey and the boy tied up the boat by the shore and we danced in the afternoon sunlight, waltzes and rumbas and a bit of salsa, until falling asleep in unexpected heaps and combinations.

When we awoke evening had come and the moon had risen and the grandmother and the child had departed, taking our boat with them, so we wandered into town, counting our members to see if anyone else had been gained or lost, but we all counted five (plus the counter) although no one was sure whether we were the same five-plus-the-counter who had set off on the journey a week ago or whether we had gained or lost some of our members, but did it really matter so long as the numbers worked out?

And no, it didn't actually matter, because we still had ourselves plus five companions, and among us there was sufficient funds for beer and meat pies and it was warm enough to light a bonfire and sleep under trees, and in the morning a farmer or tradesman would take us to the next town up or down the river, it didn't matter which.

I glimpsed the boy buying chestnuts from a vendor, and someone saw the grandmother at the front window of the pub, but they didn't or couldn't or wouldn't see us, and our memory of our boat and the rest of our itinerary was fading as the smells of the town wafted along the eddies of evening air. A clock rang the hour, the streets filled with promises of kept curfews and warm dinners and crisp newspapers and letters and new gossip to share, and slowly emptied as houses filled with occupants and the town slept.

The carpenter apologized for only being able to take us as far as Kingston, where he would exchange our weight for the lumber that would fill his van, but we understood there would not be room for everyone and he had to ply his trade. We weren't sure whether he intended to offer us, his passengers, as payment for the lumber, and weren't certain whether six mostly able bodies attached to six mostly honest souls was a fair trade for a delivery of lumber, and, if it wasn't a fair trade, was the lumber worth more, or were we? Uncertainty prevailed, but the carpenter assured us that if he was attempting to profit from his passengers he would continue past Kingston closer to the sea, where the price of flesh was unquestionably greater than the value of wood.

We shook his hand gratefully, left Kingston on foot, and found our boat anchored five miles later, with a note waiting by the tiller: but written in a language we could not read, and the rope impossibly knotted to the dock. We feasted on egg salad sandwiches and carried our parcels back to the road, continuing on foot into the afternoon. Ahead a dog barked and an infant cried, or an infant barked and a dog cried, and the sun gathered towards the west as the summer set into the clouds.

We had escaped, not from the boat but from the lives we had intended to remember, and we walked onward in the lengthening shadows, pursued by the small dog, who barked, cried, chased its tail, and fought with rabbits. The infant gurgled from the confines of a dusty front yard, raspberries ripened along the road, and the sounds of singing and a fiddler drifted from a nearby field.

We were vagabonds; we were travelers; we were free.

---

reading
Fowler's is the source of both a head schematic and a language schematic. Who could ask for anything more?

weather
final boozy Sunday mountaintop picnics, giddy descents at twilight
first experiments with cobbler

upcoming / incoming / outgoing

No writing this week; however, it will be interesting to see the results of the autumn writing retreat.

Mark your calendars now:


Mary Beth Brooker
& Stephanie Gibbs

reading recent writings

4 p.m.
Sunday, October 18, 2009

Neilson Library Browsing Room
Smith College



part of the Gallery of Readers series

reading
the scrumptious Leonora Carrington

weather
undeniably autumn

seven league boots

Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. [Terry Pratchett]

Thus we have hobbies and pursuits wherein otherwise normal members of society, presumed to be in sound mind and body, individuals with jobs and families, throw themselves from airplanes, jump off bridges with cords tied around one leg to bounce them back up, dive off cliffs, cross waterfalls, explore abandoned mine shafts, and orbit in space, each of which not only courts death but costs a certain not insignificant sum for the privilege of so doing.

Now imagine the possibilities open for the slightly more eccentric personalities, from sailing across the Pacific in a Kon-Tiki raft or a boat composed entirely of rubbish to crossing the ocean or Asia or both in a hot air balloon to taking one's most necessary belongings and heading into a land which has not yet been mapped and may in fact not exist. Cross a country by foot, bicycle, Greyhound bus, or train; explode into the air propelled by launching from a cannon; live underwater in a cage in shark infested waters.

These have all been done; are yesterday's news, the myth of the hot-headed adventurer often sadly deflated by evidence of a financial or social or technological support system which takes away some of the danger and some of the romance, the presence of alcoholism or mental illness casting a pallor on the rosy cheeks of the hero in flight suit, fur lined parka, oilskin raincoat, hand-sewn moccasins.

So when, for curiosity's sake, one has been to the Poles, to the moon, to the bottom of the ocean;
when one has crossed the tracks and explored life on the other side;
when one has worn a wig, glasses, and a disguise and passed as the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, the soldier, sailor, tinker, tailor, rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief, and all of the wives of each;
when one has been a scientist, musician, poet, and statistician;
when one has built the bow and carved the arrow and downed the deer, skinned, roasted, tanned, packaged, and sold;
when one has built a hovercraft using the motor from a vacuum cleaner and sold a fake Picasso for a record amount at auction;
when one has studied voodoo and spiritualism, contacted the spirit world, and cast a hex;
when one has caused the stock market to balloon and deflate instigated by a carefully disseminated rumor about political instability in a third world country which no one had previously heard of but could potentially have 90% of the world's copper reserves;
when one has rewired an entire house to run off of the stationary bicycles in use at the gym down the street;
when one has trained cats to walk in single file and dogs to play poker and hamsters to only run on their wheels every hour on the hour for three minutes and thirty three seconds;
when one has surreptitiously reformatted all of the street signs in a town to be in German Blackletter fonts rather than Helvetica;
when one has invented a board game and exploited a Ponzi scheme and founded a university and perfected a blackjack technique;
when one has contacted aliens and released a platinum album and been on the front page of the Times;
when one has sliced, diced, and julienned all that life traditionally has to offer --
what next?

What adventures remain unexplored, what paths offer peeks through overgrown forest, where are there mysteries, where are there challenges, where is there romance, where is there adrenaline to quiet the chatter in the back of the mind with the repetitive mundanities of life?

One could, perhaps, build a scale of London at the time of the Great Fire, in Kansas, using straw bale construction, at an 80% scale.
One could construct a greenhouse using only materials scavenged from deconsecrated churches.
One could pave a city in a paper mache mosaic of funny pages from newspapers from the year of one's first born child's birth.
One could walk from Paris to the Taj Mahal, then sail across the Indian Ocean to New Zealand and breed sheep whose wool never felted.
One could live in a community of tunnels under a mountain, hydroponically gardening and replacing all sources of light with automatic timers, resetting the circadian rhythms and speaking a pidgin dialect of English from the time of Beowulf.
One could follow the 47th parallel entirely on pogo stick; one could inhabit a Radio Flyer wagon which was propelled by an intricate network of kites.
One could disappear into a shamanistic haze, live in the desert off of cactus and peyote, speaking to the lizards, then reappear on the lecture circuit with a best selling book and a method for regaining one's youth, figure, appetite, desire, fortune, popularity, drive, lost love, success, hair.
One could mount a campaign for president as a neo-pagan drag queen using a write-in nomination only, using billboards and commercials and esoteric internet search phrases ("price of gold in China", "starvation in Ethiopia", "Roswell aliens", "CIA assassination plot", "cheap Viagra", "organic macaroni and cheese") as the only keywords to spread the message, winning pluralities in the election and sending national politics into a tailspin.
One could live off of kale, carrot, and apple juice, supplemented by bacon on Fridays, and one could live off of bacon, supplemented by kale, carrot, and apple juice on Fridays.

But it's all been done; that's the trouble. The restlessness hits, the bookshelves heave with the previously read; the maps shows only the places one has already been; the palate craves movement and texture and flavor of not only the new, but the completely unexpected, the unpredictable, the alignment of forces so exceptionally unexpected that one's entire being is shocked into stillness, forced to sit up and take notice.

The background chatter is utterly silenced in the light of the unimaginable, and everything focuses upon and magnifies that center of raw newness, a world within a world so previously inconceivable that there is not yet a language to describe it. That moment of earth shattering, life defining stillness and quiet: that sudden sense of the free fall down a silent, bottomless chasm; that void is the sweetness that lurks unexpectedly in the search for the limits of the improbable and the impossible.

Spend a week eating only raw carrots and sleeping in a hammock in the exact center of a public park; somersault down the boulevards of Washington DC; communicate only using foreign language flashcards for a month; write crossword puzzles in Sicilian dialects referencing ancient Roman politicians and philosophers; wear a genuine NASA space suit daily to work at one's job in the bank; compose fake fortunes for Chinese fortune cookies using the i-ching; somewhere hiding amongst the tasks of an unsettled mind is the hidden window or doorway or mouse-hole of an entrance into a land of heartbreakingly indescribable silent beauty.

Carve granite with a butter knife and walk the wings of airplanes and sleep under bridges and quickly now, go, and keep going, and keep pushing, and keep testing, and keep tilting, and keep growing, until, in the corner of one's peripheral vision: there it is, and the earth comes to a standstill, everything frozen in time.

---

reading
the adventures of Richard Halliburton

weather
exhilarating (tho fighting the disappearance of the sun with all my powers)

temples

[from Webster's]

gymnosophist : (from Greek : wise man, sophist) : one of a sect of naked ascetics of ancient India

sophist : to become wise, deceive
Sophist : ancient Greek teachers of rhetoric, philosophy, and the art of successful living : adroit subtle often specious reasoning
specious : deceptive attraction; false truth

From "one of a sect of naked ascetics of ancient India," how much is duly left out!

By whose standard were they ascetic? Did they merely refuse to play an early version of polo or chess; were they opposed to the use of over-embellished pottery; did they decline to paint elephants; did they decline to ride elephants; did they live in communes, in complexes, in condominiums, in caves, on houseboats, in canvas tents, in open fields, under trees? Did they practice vegetarian living; did they keep goats; did they take wives; did they beg for alms; did they farm; did they forage; did they read, write, keep accounts; did they play the flute, spin in circles, dance by moonlight, throw marigolds to the chieftain, brew tea, swim in the Ganges, keep records and minutes and publish theological essays, calculate distances between celestial objects, explore territory by land or by sea, excommunicate disbelievers, invade neighboring villages in search of lamp oil, chickens, small children?

How important is it that they were naked? Were they recreating an Edenic paradise, before knowledge, practicing being the wise fool, enlightened by forsaking enlightenment? Was clothing forbidden on the grounds of concealing knives, arrows, poison, aggressive weapons, and only the nude could truly demonstrate peaceful intention? Did the nakedness allow for ruck sacks in which to carry religious texts, meditation cushions, a flask of water, dried fruit, medicinal herbs; or were texts, cushions, flasks, fruit, medicine part of the worldly renunciations? Was clotheslessness brought closer to the knife's edge of life experience and true asceticism by the lack of wool blankets, woven capes, sandals to cushion winter nights and long journeys, or were these accessories seen not to separate believer from deity but to assist the path to faith or enlightenment?

What religion were they a sect of? Were they Hindu? Buddhist? Jewish? When is ancient, and could they have potentially been early Christian? Or Muslim? Were they an offshoot of an ancient Classical system, without the Edenic metaphors, for whom the gods were numerous and unpredictable, full of human foibles and towards whom the depth of religious participation could vary from a casual sacrifice to a cult-like residency?

In short, who was their god? Was he a he? A she? Gendered? Multi-gendered? Did gender even figure as a question or concern? Was the god a wrathful god or a loving god or an impassive god or merely a state of mind or a metaphor for the vast power of the universe? Were they naked only when actively communing with this god, and don straw hats and woven trousers when hunting and or gathering? Did the god encourage celibacy or procreation or kidnapping small children or adopting orphans or sacrificing offspring (causing the sect to die out after a generation or so)? Was it a trickster god, an oracle, a god found from the consumption of mushrooms or natural gasses, a god of the typhoon season or a god of the harvest or the god of the heavens? Did the god pay attention, visit earth, exist in bodily form?

Was their sophist identity a result of eloquent skills relating to laws, to trading, to governmental engagement, did they participate in the financial life of the community and always seem the winner, or were they known as con-men, charlatans, snake-oil salesmen, not to be trusted in spite of or because of their eloquence, their wisdom, their nakedness? Was their wisdom greater or lesser than their tendency towards deceit, and how deceitful could an obscure sect of naked ascetics really be? What did they have to gain, aside from a feeling of personal superiority over the masses, who hadn't abandoned creature comforts, for whatever unknown purposes?

If all of their striving was for a greater religious experience, were they storytellers of parables and epics? Were they musicians, spending endless nights worked into a religious frenzy by the beating of drums or the whistling of flutes or the aggressive strumming of the oud? After a long day of meditation, weak tea, a bowl of rice, and a probable sunburn, did they sleep exhaustedly under the stars, retire to the home of a patron, dance until the setting of the moon, chart the flow of planets across the sky? Were they poets, stories only told orally, never recorded in a land before anthropologists and frequent flier miles?

Were they social outcasts, pariahs, thrown out of more organized, recognized, or formal religious groups due to antisocial behavior, epileptic fits, narcolepsy, schizophrenia, being the seventh son of a seventh son, being left handed, being bastards, being born to a mother who died in childbirth? Or were they socially dominant, the waywardly religious sons of established intellectual leaders, bankers, successful hunters, wise mothers, strong extended family connections? Were they inside or outside the social community, the caste system, family dynamics and expectations, the legal system, the religious system? Were they officially recognized, socially loathed, culturally adored?

Were they physical athletes or intellectual giants or just a group of lazy men who wanted nothing more than to sit on a riverbed under a tree on a hot summer's day, and dangle their feet in the water? And if so, who can blame them?

---

reading
on the forming of the letters of the alphabet (from an edition job):
"Engrave them, carve them, weigh them, permute them, and transform them, and with them depict the soul of all that was formed and all that will be formed in the future."
-- The Sefer Yetzirah

weather
idyllic September: fresh apples, brisk mornings, mellowing warm afternoons and evenings suffused with golden sunlight

and all the boards did shrink

Yes, I know that the image quality varies from mediocre to rather bad and that the sound quality is distinctly sub-par.

Yes, I am aware that the focus isn't always reliable.

Yes, it did occur to me that four minutes of listening to and watching a variety of water sources might be tedious. That's why it isn't eight minutes long. If the viewer becomes bored, think of pirates, or sea monsters, or man-eating fish, or the adventures of Jacques Cousteau.

Yes, I would prefer a super-8 film camera. And also a VW camper van, in chartreuse.



reading
film schedule notes from a showing of a work by Bill Brown, media creator extraordinaire and a fantastically nice guy [wikipedia here]

weather
How can July and September be separated only by August? They seem worlds apart.