What I Assume

Jame remarked to me the other day that hope is “a scary venture”, for it is escorted by memories of dissatisfactions and failures, and is a prelude to fearing both. At first I was curious about this fear, for I nearly always rely on hope to fuel my endeavors. But reflecting on the matter tonight (disclaimer: my brain may be mixed tonight by “Ulysses”, chai, and prescription opiates), I think she’s right, and to illustrate I return to my favorite Greek myth.

The tale of Pandora’s “Box” (in fact, a jar) has always fascinated me, though perhaps I never fully realized why. Jamie’s comment that hope is frightening rings true, for Pandora released from the jar all the evils of mankind except for one:

Only Hope remained there in an unbreakable home within under the rim of the great jar, and did not fly out at the door.
Hesiod, The Works and Days

A red-figure Attic pyxis showing a marriage procession: “the bride is driven in a chariot from her parent’s home to that of her husband. 440-430 BC” Wikimedia Commons. What figures might have adorned the jar Zeus gave to Pandora?

Rather than “hope”. I have also seen some interpret this final “evil” as the opposite: “foreboding”; for many consider hope not an evil but a good. Yet for many there is in hope itself an inextricable foreboding as Jamie described. In fact, the jar’s retention of hope may be seen as a necessity for survival: The absence of hope can numb us to the dull and tiresome tasks of existence, and I think in a way that makes ordinary life more bearable. But true hope is risk, and hope that demands rich, deep, meaningful satisfaction is not something our world of materialism is very good at satiating.

It makes sense, then, that our materialist’s society encourages superficiality and the immediate gratification of simple pleasures. Why? Perhaps the material powerbrokers in society find it the addictiveness a good way to keep us consuming and spending, reinvesting in their system while we trip ourselves up, binding ourselves an entraptive net from the silk they spin; they will keep us, they will drain us. But we accept and even choose these fixes with enthusiasm, perhaps because it’s the easiest way to keep our restless, questioning minds occupied, and far away from slipping into true hope, for true hope must for many of us trigger cynicism and pessimism in the vacuum where we wish for stronger, more lasting fulfillments.

What might those be? Attachment to our loved ones, persistence of life or being, and creation. I think one can find these in, respectively, family, spirituality/faith, and parenting/art (is it strange I mix those two?) ; but none of these are easy to package and sell, and as for making your own, they are works never completed, and collapse even as they are constructed.

Back cover of Einstürzende Neubauten’s 1989 album Haus der Lüge

Revised 11/06/08 in Phoenix, AZ.

A Fog of Fuzz

A fog of fuzz,
two magpies black
and whites aloof, in gray,
against a bearded veil of rain
their forked feet peck and kiss
the ashen leaves that stuff the iron drain.
And gutters flood the graveled road, frame
a fog of fur the magpies cluck at;
pull out a red steam worm.

We break through the storm
from opposite directions meeting for tea,
to pick and scrape at words. And how
can I describe this to you
like it was, like it is
my lover's love
for you.

Since taking up skateboarding again last year after a 15-year hiatus, it has brought me back to several things I’d loved in my youth but taken for granted as my commitments to work and family have grown. Writing is one of them. So it’s fitting that I at least try to pay tribute at the shrine of the skateboard, and here’s my first offering.

Cool Night

Cool night
taken freely by me;
the lights of the city,
the incandescent eyes that pass,
playing on the pavement and curbs;
the mantis lamps
preying on a subcelestial emptied lot.
A skateboard stamps, I, the rider, step up and am
shown a third/foot taller.
And, at last, the spring airs sweep
the grime of winter, the scent of rot.

The muscles know they now may flex,
tendons stretch, and thus will wheels
run on in twos and fours
like a train rumbling, a rough dog panting.
Their hot frictive spinning incenses my soul
and spurs it on, toward imitation and invention
till the body chafes with it's burning.

And each tap the wheels time down
resonates ancestral roller-skates.
I speed past a sign: No Skateboarding
not rebellious in my age, but desperate.

A pop and the wood will flex, the feet
attend to it:
one heel kicks, or these toes flick,
to flip the board on either axis;
a sharp mind and smart catch will land it,
else chaos worsts
and bites with vicious gravity.
Whichever, let my chest swell in
the cool night, it's lights, it's airs--
elements of which new blood is constituted.

So I force life to circle through me, as inevitably
the night will end as it began, I
just one of many
sad dogs running solo, in training to be
Lone Wolves:
unconquered, uncapturable
but by film.

There was one summer day in 2007 when I thought I saw my friend’s ghost twice in the same hour. I was annoyed rather than sad, and I uttered (but was immediately horrified with) the words, “Damn you, Carter” Then I figured that every poem-writer should be allowed at least one death/eulogy poem, so I meted out mine:

Carter, Dead

At times I think I see your shade
Out corners of my study
keeping dusty with ambition

I keep on lights past midnight
Having only the void
and no vision