What is
at the bottom is a poem. What comes before it is a little insight in to how and
why it came about.
A peak
inside the untidy world of creation.
I recall---and so far have failed to forget as I tell it to you now---something
I’d read about our favourite dipsomaniacal wordsmith, Charles Bukowski. When
recollecting his early years as a young, penniless, peripatetic writer
travelling the country during World War II, he often revisited in memory the
sheer squalor of his lonely years moving from cheap hotel room to sordid
boarding house to cheap hotel. He wrote of those travelling years walking on a
knife’s edge that caused him to believe he would surely slip on that edge and
impale himself through the heart. He more than once contemplated suicide.
Never
more was suicide at his elbow than when he found himself paperless. Not money, of course, though
that surely was a factor in being destitute. No. His impoverishment was in the form
of white paper needed to write. When out of sheets to place words is when he
was most near despair. One night, with nary a piece to write on and just a nub
of a pencil as his technological implement, he readied the noose. Before he
could finalize the ‘easy cure,’ however, something seemingly insignificant
stopped him in his tracks. He spied the margins of a newspaper. Blank white
area, he realized! He
explained that what kept him alive on at least one occasion was the free, unmarked
area of the margins of the newspaper where he could continue writing words.
Like a man underwater finding an alcove with small pockets of air to breath, he
found a way to go on thanks
to roughly a half inch margin of white area around somebody’s Gazette or other,
to stain with a pencil marks. He would continue to create.
I cannot
by any stretch match anything in my own life that might compare to the
circumstantial despair that Bukowski lived through during those his lean years.
However, in my own pathetic way, I can relate to the margins.
The
germination of the poem below sprung from a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of
Art in New York City one blistering summer afternoon. Though things in the poem
are not conveyed as they happened exactly, (I naturally take some artistic
license) there were enough fragments of experiences I believed could be shaped
in to a poem. This is not a
poem so I shall try to be accurate whilst being slightly vague. The problem was
that I hadn't the means to write the ideas down as they came and I was deathly
afraid I would lose them. Who, after all, when one gets right down to it, even
in the most intimate recesses of the mind, truly trusts their own recollective
abilities when it comes to ideas not yet shared? Sure, we may believe we have
been the eyewitness to something, or recall an argument we are sure went our
way. But to believe we can
manufacture again that eureka moment is something we do not trust within
ourselves. I am be being too objective here. May be I should say I cannot. On this particular day I was
dictating words in the mind whilst at the same time feeling the excitement that possibly they
were good ideas. I know
that even if I might have recalled them accurately the same excitement would be
lost. If this were lost I would think the ideas were lacking. If not a lack of true
recollection at least a loss of spontaneity in the moment. A paradox of sorts
to be sure.
No matter
what I recalled later they were in danger of losing the sheen. We know how
this works. Like the initial images that present themselves with a quick flick
of paint on a canvas, we are fixated and excited about our original and
intuitive idea. They come
from the ether. There was nothing, now something. They seem the best and
freshest early. However, when they are ideas for a written project, we become
deathly afraid of losing them if they are not brought forth from the brain to
something substantial like paper. They must be set down! This was my own
squalor: Fear that imagination dried up beyond the first intuitive idea, if not
grasped in time. My fear was that the excitement of primary imagination
was only a mirage of ornateness that, if allowed to change with passing time,
turned out to be nothing but a lumpy fold out bed, a Gideon’s bible in the
drawer, and a neon sign shining a devious red through the curtains.
I walked
out of the Met with a jumble of ideas and an unorganized collage of images.
Worse than this, I was afraid of losing them. I walked the long path down 5th Avenue from the Museum at 80th to a friend’s place on 57th street. Walking south down 5th meant Central Park always at my right
hand. I ignored it the whole way. I
was only thankful for the benches at every entrance. It was a blazing hot day
and my brain melted seemingly taking my ideas with them in a kind of puddle of
primordial soup. I tried desperately through the sweat to contain them. It felt
as if the perspiration was from the exertion of holding on to them. I found
myself sitting on every bench at every block to rest and collect my ideas. More
to the point, I checked to see I still had them. It was at one of these rests,
I realized I had white space around the margins of a few magazines I carried in
plastic bag. I found a pen and feverishly wrote down these ideas at every
sit-down at every block, filling in the white spaces on every page with ideas
and lines. I walked and thought (and perspired) then stopped and thought then
wrote. Soon enough as the blocks and hence, park benches added up and receded,
I was able to piece together very loosely the poem below, haphazardly and
cramped, in an array of untamed ink within the white margins of my magazines.
It was hot as blazes. I was as soaked as white water rocks.
Anyway,
none of this is quite parallel with the early, destitute life of Bukowski. I
suppose, may be, I can say we both worked within the margins. We both might
also agree it’s a cramped life. So is the Metropolitan Museum most days. The
poem below is set there. The poem is simply about a little calm, real,
unfabricated sophistication surrounded by a good deal of the opposite kind.
Sometimes the surroundings are fabricated (like temples in a museum wing) and
sometimes the inhabitants are unsophisticated (like tourists in that wing). The
unforced and original sophistication can be in the form of a person. It may
often be in the form of a child. It may often be in the form of a sophisticated
child. It is rarely the artist. He is merely a detached watcher of things. When
he is in his workshop he is clumsier. There is often no sophistication there. He
often must stop at every block. He may often work in cramped places. He might
often wipe copious amount of sweat from his brow. The poem:
At the
Met
Roofed by
Japanese temples and
Artificial
light we stood. No rising
Sun from
the east here. Rather from the east
wing. Our
roof, as ornate as a geishas
Conversation
is deceivingly simple,
Curled up
at the four corners like a sultan's
Slippers
towards a God though whose, I
Could not
tell. I stood with a small worshipping
Mass
whose saviour must be a giant eye
As the
talisman's around their necks
Implied.
Only I and my Buddha boy
Stood
naked necked. His naked nape, bowed like
A lover's
top lip and his shorn head, in
Danger of
colliding with my hip, aimed
At our
interest. A lady of the mass
With a
voice like a bugled blare to send
The weary
off to war, spoke. The small pool
Of water
at the foot of the temple
We all
penetrated with a glare (the
East know
the importance of water, so
It's
said). At the pools edge she read aloud
The sign:
"Do not throw pennies as they might
Endanger
the fish." What fish we all wondered?
Then:
"Did I just see one scurry by?"
The
question sent us all on a journey
And the
ladies, camera eyes bouncing
Like
bewildered demi-gods against
Ancient
mountains, were off on the hunt.
"Do
fish 'scurry'?"
"Is
'scurry' the word?"
"Who
still says 'scurry'?"
"Well,
what do fish do?"
The
leaves of the Bodhi tree tickled the boy’s
Head, I
could see. For silently, with fixed glare,
And all
the aplomb of a cherry trees leaf
As it
alights from its place, he whispered: "swim".
In an
instant the light danced off the water
And rose
and congealed a tight ball like a dying
Star. It
ascended my face where the white
Heat
thrust through my nostrils and the light
Flashed
out my eyes. I staggered for a moment.
Blind and
frightened, I leaned upon a pillar
And
speculated: The superlative artist paints
Mount
Fuji with a mere stroke of the wrist.
