The Chinese Gardener

Just another early morning walk past

Suburban yawning houses

       No different than the morning last.

   Each house with sleepy pride announces

At their feet sit pretty Jersey gardens.

     And the mindless clod trods through

One with a thousand beg your pardons.

       With western plod he traipses into

Some eastern loves and old enchantments

        With crowns of cabbage tops and rows

Of reddish roses. A dream, he thinks,

   That's ushered in by oriental blows

    Of wind which brushes leaves and slips

Over ringlet stalks like wedding bands

         Over blushing, rosy finger tips.

     Amid the cultivated patch stands

      The wordless cultivator. Child sized,

    She is sleek in black to the teeth.

  A conical hat, bamboo-leaved and wide,

Shades the gaze of exotic eyes underneath

That fail to look or heed his remorse.

    She stoops to dig with ungrowing glee.

  And a stab of the earth with delicate force

          Sows this garden of deeper mystery.

His mind digs with a thousand if's and so’s

    As the morning continues a silent call.

    She digs, aloof, heedless, with a garden hoe.

 Death plants seeds at less than five feet tall.

      A sedge wide hat that's fixed to a point

Where seed-love growth anticipates birth.       

         Yet rich brown soil is balm to anoint

     The many beds of subterraneal earth.

Morning on Masada

On my visit to Israel I made a pilgrimage to Masada. Not quite Chaucer-like, it was on a bus through the desert but with no less a diverse group of folks from round the world. We were led intelligently by a wonderful little sage, our guide, Uri, who tirelessly kept our curiosity at the ready with his wonderful explanations of practically every crevice in every mountainside as the bus roared through the Judean Desert. And there is plenty of desert. It may seem trite to say also plenty of history. It stretches as long as the rocky, arid landscape. How lucky are we that sages of days of yore hid their papaya manuscripts within the cavities of the very mountains we spied from our bus window? I think, plenty. Thank goodness for all these scribes. I thought of this whilst on the journey toward our ultimate destination, a place alive thanks to the remembrance of history: Masada. For those possibly familiar with the name—and may be even the film of the same name---but not so much a geographical grasp, Masada is a large, mountain plateau in the eastern part of the country standing at the lip of the Judean Desert. It is the very desert we traveled. It is also along the Dead Sea, just a stones throw away. And stones do abound. If you’ve ever wondered why, in that ‘good’ book, stones are often a prescriptive tool for sponsored assassination, go to the desert. Stones are aplenty.

Our destination, our large “stone,” Masada, reaches skyward about 1300 feet above the Dead Sea where the peak of the mountain does in fact plateau flat like a mesa. It’s a very large, stony tabletop. Mercifully, tourists like us could be lifted to the top mechanically thereby saving the body from an excruciating hike up the side of the mountain on foot which, too, can be done. One can hike either side of the mountain. On my visit one of my fellow pilgrims, the young strapping lad of the group, forewent the cable car and bravely hiked the side. When eventually reunited with the rest of us at the top his face bore such a deep, anguished red as to look to my eyes like a soft black.  His own eyes were like slightly lit pieces of coal. I don’t know if I ever saw in those embers such exhaustion. At least, I think so.  This, too, is hazy as the sun altered my vision and brain.  Everything seemed a hot, white electric buzz. Yes. There is no hiding from it. Make this pilgrimage in the summer in any form and you are doing it under a hot white sun that is equally blistering and unforgiving. Masada, it has been pointed out as a prescriptive more than once, should only really feasibly be done in the morning. Any later would be excruciating. This point will make the history all the more incomprehensible.

Historically, and put rather too simply, Masada was to be the final destination for contumacious Israelites on the run. Rather than fleeing this same seeming unceasing sun they moved closer to it in order to escape the equally sweltering oppression of Roman persecution and rule. And it was this large, flat, dusty expanse which became both settlement and fortification for rebellious Israelites demanding emancipation from on high. The Romans of course, having none of this, lay siege spending their time at the foot of the mountain devising ways to penetrate the mountain, or at least hoping to wait them out. I recall Uri explaining how a bridge was built by the Romans through the use of those Israelite slaves with nary the luck to have escaped. This bit of engineering was implemented in hopes of, as it were, bridging the gap between them, the Romans, and their target. That target, of course, being the new inhabitants of the top of that plateau. It is a story that emanates and still rings loudly. If you are there walking the terrain it rings louder still.

Anyone at the top of this plateau today worries about nothing less than staying hydrated or keeping dust from a camera lens. He also does not have Centurions waiting to shackle at the bottom of the rock.  We are free to roam what was once the existence of a small society. As you do mingle in and out of each room or crevice, you get the feeling of a kind of ‘tough comfort’ domesticity. The place, naturally, is only a pale, wind driven ghost of itself, but with enough imagination one can still place hewn brick and mortar, and colour in to it. It may be much like knowing the Parthenon only as we can know it today, as a skeletal but beautiful ruin. However, when a clever graphics expert ably recreates it in all its former glory, we then see the vivid impact of the original and so different than the ruin we know and love.

There are, for example, the baths, now bereft of any water, with the small columns still rigidly rising out of the dusty bottom. These columns presumably would hold tiles where the bathers could sit above the steam coming from the water below. With the tiles since gone, the columns are exposed. They still hold their rounded features with a flat top though time has reduced these tops to unequal sizes resembling often used erasers at the end of pencils. There are the small dusty rooms, proof of domesticity, some of which still carry proof of breathtaking design. In a few you will find the beautiful and complicated remnants of a mosaic pattern in the floor and walls. It is enough to make one smile to think that among all the practicality that comes with desperation, these inhabitants still found the need to decorate for the sake of aesthetics. One must constantly pass through small arch top passage ways to get to these enclosed rooms which, in my own emotional appeal, added an almost ‘sacred’ element to every entrance and exit.

Outside in the open air, one finds walls and mazes that lead to steps and brings one to all different aspects and levels of the plateau.  It was out here that Uri, beads of sweat dotting his sweet bald pate, explained in proud, almost nationalistic explanations, how the Israeli’s bravely and single-mindedly defied the Romans. They not only demanded freedom, we now know they would rather have not lived than to be bound by others than themselves. Uri described all this in is more than charming Israeli accent as we all stood just over a slightly vaster than usual smooth decline that led to a lower level of the mountain.  It was this scene that turned Uri’s description of the bravery and single-mindedness of defying the Romans to the more practical need of collecting water. He described how they would make the small trek down this particular decline of the mountain in order to collect the so very necessary rain water caught within one of the very ingenious aqueducts. Upon describing this, I could not help but notice that the trek down the mountain toward the all-important water system brought one dangerously close to where a portion of the Roman army purported to have staked them out. This captured my curiosity. I asked in the simplest way possible of Uri, who exactly owned the arduous task of fetching and bringing this water to the rest of the community? With not a hint of irony Uri turned to me and in that same accent that transfixed me to every syllable, and said so very matter of factly, “Their slaves.”

Is 73 A.D. just too far in the distant past to create a causal argument they did good with their sacrifice? Can we say it made a palpable difference today? Because of this distance, I believe, it is too hard to tell. I hope this does not make me sound nihilistic in my approach toward doing anything in hopes of affecting the future. Could what I do today affect circumstances fifty years from now? I think it’s safe to say it is a possibility. But, what of 5,000 years from now? The prospects become as vague and hazy as the heated Judean dessert. But, they did make history. Of course they did as we still talk about them today. And this is an extension of learning. We are learning through history.  We’re still visiting their chalky and arenose ghost town at the top of a mountain. What is left is a weather worn former community and ghosts of history.

Uri’s explanation about slaves fetching the water reminded me that even a King resided on that mountain. It also reminded me of philosopher Walter Benjamin’s notion that what drives revolt and the need for progress is not “dreams of liberated grandchildren” but rather “memories of enslaved ancestors.” It might be important to remember even this enslavement was by degrees. The great equalizer is that Israeli king and Israeli servant alike, their Roman oppressors, and the leader of that army, are now mere spectres. They do not walk the rocky grounds and earthy rooms of Masada. No. They just flitter in our imagination as we attempt to cover them in bones and sinew, and imagine the workings of iron age brains, as we try to place them in that setting of rocky ground and earthy rooms, the same ones that, no matter how weathered with time and wind, outlasted them. But, not in our minds.

Geography of Love

Allow me please to get lost in your hair. 
I promise you won’t even know I am there 

Lest you think you might like to play coy, 
Then I’ll swing from a strand like a casual toy. 

If you can, don’t let me get lost in your eyes. 
Or I’ll lock myself in while the land around lies. 

Held captive, I might not get where I want 
And the lay of the land will tease at and taunt. 

For I must scale in time those highest of peaks 
Where panting breaths sound a yodeling speech. 

From there I’ll come down the mountains with care 
Where the stretches of heath lay boundless and bare. 

I’ll stay for a while on the flattened expanse 
Where softer breaths swirl in much plainer dance. 

God! Give me consent to your yawning thighs 
Where I’ll open that cave with lurid-like sighs. 

Then let me please go where no one does pass. 
With tongue, like a blade, I’ll mow down the grass. 

The permission you give to enter your lair 
Is heavenly sent and utterly fair. 

Some say this is like a descension to hell. 
The riddle though is if I walked or I fell. 

Yet if this is the way, I haven’t been told 
And all I can say is I’ve mapped my own road. 

Origen's Vision

Last night I dreamt all the world

Was put aright in a

Glorious restoration like

Oregin’s famous vision.

Even Mephistopheles and

His minions were invited back.

Creatures, no longer great,

No longer small, convened in a

Consortium of a

Celebrated congregation,

A magnificent mass

Of all that was and what

Came to be. We easily loosed

The tangled tree of

Knowledge and guiltlessly ate from

The apple where the seed

Took root in each and multiplied

In a cultivated

Consortium of sanctified

Truth and goodness. We saw

Ourselves in each and each

In ourselves. Old earthly habits

We shed and in that place

New plumes of purer kindness and

Clearer understanding

Bloomed. We saw cause and effect as

Mother and child while we

Became birther and birthed to our

Own living, pregnant thoughts.

Eyes in infinite number beamed

Forth in enveloping

Wonder till we pierced the wall of

The universe and saw

Without shock what lay on the other

Side. All this was the final

Restitution; mysteries

Gift. We all stood on heavenly

Clouds. Yet I was distracted.

Among histories horde I stood.

I stood shoulders with him;

The devil himself. In a kind

Of a mechanical

Mastication he chewed his gum.

He chomped, he champed, he chawed.

A  distraction dirge of din. His

Jaw of corruption pierced

My vine. I seethed in silent anger.

I wanted to throttle him.

Hide Under My Mustache, Poor Horse: Nietzsche in Turin

'Hide under my mustache, poor horse!

Only I comprehend the state we're in!

Insensitivity of the world runs a course

And overtakes us here on this street of Turin!' 

And so this superman, with looping, aching arms,
Wrapped the nag’s neck in sympathetic choke.
Though equine embrace made no less calm,
Clasped hands, trembling tight, made a loving yoke

That laboured to shield the beast from his flog of dread.
Man and beast, there, held tight to no common vanity.
The Flogger of the man, in his lost mind, stayed dead.
Nature, in blind ambition, straight stripped his sanity.

So, like the clasp come undone from slippery skin
And takes leave of a wrist, snaking around,
Did the man let loose his fingered grasp and, in
Tragic heap, fell straight to the ground.

That good little lamb that frolics happily upon
The globe round top of the green grass lea
In stainless splendour, is in turn the same one
Who, with innocent eye, cannot spy the company

He keeps. Behind that eye the subtle worm
In insidious routes but no true endeavour,
Bores through the skull in parasitic turns.
And the innocent eye is shut forever.

We climb the hill, we crave to be on high.
But the taut tight rope over the abyss frays
And in eternal echoes we hear the sighs.
Angel arms slip from our necks and we fall away.

The Price for this is Right:It's Free

If you’ve never heard of Jaron Lanier, I would highly recommend a contemplative read.  He has some very interesting takes on the internet generally and social sites in particular.  We are all users of the internet generally and it should be as clear as Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie peering at you in all their glossiness from a supermarket checkout line, we are all users of social sites particularly.

As it stands right now, anyone who is the least bit creative in the 21st century is standing on a knife edge, a sharp and decisive conundrum: How to make money?  I will not bombard with trite clichés like, ‘money makes the world go round,’ but let’s face a reality, it does in fact at least keep societies gears turning.  This, for me, is a bit of an irony.  For many years now I eschewed the very idea of material gain as so much wasted fuel and a real drain on integrity.  I say this especially as an artist.  But for the love of Vishnu, I wonder is it possible to make a little bit of the green stuff?  My worry now, however, much like Lanier’s, is how do we expect anyone to even eke out a living in this our gadget filled, electronic age?  As another writer has said, “the internet is both midwife and executioner.”  It has sprung a plethora of a well-spring of creativity but everyone expects to bathe for free.   The internet can give new birth to a creative idea but will die upon its arrival as a ‘product.’   I am just as guilty of this.  

Indulge me in a short story.

The other day I found that a favourite writer of mine had decided to sell an e-book.  He dealt with the inevitable minor controversy that it was not an e-book at all but in fact just an essay.  The price should have been an indication.  This 9,000 word small body of work cost a mere $1.99 on Amazon.  I like him, I like his ideas, and I liked the price, so I bought it (I also downloaded the necessary Kindle for PC’s.   For free, I hope!).  I figured at that price it was essentially the same as a potentially bad cup of coffee so I justified it rather handily.  I downloaded this writer’s essay and read it in a sitting.  It was interesting and thought-provoking.  Some of it I whole heartedly agreed with and much of it I did not.  The problem was that as I found myself wrestling with those ideas I disagreed with in my head, I found that much like an uninvited party guest, the thought that maybe I wasted my money kept popping in like a messy drunk.  But, why did I think this way?  

When I delved deeper I realized I was becoming accustomed to getting things for free.  I was ashamed.  I realized I could have waited until it made the rounds certainly as time wore down and his sales for it waned.  Yet I remembered I had skillfully talked myself into it by the paltry price of the download.  Is it wrong for this writer, a great thinker actually, to give himself away for nothing?  He does this already with a blog.  He has a right to make money, I believe.  If anything, I do hope this illustrates how at least publishing is shifting beneath our feet.  The man (me) who used to decry the need to make money is now fretting over how some businesses like publishers might make a profit!  Such is the strange dichotomies of the internet.

The other frightening thing is how it promotes mediocrity.  Much like an ‘American Idol’ kind of hyper-democracy pushing the banal, the internet can do the same in more convoluted ways.  I have seen great writers (and I mean very talented people) write for a magazine and placed on these very prominent magazines websites only to be buried within everything else in that magazine.  These writers can be hard to find.  But the minute a less than talented writer’s work finds its way as a link on a prominent blog, he makes it around the world as quick as sound travels.  This, as someone put it, may have a lot to do with “the ratio of signals to noise.”  It does, however, make me feel better as when I place a poem or some such piece of work on here.   

If someone simultaneously claims in a ‘comment’ they saw Britney Spears pumping gas, they get a thousand ‘likes’.  If it is a thousand, it is exactly one thousand more than I receive. Imagine if either of these had to be a money maker.  I would be broke.  A celebrity "sighter" would not.  Am I bitter?  No.  Am I lying?  Yes.

It just now seems that America has become a weird place. With an unemployment rate of over 9%, its inhabitants appear to be content to place things—sometimes someone else’s stuff—on social network sites in hopes of getting a “thumbs up.”  We want to have sensitive egos stroked over creating a society where everyone can share in a marketable way that (hopefully) everyone can flourish.  

Whether we like it or not, we still need cash to buy things.  You know this already.  I mean in the sense that Adam Smith explained it as a market that was circular.   I guess I have to do my part by not expecting everyone within the frame of this little unblinking window that now peers in front of me is for free.   Yet somehow, and for some clear reason I still fail to bring into view, I continue to place things on Facebook for free in a quixotic attempt at a little love.  Sad.

The Blurring of Technology as Appendage and Tool

Karl Marx once stated that the worry for the workers of the world was that they may alienate themselves from what they create.  The machines they used were in danger of becoming  "appengages" to the human being.  With an extensive use of the machines, the worker and his work stood on the precipice of losing any "individual character."  Is there any technology in this our modern age that we might come close to considering nearly literally being an "appendage" than a cellphone, or ipod, or whatever mode of adjunct to the body part may be your choice? Unlike, say, a loom, these things are always "on" us.   However, the very organ I might say these things are standing in for is arguably the very nerve center (literally and figuratively) so important to organic life and acquirement of knowledge: the human brain.

 I have surely mentioned more than once somewhere within a sea of blogs that I am concerned not so much with technology as a tool, but rather it's expediency as a tool.  On the face of it, this should sound like a positive.  I believe it can be one  (I chuckle at how often I hear people exclaim they cannot imagine life before cell phones but I rarely hear it lamented that they cannot imagine a time when they couldn't look up a useless information at the drop of a hat).   But I also chuckle at my local bar and a random bit of useless trivia is thrown out there as a challenge to the collective know-how.  This is usually in the form of some sports trivia of a sort.  Heads come up and away from beer rims like lions lapping up lake water only to hear or smell some tasty prey.  It’s then that cellphones collectively come out at the ready with all the aplomb of taking out a chewing gum packet and thumbs begin to genuflect wildly in contrast to faces frozen in stony stares at their little screens.  The race is on for the answer.  Is this a good thing?  Well, why not?  There should be nothing wrong for a ‘quest’ for knowledge and there should certainly be nothing that hinders the honest competition in acquiring that knowledge.  It may be all fine and well for getting lackadaisical men from pulling their heads from out of a beer mug, but is this what we want, for example, in our classrooms?  No doubt the acquirement of knowledge especially at the click of a button seems appealing but there are dangers beyond the seemingly educational allure.

The problem with this is it might foster the ‘habit’ of being able to find information without the time worn need to also distill, absorb, and remember the information.  If there’s a study that says otherwise, I don’t know of it.  However, in my own travels, I’ve found that students are infinitely cheery at answering a question right but sadly cannot expand or improve on what they’ve answered correctly.

As an example of this, imagine I'm having a discussion with a friend over some rich and tasty coffee. Somehow, and for some reason only known to him,  my friend is gripped with a desire to remember a quote by the the Rennaissance painter and sculptor, Michelangelo Buonarotti.  He says between sips: "I'm thinking of that wonderful quote by Michelangelo but I can't remember it for my life!  What was it?  I know he said it  around the time he was painting the Sistine Ceiling.  When was that?"

I'm glad to oblige.  I do this by firing up the phone, punching the mini keyboard with the words google, then I'm off on my own quest.  I get my info rather easily.  "He started it in 1508 but didnt finish for another four years," I say matter-of-factly.  This helps jog my friends memory.  He's on the trail thanks to my hint.  He says, "Yes!  Yes!  It was something to do with the nature of genius.  It was  said around that time.  This I remember!"  This is all I need, or, more to the point, all google will need.  I punch in Michelangelo, then 'quotes,' then simply the word 'genius.' After some of the least amount of research, I've found it!  "He said, 'Genius is eternal patience,'"  I might declare proudly.  My friend is content.  But what have I done?  Well, for one I have used the phone as appendage, as a stand in for my brain.  It may be argued that this is analogous, or merely a stand-in, for an anthology or thesaurus on art.  There's no doubt this analogy holds weight.  But, the expediency of the cellphone has become part of the usage of the thing.  It's become an essence.  If you own an anthology on art, it should be unlikely that you would carry it around on your person waiting for any questions to do with the Rennaissance, or the Baroque Period, or any other art movement.  You will hopefully read it and get to know it intimately so that the knowedge gained becomes just as intimate with you.

But the real problem here is that I have only become a distiller of information.  What if he then asks me my opinion on the more esoteric meaning of the chronological layout of the Sistine Ceiling?  What if he asks why he placed a Sybil here and a saint there?  What if he asks my opinion on his theory of form and function?  Is there enough room on my little screen?  Is there enough time before a second cup of coffee?  I might be embarrassed.  My only recourse to him may be a sheepish, "My little machine did all that."  Of course, this will depend on if I pretended all along I knew what I was talking about.  Admittedly, this little problem, though still associated with how I got the information, may have more to do with my attitude and my honesty about it.  But, if I did pretend I knew what I was talking about, it should then have been my responsibility to expand my knowledge beyond mere trivia.

This is why it seems more than ever, it is a teacher's duty to  demand that expansion.  Herein lies the danger of something like a Wikipedia.  When I was a student I well remember the ire of the teacher when she finally came to the conclusion that a student was merely regurgitating (without feeling or understanding, mind you!) some those 'notes' that were a mere distillation of a story to a book that was meant to be a companion to a work and not its replacement.  Might Wikipedia be the “Cliff notes” of the present?  In this case, an answer does not even have to be memorized!  One merely has to call it up on a laptop or phone and an answer is provided immediately.  The danger in English (and I might even argue math) is that the expediency is eroding the critical thought that goes with finding new information.  Ones work is done once something is cited. No need to keep it.  It was all in a moment.  What's next is next.    The other problem with such rapid information gathering is the thrill of the find seems to be lacking.  As a psychological motivation, with much digging comes more interest and hence, more passion into the quest for knowing.

I  remember well when young, and in hindsight as slightly older, the thrill of the search for knowledge. At the time, it seemed deeply frustrating but in lovely retrospect, I now see the importance of pushing myself to finding it was something so essential to the desire of attaining and finding  knowledge.  When one works for it, one holds it dearly.  As an analogy, imagine the polar bear in the zoo who is fed daily, something he never received in the wild.  Why then does he seem so depressed?  Quite simply, because, in the wide stretches of the years,  nature has placed in him the need, the very desire, to find his own food.  His very 'raison d'etre' was not eating alone.  It was finding it.  I sometimes wonder if we are putting on a brave face but we might be feeling just as dejected as the imprisoned but well-fed polar bear.

This also applies to college students who use websites as a way to facilely cut and paste information expected to pass as their own paper.  The laziness is near unforgivable but the ignorance of the severity of such a crime cannot be comprehended.

We must teach children that, despite the speed that new information can be called up, it is still just a tool for reference and the topic called up must still be thoroughly examined and, most importantly, must be compared to other information as a way of cross referencing facts and ideas for the best possible educational outcome.

Googling is fine for at the bar when you want to acquire the number of strikeouts Andy Petite has achieved on every odd number month of a lunar eclipse.  But for a student who wants to deeply understand Homer’s “The Iliad,” it should be a tool that requires further human thinking.