My Library

Remember those afternoons?
Inside the library on the Base
Bombers rattling the metal shelves
I leaned against the industrial aluminum window sill
The memory of hot glass baked by the sun
And I shaded my eyes while I read the Hardy Boys
My chin tucked on my chest
Elbow anchored against the metal making a sweaty spot
Leaning back slightly in my chair
Kicking my foot against the wall
Pausing occasionally
Looking up
Watching for Mom to return from shopping
Only to meet the Texas glare
Shining windshields in the parking lot
Returning happily to turn the pages faster.

After dinner tonight, I laid down for a moment on the bed. Oof! It was hard to get back up.

I muttered to myself, "I am getting old!" But, I stopped and amended it, "No, I am getting oldER".  I became a little internally confused at this point, because five hours of yard work and running around wore me out more than I thought it would. But, I also felt young enough to mentally smack myself in the back of the head once I realized was complaining like an old man. Yet I was still tired.

In situations like this, I find it helps to grab a beer, sit on the deck and throw my feet up on a chair. Twenty minutes later, perhaps one more beer as well, and my subconscious and I come to some sort of understanding. Or at least a  compromise. On a really good day, I'll remember to grab my laptop and see what my fingers can dowse out of the keys.

So, library? Hmmm. Don't ask me, ask the strange guy several layers beneath my cerebral cortex. Excuse me while I take a deep swig out of my beer. The nice thing about sitting on the deck when it starts getting cold is that your beverages stay cold a long time. Nice... Maybe you lose some feeling in your nose, but then, that could be the beer, right?

Anyway, I have good memories from libraries. I hated food shopping as a kid. The commissary was a monstrosity of torture and madness. The library was right next door, so I would enjoy two hours of reading on the huge squishy shiny blue cot-chair-blob things they had in the kids section. Every once and while, like all kids, I would meander over to the water fountain and take long lingering drinks. Funny how all kids seem to do that with water fountains. Drink noisily, all bent over with big pursed lips, getting the water all over their shirt; looking around, wiping their mouth and then taking another godawful long drink. Depending on the season, easter jelly beans or christmas cookies or candy canes would be sitting on the little greeting table close to the door. Although, if you began to graze, the head librarian's desk was right there too, and she didn't hesitate to glare and bustle over to start "straightening" the table and shoo you away.

Looking back at it, while I had plenty of private time in my own room at home, the library was my first experience of independence. For two hours, I was on my own. I could go any where, read any book, even run away if I wanted too. Usually I just found a book I hadn't read and got lost in it for a couple of hours. Sometimes though, I would wander the stacks and just note how the books were organized. Every once and awhile, a title would jump out at me, and I would haul the book off the shelf and placing it on one of the big shiny tables, pore through the pages. I never was a master of the card catalogue, and I hating asking the librarian for help. My explorations eventually gave me an intimate knowledge of each discipline, and so I never need Dewey's decimal system. Sometimes, I would just flip through all the phonograph records, looking at the album covers. My favorite was H.G. Well's time machine. It was the indistinct figure of a man sitting on a box holding a steering yoke with a strange mushroom like umbrella behind him; surrounding him were what looked like lines of magnetic force, like the the whorls of fingerprints... then, just empty and terrifying blackness. I remember staring at it a long time, imagining how it must have felt to be alone in absolutely nothing, no matter, no air, not even time. I figured sound itself would not even possible. I distinctly recall thinking that he must not have been able to even breathe, and worrying that he didn't even have an oxygen tank, and that as soon as he threw that switch he was pretty much done for- lost in a flat, non-echoing limbo forsaken by even lost souls, not alive nor dead, just a strange hiccup of unreality sandwhiched between time and no-time, mouth open in an eternal scream. (lol) Like I said, it made a strong impression on me.

In the end, small as it was, this libary became a book chapel of sorts to my small soul. It was the last homely house in the wood between the worlds. A place that I could properly say was my secret kingdom, and I knew every nook like a native American recognized his territory. It was my refuge on payday, and a castle only a twenty minute bike ride away. Eventually , with my drivers license, I progressed to university libraries, the city public library, but I never lost the love for the small library with the old fashioned aluminum window sills and the rickety metal shelves.

Years later, I returned to Dyess Air Force Base specifically to check out my old spot. I parked, walked up the sidewalk under the metal awning, and then stopped. The library had been demolished, and I had been so distracted, I hadn't even noticed until I was halfway up the sidewalk. There was nothing but an empty patch of dirt and a couple pieces of concrete rubble poking up through the ground.  Walking over to where the kid's section used to be, I stood there a minute, watching the people leave the commissary, just as I had glanced up from my book years ago. I was genuinely very sad.

Whether we are old or just getting oldER, and even if we are young, sometimes we just need our own space for an hour or two. So I will finish sitting here in the cold late October air, toasting the planet that hangs right above my tree while I finish my beer. Good night everyone!

I'll close with a pleasant fantasy:

He sits in a chair outside

Framed by a patch of ground.

It is afternoon

The sun shines brightly;

Its heat touches his face.

His eyes close,

He remembers the lost books

The books that he read.

He understands but is sad-

Like when the Norse gods walked quietly the day after Ragnarok

Picking their golden chessman from the dirt.

Book Collector I am? I am.

Well, due to my whimsical mood today in the face of a string of minor adversities, I'd say things are going well. The intent of the last post still holds true- good things baby... GOOD THINGS comin' my way!

Whimsical mood or not, my titular use of Yoda Grammar is a unique production from my key-tapping, but that's okay. I read an essay from a collection of Walter Benjamin's writings today, and I really enjoyed it. He reviews the pleasures of being a book-collector while unpacking his library:

"I am unpacking my library.  Yes, I am.  The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order.  I cannot march up and down their ranks to pass them in review before a friendly audience.  You need not fear any of that.  Instead, I  must ask you to join me in the disorder of crates that have been wrenched open, the air saturated with the dust of wood, the floor covered with torn paper, to join me among the piles of volumes that are seeing daylight again after two years of darkness, so that you may be ready to share with me a bit of the mood--it is certainly not an elegiac mood but, rather, one of anticipation--which these books arouse in a genuine collector." 

Every day I try to steal thirty minutes of stress relief by taking an old fashioned bath. I drink a favorite beverage and bring the latest book I'm working through. Subject matter is usually essay collections- due to the short nature of my therapeutic interlude, surrendering to hot suds on weary muscles, cold suds to ease my throats, short-smooth-thought provoking essays put the final stabilizing spin that makes a good bath worth my time.

Ray Bradbury's book ZEN AND THE ART OF WRITING was the last winning contestant. It was to be followed by a collection of Louis Borges' Short Stories and Essays, with Essays of Albert Camus in hot pursuit, but when Benjamin's REFLECTIONS came in the mail, that book toppled them all. Benjamin is proving to be the far removed cousin to my study of Jung. Benjamin and Jung complement each in sort of a subconscious way- I can't really define how. They were both pioneers- Jung in mystical science of the mind and Benjamin mystical literary criticism. I feel connected to Benjamin the way I identified with some of Jung's traits and experiences. If I were to illustrate my overall gut simultaneous appreciation of their work, they would be a Yin Yang sign, except I would be hard-pressed to say which was black and which was white.

The mundane duties of every day life assert themselves... excuse me while I pick up my children from school...

To be continued before night fall....

AND about a week later...

I enjoyed Benjamin's essay because I identified with his love of books. He recognized that owning a book is much better than borrowing it. I also appreciated his statement that just because you own a lot of books doesn't mean you are obligated to read them all. His quote from Anatole France validates this reasoning: upon the snotty inquiry of a visiting bourgeois merchant 'Monseiur- I'm sure you have read all these?' Anatole- "Not one-tenth of them.  I don't suppose you use your Sèvres china every day?".

Benjamin also writes of a poor intellectual who, upon reading through catalogues of books he couldn't afford to buy, picked the most fascinating titles and from them wrote the novels he would have like to have read. That was another great take-away from Walt: That true writers are the ones who write the stories that seem to be missing from the stacks.

In someways, he reminds me a little of Fernando Pessoa. Benjamin's love of quotations seems to mirror Pessoa's multitudinous personalities, alluding to a similar desire to communicate indirectly and by discrete literary proxy.  Both of them know how to convey the reality of their selected personality and presence through their written words.

I guess I thought I had a lot more to say, but that comes from losing your train of thought to the relentless march of pragmatic every day life.

Here's to the greatest German-Jewish-French literary critic who ever lived, good leather-bound books, and my excellent cup of coffee fresh out of the microwave.

Cheers.

This Day

I think the best years of my life are coming.

That is hopefully our common automatic thought, but personally I think falls into the category of politely meaningless, empty American middle-class platitudes: mundane small talk with the neighbor on Saturday over the fence. It lasts through the happy Sunday glaze of a good meal and football or whatever you relax to, only to fade on Monday morning when the alarm buzzer goes off. In the shower you itemize your week's task list mentally and all of a sudden the "best years etc." become "same-o, same-o".

But really. Seriously!

There is a good sky overhead and an excellent feeling in my heart. We are headed towards good things. Good Things!

Right now, I am in the process of being bombed by acorns from the massive oak tree that shades my deck. It is late afternoon, and aside from the intermittent but annoying drone of my neighbor's weed-wacker, it is an amazing fall day at the start of a four day weekend.

I have been looking at a small, humble tree across the street in my neighbor's yard. It catches tissue-paper strands of late afternoon light in its branches; the red and orange leaves glow like the golden letters of a medieval manuscript page. It's branches are unusual but eclectically balanced- the overall effect reminds me of a complex Chinese character. If it possessed all of it's leaves, it could replace that movie logo of the lightning -struck tree alone in a field- but it is flawed by a perfect and diametric asymmetry- the top of the tree is bare while the lower half is full.

What does that mean semiotically? I dunno.

I'll settle for a simple declaration that the tree is beautiful and that I am glad I was sitting here to see it. It wasn't even a Satori moment. Just a "cock head to the side and Hmmm.... I don't think I've ever actually SEEN that little tree before."

Sometimes, you just have to SEE things. Unfiltered, raw, SEEING. And then, you discover beauty in ordinary objects.

And with that....

 My neighbor shatters the reverie of the quiet neighborhood by murdering the weeds against his house in a casual vegetal recreation of the Valentines Day Mafia Massacre. *Eyebrow lifted* (Brother, when WAS the last time you mowed your lawn?)

Time for some new work and completion of the old.

The wind is shifting, and I like this change.

(my neighbor's tree is back to its shabby, mundane self. The light shifted during my final editing of this piece and the magical moment has passed. However, I will never see that little tree quite the same again.)

The tree below is NOT the one in my blog today, but it is an consistently amazing tree that captured the sun in  its branches earlier this summer one July evening.

Autumn is Coming in the Door

Fall comes to Virginia suddenly. Within a week, it is noticeably cooler in the mornings, and there seem to be less birds singing. I wonder if some have already started their long flight south?

Perhaps it is my imagination, but in September the light seems to change to "fall-light", and  there is a hopefullness in the air. I don't really know how to define this feeling better than that, especially when it seems that there should be some sort of mourning or sorrow for the free days of summer, more of melancholia perhaps. Yet, there is a fullness, an autumnal ripeness that descends like heavy apples from trees with coloring leaves. Fall marks a harvest time, the point of the year when maturity still has its virile strength. Later, in the darkness and cold of winter, it will transition with feeble steps to a maturity identified by finality.

But the pleasure of the fall! A gentle breeze, the rattle of leaves down the street in the evening, the golden light in the Sunday afternoon. I am researching my Gilgamesh/Steampunk novel while sitting on my deck. Books on Zeppelin Airships, Illustrated Encylopedias on Sailing Ships and Steamboat are stacked in tumbled disarray on the glass table top. I pause and sit back as a breeze sweeps through, and suddenly leaves are drifting over head. The oak tree drops acorns regularly, and I can see hawks wheeling overhead while a crow scolds them with a gutteral cawing. When winter comes, that "caw-caw" will be a lonely sound that echoes through bare trees and fields of snow; for now, it is simply a vulgar herald of shorter days and the increasing smell of woodsmoke in the air.

My neighbor's garden is beautiful across the lazy street. The flowers will soon fade, but for now, they match the growing orange and redness of the leaves.

It will be a good week, and I look forward pulling the box down from the closet filled with my sweaters.

Sharpening my verbal fangs

I am being tortured right now. The Individual Concept of Support is the capstone event of my Captain's Career Course, and I am trying not to crash and burn. A concept of support is an English guy's worst nightmare. It is a synchronized compilation of all the logistic considerations supporting a military operation. Massive amounts of math, time-rate-distance, straight line computations between multiple points. Rigorous, strict and disciplined thinking.

Ugh.

So, I took particular and uncharacteristic pleasure in taking my daughter to the doctor during this exercise. While there I did some reading in a great book, The Transitive Vampire. It is a book difficult to define, and since I have only read 15 pages of it, impossible for me to review. I will say that from what I have read so far, it is fascinating.The writer unleashes a maelstrom of a vocabulary composed of articulate witticisms that are uniquely expressed. I believe the purpose of the book is pursuit of grammar for the pure joy of reveling in the dance of words, but with a poetic creation of free-wheeling sentences for the hell of sheer fun. If I am ever an English professor, this book will be on the reading list. There is definite innuendo dancing and a gothic influence to the work- as if the Addams family collaborated on a English Grammar book for their future generation of eclectic misfits. Here is a brief sample:

A compound predicate, or compund verb, is the happy issue of two or more verbs that are joined by and, or, or nor and that belong to the same subject:

The recluse groveled before the mannequin and

kissed the hem of her slip.

She wriggled in acknowledgement or writhed in

uncalled-for shame.

The debutante squatted and pondered her

meaningless life.

The werewolf howled piteously and sought

comfort in the lap of his wife.

His huge, calm, intelligent hands swerved

through the preliminaries and wrestled with

her confusion of lace.

It neither soothed the unrecorded regrets nor

averted the impending doom.

Simply too much fun, buy it from Amazon.com today:

The Transitive Vampire

Deliciously evil- a grammatical delicacy akin to verbal frog-legs.

The Artist's Prayer

I was reading Nina Paley's blog today, and in one of her posts, she scribed/quoted this poem:

Inspiration (a.k.a. Artist’s Prayer)

Our Idea
Which art in the Ether
That cannot be named;
Thy Vision come
Thy Will be done
On Earth, as it is in Abstraction.
Give us this day our daily Spark
And forgive us our criticisms
As we forgive those who critique against us;
And lead us not into stagnation
But deliver us from Ego;
For Thine is the Vision
And the Power
And the Glory forever.
Amen.


Awesome.


Here is a link to her site: 


Nina Paley's Blog

A Moment of Quiet

There are times in the early morning, when the house is silent, that I think time is almost paused. A simple moment of unadulterated existence with the rising sun and a simple breeze. I am struggling to understand why I don't get to feel this more often. Why do I have to wait for labor-day weekend? Although, at the precise moment I typed those words, my sense of gratitude for the little things reminded me that 7 years ago, Labor Day at the Steinmart Shoe Department would have been one hell of a busy work day. Or, that 3 years ago, I would have not even noticed a day off at all while I walked to the chow hall in Iraq.

I do have a choice every day though. It is either to stay on the treadmill of modern life, or get the F- off by simplifying things to the bare basics. Family, a few friends, the pursuit of a full and rich life- that is the focus. Unfortunately, we get so caught up in our societal conditioning that we pack our lives full of action that we forget how to simply "BE".

Life runs us after a while, and it runs us into the ground.

Just the other day, my nine year old daughter Emma had a gloomy expression on her face. When I asked her why, she explained that her best friend told her she would only be able to play on the weekends during the school year because of her busy schedule. Between dance lessons, ballet, music lessons, swim class, and horseback riding, their friendship would have to be on hold from Monday to Friday. This saddened me. Her friend is an amazing little girl, but I see her being carved into that sad American mirage of success. Maybe I'm just not wealthy, and I don't understand that truly successful people need all this formation to reach their dreams in their mid-thirties, but I think it is a Pyrrhic victory. Aren't the late thirties and early forties of  most upper middle-class Americans the time of mid-life crisis and when most people find a regular therapist? Maybe if they spent a little more time "living" than pursuing their goals they would find that the act of truly living life "awake" has rewards that far exceed any "fast-track" gain.

All this is temporary.

I almost quoted the Bible, but I decided paraphrasing it in the colloquial might have more punch: The guy who owns the world at the expense of trading in his soul is one stupid motherf-er. I was going to add in the adjective "sad", but when you buddy-f yourself, than there is an automatic exemption of sympathy for people who stick it to themselves because they choose to.

He's stupid because he bought something worthless by trading the only priceless thing he had. It would be like selling your living body forever into slavery in exchange for a portrait of yourself as the king of the world. Stupid. He is a motherf-er by defaming his life's purpose- why should his mother suffered her pain at childbirth if he is to trade his life away in casual indifference for insignificant and transient gain?

We all grow old, we all retire. Every one of us is replaceable. Even folks who seem to possess eternal fame like Alexander the Great,Queen Elizabeth I, George Washington, etc.- they are but the personalization of myths and archetypes  of generations, figureheads for the yearning of countless individuals who have struggled towards inaccessible satisfaction. Despite the achievements, their hands shook when they died, and two days after death their bodies had a terrible smell. When you consider the millions of people who have lived and whose names are forgotten, our egg-shell lives become very precious to us. Making a good, rich life is all that should matter to us. We should exist for the pure sake of living a beautiful life and passing that legacy to our children.

On a personal note, this entire conversation with Emma took place in a fantastic fort that Emma created with sheets, safety pins and every article of furniture in her room. From the doorway, it looks like a bomb went off, but if you get down and crawl through the secret doorway, she made a house within a house, creating a posh Persian princess two room suite. I might not have Emma running on the American Success treadmill, but if she comes up with such magnificent creativity, I think we are on the right track.

In the end, my life is what I make of it. True, I live in this house of cards society, and since I have a family, we must affect a compromise with the gods of society to survive. However, I can choose to throw a football with my son after school rather than immerse myself in the television. I can jump off the tree on the rope swing with Emma rather than immerse myself in Facebook. Ultimately, I have a time account that is topped off every night with 24 fresh hours, only 8 to 10 of which are dedicated to working. In regard to the others, they are my own.

If you want a unique view of this, read "How to Live on 24 hours a Day". Great little book. Here is the wiki link: How to Live on 24 Hours a Day

As Paul Harvey said, Good Day!