Creature of the Shade

the mole who dug to australia

While in Portland last week, I made a point of meeting a certain mole, whose remarkable blog I continued to read even when my own voice had gone silent.  I return to him for his perspectives on his Buddhist practice, especially his ability (and willingness) to write lucidly from states of confusion and despair.  We also have some things in common, notably literary educations that ground our world-views but don't quite explain our careers.   Now and then he treats us to a humorous drawing, or more often, a poem. 

(Poetry, like fiction, is something I'm trained to critique but can't begin to produce.  The mole produces some gems.)

Tonight I find he has aimed a poem at me.  It condenses and dignifies several threads of our conversation, including my compulsive botanizing, my philosophical obsessions, and my current adventure in Australia.  It hits all sorts of targets, but I especially love moments when the 'he' could be either of us.  Like this one: 

He looks for a place so empty
That it can hold the baroque without cloying.

  Thank you!

what the storage unit said

I'm back in San Francisco for a wee bit to visit possessions that have been sitting in storage here during my year in Vancouver.  Here are not just 20 boxes of books, but also life's archives.  Now that I'm moving to Sydney, anything I keep must be worth shipping across the Pacific. 

O to have settled in the classic large house, where things could accumulate in attics with no need for these annual cullings.  My storage unit asks harder questions than any mountaintop guru.  "What matters?" the unit asks, frowning as I cower in the flourescent corridor.  "Should you keep the three inch stack of grieving letters and clippings, surrounding the 1985 death of a student of yours in a climbing accident?"  "Should you keep yearbooks full of hopeful commentaries that can only intensify your regrets when you reread them now in middle age?"  "Should you keep the complete letters to you of your late great aunt, a remarkable woman who was an army nurse during WW2?"  Some may be able to answer these questions, but before I can hurl the item decisively, I hear the followup:  Why or why not?  Discuss.  Each of these questions deserves a long essay, covering (a) the history of the item in question, in its personal, political and social dimensions, (b) ethical precedents on the question, and (c) just enough sensually rich narrative about the memories evoked by the item, both to ground or enliven the essay and to overwhelm any clear thinking that might arise from (a) and (b). 

Or perhaps each question is a koan.  Where neither logic nor emotion can decide fully that something deserves its weight, some sort of magical insight is required.  My 1991 acceptance letter from Shakespeare Quarterly, announcing my first and last publication from my scholarly days.  Love letters and poems from a great love 14 years ago -- they might still teach me something, no?  A fine copy of Marlowe's complete plays, a gift from the cast of a play I directed 20 years back -- with my theatre days so far gone, will I ever read a Marlowe play again? 

This storage outfit has locked dumpsters.  I can lift the lid enough to slide things into them, but there's no getting them back out.  In a few cases, I managed to walk to the dumpster with a freighted item and slide it in.  Sometimes as I did this the item seemed to wiggle in resistance, as though trying to turn soft pleadinh eyes to meet mine.  No question, if the dumpster had been open, a few would have crawled back out and snuggled again into my packing, like cute but hopelessly mildewed teddy bears.

Still, I will ship many of these things to Sydney, but some part of me would be relieved if they never arrived. 

Save twice as many dolphins!

So says today's fundraising appeal from the Ocean Conservancy.  Actually the full text is:  "Save twice as many dolphins!  Free decal enclosed!" 

I am not opening this envelope.  I already have enough material.  Not to mention enough decals, personalized mailing labels, and coupons I can redeem for collapsible totebags and coffee mugs.

It's the "save twice" that's getting me. 

Saving dolphins I get.  As in save the whales, save the redwoods.  To save in the sense of to protect.  It's a clever use of the word, because the imperative "save!" usually means save our money; it's not about protecting something out there in the world, but hoarding something as ours. 

Can we really protect something without feeling like we own it? 

Campaigns about air pollution are settling on "spare the air."  I doubt "spare" was given much thought beyond the cute internal rhyme.  But spare is the right verb; it captures the taoist-environmentalist ideal, to do something by not doing anything, or by doing less.  The slogan reminds people they have the power to spare, which suggests, in a nice nonthreatening way, how violent and destructive our lives are.

We can't quantify what we've spared.  I do my part to spare the air but I also move through life unconsciously sparing: ants, weeds, morale, blog readership, microbes.

Now I'm invited to save twice as many dolphins.  Not spare them.  Save them, like money.  But if I save twice as many dolphins, how will I know they're still mine?  Will I get an account statement?   Can I trade them for redwoods later?

Caution: long lowercase run-on ahead ... watch for falling jokes ...

and i signed on just thinking well yes i'd check the hit-meter (fine, thanks) and the comments (62) but really i was here to follow up on pica's post re an antioch review essay by daniel harris, who is an old friend of mine from back when he rather than i was a single guy loitering about the castro and...

Comma-Free Sentence (Another of Life's Challenges Dispatched)

(In response to a call from elck, already taken up by several of my betters.) 

Contemplating writing a sentence with no commas and inevitably wondering whether he can use parentheses (not just to set aside any old subordinate clause but also to cheat because nobody notices a missing comma after a right paren) he succumbs in the instant of writing the stem verb to a sharp pang of deep tedium (surely the worst possible moment for same) and after contemplating using an unabstractable verb such as to disembowl or to f*ck or to wrench he realizes that (grammar being a little death) he can satisfy his violent desire by wrenching the object from a transitive verb and therefore resolves foreverafter to put.