Motel of Life
May 20, 2008

I am sitting in the kitchen, in the dark.

I feel like I am in a motel.

The refrigerator rumbles like a groggy, forgotten god.

The clock ticks like a memory of a debt owed.

The table shakes as I type these words.

Maybe this is a motel: The motel of life, where every room is a rental, every day borrowed, everything feels foreign.

The darkness is not complete. Besides the light from the computer screen I have a clip-on light pointing at these hands, pointing at the plastic computer keys making their frantic kissing noises as I type onto them.

This is a table at which my family and I played games. Card games like Uno and war; board games like Scrabble, Life, and Monopoly.

As such the memories of experiences at this table are not all pleasing. Games played at this table often lurched off into yelling, fighting, bitching, cheating, and -- occasionally -- a final act of slamming the fucking games into the drawer and vowing never to play them -- or anything else -- ever again.

On the other hand something I learned about myself is that the past is no different from the present. I project into both, selectively remembering, selectively nominating one trauma after another to various positions of my psychological cabinet only to find each of them neutralized with a single sentence, a single spoken word.

It's strange the things you remember. I also remember my sister and me giggling ourselves sick at this table, sometimes with my mother. I remember with pride my great 7th grade Scrabble triumph: the word QUIZ on a triple word. I could not imagine a single word being worth 66 points, but I did it. I did it!

I do not sit at this table as much as I imagined I would when I brought it up here from Florida, but I like to think the time here is well spent. I do not play games here. I write, eat, and read. I feel the breezes blow through the window, and I listen for the sounds of the neighbor's wind chimes.

It is raining. Rain drops hitting the window sill sound like unused punctuation marks.

A couple of months ago I found a stack of blank papers in the lobby of this building. Someone had left the paper for trash or recycling. It was notebook filler paper, Mead brand -- about 300 pages of the stuff.

Remembering a time in my life when free paper was nothing short of gold I decided to seize the blank pages and fill every one of them with something. That something turned out to be mostly words, and it was at this table that I began the desultory job of finding words to possess the pages.

My self-appointed habit of writing about my fascinating existences could be dubbed a fetish for its unhealthy absurdity. Some days my hand can not write fast enough to get even a fraction of the words in my head onto the page, other days the hand just putters along, forcing crap out for the sake of the crap, and solely for the sake of the crap.

Nevertheless I love filling a page, lifting it, and placing it across the table onto a separate pile. The other pile is for the weathered pages, the pages whose constitution is riddled with wordly slashes and daggers. I've written through one complete pen. At the head of the table sits a large NEW YORK NEW YORK coffee mug, a mugh which holds the emptied hulk of that pen. The coffee mug serves as a paperweight and as a receptacle for what I imagine will be 5 or 6 pens needed to fill all these pages.

The act of writing, of documenting one's days, is theater. It is a solitary theater whose acts are played out in retrospect, in the hum of silence while your lovers read the poetry you wrote for them, in the quiet light of a computer screen at which someone far away reads the things you had to say to them, in the traveling of a letter from one post box to the other.

A friend sent me a copy of House of Leaves, by Mark Danielewski. Talk about theater. I had described Avital Ronell's "The Telephone," explaining how that book (sitting on my shelves since the early 1990s) demonstrated what I imagined the written word could be. Traditional novel formats, I somewhat stupidly announced in defense of The Telephone, made the words prisoner to the page. The strictures of the document served to interrupt and upstage the shape of thought, which I think can be expressed topographically as well as mentally.

I was not given House of Leaves just because of this conversation.

No, my friend was inspired to send this book later, after I shared the story of a strange incident at Calvary Cemetery.

A couple of weeks ago, while standing inside the grounds, I got an e-mail (on my cell phone) from someone who wanted to know where in Calvary an attached picture was taken.

It is not altogether unusual for me to receive such inquiries, though I do not get as many of them lately -- and I have never received one while actually there at the yard.

I could barely see the picture. I nearly decided to give up trying to tell where the picture was taken. The picture was very small on my Treo's screen, the sun shining too bright for me to see it clearly, but I wanted to respond quickly to the e-mail if only to let the person know I was at the cemetery right at that moment, and to ask if she had more information for me to work with.

I responded to the e-mail, saying I thought the photo showed Section 48, but that I would look more closely later. I idled around a bit, then found some shade, which made it easier to see the screen. Here is her picture:

It did indeed appear to be at or near Section 48. In fact I looked at the picture, then looked around to find that I was standing about 30 feet from the spot where this picture had been taken. The picture shows Section 53 at a point where it directly abuts Section 48.

I reported back with that information, thinking that might be the end of the correspondence. I took a photo from what I guessed was the same spot where the e-mailed picture was taken, discovering later that my photo (taken almost exactly a year later) was a virtual copy of hers:

The correspondence continued.

Her brother died before she was born. The spot where I stood (the same spot her picture was taken) was about 20 feet from the burial site of that child.

She sent me the boy's exact burial location, and I quickly found the grave. I took pictures of it, intending to share one or more of them with my correspondent.

For her entire life her family had prayed to this boy, who died at 1 year of age. They didn't pray for him. They prayed to him. He was their angel.

With Mother's Day coming up that weekend this woman had arranged to have flowers placed at the grave site on Saturday. It was her (and the boy's) mother who wanted this done. No one in her family lived close enough to New York to come visit the grave or to see the flowers, she said, but if I could get pictures…

There is a lot about this scenario which did not make sense to me. How could she not know where the picture she sent me was taken when she had the exact burial location of the child? Also, her e-mails came from her place of work, and based on her e-mail boilerplate lines she did not appear to be all that far from New York.

I asked no questions, though. Why would I?

There are things she does not know about the correspondence -- things she does not know I know. In particular: Despite her accurate information about the burial location she did not seem to know the name of the cemetery.

Most people in her position find me by typing something like "calvary cemetery queens" into a search engine. I discovered that she found me by looking for something like "cemetery where the godfather was filmed."

The funeral scene from The Godfather was, in fact, filmed at Calvary. Our paths might never have crossed without that piece of trivia.

On the following Saturday I made the promised trip to the cemetery. I was a little skeptical that this random arrangement among strangers would actually come through according to plan. Why, I asked myself, would they arrange for flowers to be placed someplace where their best chance to see them was through an unusual scheme such as this?

None of my questions mattered when I got to the site and found a radiant collection of flowers. Someone had done their job well. I took several pictures for all who might want them. I hurried home, thinking the pictures might evaporate or somehow go missing. I e-mailed them as soon as I got home.

I told this story to a friend, who remarked that the child's last name was the same as that of the author of House of Leaves, an experimental novel that seemed to fit my vision of books that comprise more than just words on the papers.

To be sure this book (which arrived at my 181 the following week) is a strange, swirling carnival of type. An adventure. It looks entertaining, though I am inherently skeptical of anything that gained even a particle of its reputation through the Internet, as may be the case here (according to comments on the inside cover).

I am, in fact, skeptical of any creative work that originated or has roots on the Internet.

At any rate, upon receipt of House of Leaves (or as I call it: "Louse of Heaves") I promptly took an apple from the refrigerator, washed it, and placed it (still wet) on the book's cover. This arbitrary ritual was meant to add yet another dimension of physicality to the volume, in the way the pile of papers I found downstairs are now characterized by their encounters with me and my thrashing writing utensils.

It remains to be seen how much farther the connection goes from that infant's grave to wherever this 700 page extravaganza might send me. I have a mountain of books to get through. Poetry of John Logan, Mark Strand, and Elizabeth Bishop; a short fable by José Saramago, given to me by a chef who named a dish after that author; a massive biography (which I'll probably never finish) of Ed Dorn; "The hour of Our Death," by Philippe Ariès.

And, now, the House of Leaves. In conversation I refer to it as "Louse of Heaves," suggesting nothing to do with Mark Danielewski but perhaps evoking the title of a high school literary magazine. Lousy with heaves, lousy with mental heaving, lousy with … ah whatever. Back to my stack of blank pages.

Library of the Living
March 10, 2008

A few weeks ago, for a couple of days, I felt like nothing. That could be called an improvement over other days on which I feel like less than that.

If someone mentions a future event I have to sooth the tiny panic lurking in my guts -- panic at the possibility that I might not live to see it or any future event. I have no specific reason to think that my immediate future is in peril. Apparent facts are not relevant. The platitudes of daily life are erased, leaving nothing to support the flimsy obliviousness to life's futile march. These mornings the strength to craft a simple thought is like doing push ups on two broken arms. The weight even angers me. If you tell me I need to cheer up then you do not what you are talking about.

My life would be incoherent without these episodes. Depression and the singular physical sensations it produces (pain, numbness, a feeling that something is genuinely falling apart) make more sense to me than life's fatuous illusions. I would argue that this capacity for consummate discomfort with the shell of life allows for a more realistic view of the world.

The panic takes many forms. During this bout I opened a book of Li Po poetry. A sentence in the introduction describing the Tang dynasty as "a most brilliant era of culture and refinement, unsurpassed in all the annals of the middle kingdom" did not uplift or inspire. It humiliated me as an example of how much knowledge I will never possess or even comprehend. Time has no future, only the wasted past. The sound of laughter fills the air, but the laughter is at me, and the laughter comes from everything. Cars drive past outside, like patient breaths, self-satisfied and eternally remote. The sound of running water cackles, heaping disdain on me as it passes down the drain. Every drop of water is a century. The sound is cruel, I feel it should stop, but it pressures and destroys my ability to think.

I've been writing a poem about a place in which the evolution of human knowledge marches toward nonexistence. What passes for knowledge is front-loaded into the young while the elders have nothing and say little. Tiered levels of communication based on age endure out of the earthly excuse that wisdom is shared among peers.

At present I call this poem "The Library of the Living." The library is a Borges-ian structure housing the books and writings of every living human. One could never find the beginning or the end of the place, but as with the specter of nonexistence one would never so much as contemplate it.

At the Library of the Living
the authors sat at tables
near their books. 

This structure housed 
no published works,
no books by the dead, 
no works stinking of
immortality.

The young had filled more pages then they had read.
The shelves of the elders were nearly empty.

Maintaining the earthly lie of wisdom
a few elders had slim notebooks
of lightly littered pages, 
a few sheets in a drawer.

As the supreme elder I had nothing.
No stories, no poetry, 
no waste of the written word.
My pages had 
evaporated into the silent present.

As I aged I made fewer spoken utterances,
my last spoken words an obscure tomb, 
untranslatable glyphs of breath
decrying the coercive relationship among 
words written, spoken, and unknown.

Through translation earnest and fearful,
my words were passed among the others:

	Thought
	is made trite the 
	moment it is uttered.
	No words are immune to banality.
	All words signal
	a disdain for the shell of life.

By my decree:

	To live is to fail

the ancients were dismissed.



But the dead responded with fire.

	Fire. 
		Fire. 

Lianas of angry fire 
raced through the stacks, 
mad snakes of lightning
snapping up books like 
rain washes chalk from a sidewalk
leaping from room to room 
wrapping shelves of books,
incinerating them.

Some tried to escape but 
most looked to me
as I welcomed the flames.

Too wise for panic but firmly terrified 
they listened and reported to those who fled:

	This is how the story is told.

The young put it crudely, but heroically:

	If the building burns then so do we.


The Library of the Living vanished
so the dead could survive.

 

I do not know if this poem is going anywhere. I lack depth of knowledge in Lacanian linguistic theory and Taoism, the magic combination of specialties that might give me more guidance. I don't know why I make myself the supreme elder in this poem, except that I had a dream a few weeks ago which evoked a similar setting.

I read William Styron's "Darkness Visible" a few years ago after a friend described it as the seminal book of our time on the subject of depression. It may seem strange but I found that book irritating to read. I don't blame the author, who I suspect would understand my reaction. The overlay of story-telling seemed pretentious, and when I read it those years ago I felt the author used blame, anecdotes, and drugs as salves to obscure his own free will.

My clearest memory of this book has little to do with its content. In August, 2005, I woke up in a cemetery with "Darkness Visible" lying on the ground in front of me.

The sun, rising over on an already 90-degree morning, burned my eyes. I had not been asleep there for more than a few minutes but I had been up all night, passing 32 hours without sleep. When the sun started coming up I drank half a bottle of cheap wine left open overnight.

As Hemingway might have said: The wine was rancid. I drank all of it. Then I went outside.

That is a long and torrid story, though, as the many pages of text to follow would have proven had I not just erased them.

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March 08, 2008

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Oleander
February 26, 2008

Oleander For 25 years my father lived on a street named Oleander.

I spent some summers (mostly uncomfortable) in his house of cigarette smoke and loud talk radio.

I always left the place teary-eyed and coughing. The walk from the house to the car offered a brief release from the smoke, but that ended when we entered the car. Windows shut, the cigarette smoke rapidly filled that smaller space. The smoke snaked over the dashboard toward me. It slithered over my eyes, coating the left one (then the right) like rancid eye drops. Closing my eyes cooled them for a moment but only seemed to make the smoke absorb more thoroughly into my eyes. I inhaled it, too, but never seemed to feel the smoke in my system until the headache arrived.

My father left us in September, 2005, leaving me mostly responsible for the property on Oleander. A week of deep cleaning barely created the illusion that the cigarette stink was gone from his apartment.

Regarding the building on Oleander he had, over the years, sent me letters – bulletins – describing work and activities associated with the property. I never knew what he was talking about. New shingles. Evicted tenants. Landscaping. Garage door?

Those letters passed me by, the words swirling like cigarette smoke on the type-written pages.

For as long as I have known the word I assumed oleander was some pleasant flowery thing. Why would a city name a street Oleander if not for its innocuous pleasantry, like Maple and Elm?

The oleander plant is beautiful, it turns out. It is also insanely poisonous:

"Every part of the plant is dangerously poisonous, and death has occured from using its wood for skewers in cooking meat."

The word "Oleander" is virtually synonymous in my mind with my father. To me it was practically his middle name. I never knew the full name of the street – Oleander Drive? Avenue? The letters I sent him never included that designation, nor did the return address on his letters. By addressing letters simply to "Oleander" I felt I was letting it go with a lift, or a knowing flourish.

The street itself confused me. I would drive to my father's house, looking for Oleander, thinking that once I found the street I would have no more turns to make. Then I would encounter Oleander's off-balance 4-way intersection that forced me to turn the wrong way. I never remembered that turn in the road until I got there.

Researching the word "oleander" in botanical resources feels creepy. It is almost like I'm digging up new information about him. He, too, probably would have defined "oleander" as some kind of frilly plant.

The technical name of the plant Nerium oleander reads like his forgotten middle name. Nerium? Some people called him Tom but no one called him Nerium.

Months after he died I typed his name into the Internet, looking for the obituary my cousin and I wrote for his birth town newspaper. I did not find it, but I had no reason to presume it would have washed up on the Internet. Instead of the obit I found a bullet-point paragraph he sent to the alumni newsletter of the military academy he attended in east Tennessee. It skips many things (of course), but it also reveals things about him I never knew:

"Served 23 years U.S. Army retired 1077 as CW3, MI. US Army Security Agency, Chitose, Japan 56-59, Army Attaché Office, Vientiane, Laos 59-60, Army Attaché Office, Brussels, Belgium 61-64, Defense Attaché Office, Warsaw, Poland 65-67, DAO, Accra, Ghana 68-70. Cross trained as investigator 1970 and assigned Washington, DC. Joint Army Navy Air Force Attaché Office, Vientiane, Laos 73-75. Defense Investigative Service Field Office, Tampa, FL 75-77, retired. Hired as civilian special agent July 78 with service in Tampa, Valdosta, GA and Daytona Beach. Numerous temporary assignments such as Miami, Key West, Cape Canaveral, Chicago, San Diego, Pasadena and Las Vegas. Married 62 at Brussels, Belgium. Two children, Diane now 35 and a free lance medical transcriptionist in South Florida and son Mark, 30, a webmaster for Time Warner in New York City -- anybody@sorabji.com, recently featured on ABC News. I retired from civil service in 92 and pass time traveling and attending to four rental properties in Daytona area. Would love to hear from former cadets CHMA."

I do not remember anything about the "numerous temporary assignments" or the cities to which these jobs sent him. He once mentioned Las Vegas in passing when I spent a week there in 1995, but I did not have the impression he spent significant time there. I know we stopped in Las Vegas on our cross-country Winnebago trip in 1973, but we just passed through.

"CW3, MI," means Chief Warrant Officer 3, Military Intelligence. He was in cryptology, or "crypto" as he called it. He long claimed to have intercepted and decoded coded communiques from the communists while stationed on an Army ship near Chitose, Japan, in the 1950s. I do not know how true or how significant that story is. The 2-1/2 years since he died have helped confirm my lifelong suspicion that he tended to exaggerate.

I remember dad talking about catching up with fellow alumni from his military academy and even his grade school. I didn't think much of it until I realized that he did not really know anybody from those days, and that he hoped to rekindle friendships with people he had not seen since he was 10.

Lifework
February 22, 2008

I knew an artist who groused that his life's work could fit neatly onto a single compact disc.

"My life's work," he said with a grim, cheesy smile, "fits onto one CD. One piece of plastic." I later imagined him flicking that shiny CD into his kitchen sink with the dirty dishes.

He had actually described a condensed version of his project. The total of his "life's work" would fill hundreds of CDs, and my understanding is that his legacy today comprises hundreds of cassette tapes sitting in the room he called his "hubble."

His "hubble" was a converted closet in which he created the project that occupied much of his life for nearly 15 years. He showed me this room the first time I met him, and I remembered that space a year later when he made the "life's work" comment.

At the time it impressed me that he produced his lifework entirely in one room, in one place. I was a huge fan of this artist and maybe a little excited to see where the mad man worked. At the time I equated his use of one room (and one room only) with a singularity of purpose that put his work first with little regard for environmental niceties.

My present work space is a corner of my living room. I sit on an old, falling-apart office chair that tilts drastically to the right if I sit a certain way. Yesterday I pulled a lever under the seat, raising the chair 4 of 5 inches and providing a clearer view out the window. A Posture-Pedic pillow meant for human heads at sleep instead cushions my ass at work.

Today I work on this. These words are my day's work. The works of your days become, of course, the work of your life, and most of my work is done at this table, on this spot.

I report to work by 10am each day. The commute from my bedroom to here, usually uneventful, includes a detour to the kitchen. If I wear anything before noon it is a solid colored t-shirt and a torn up pair of pants with holes in the crotch and at both ankles. I am 40 Goddamn years old and I dress like a 22-year-old hipster barfly. I write poetry into a book, a form of masturbation that produces a more permanent discharge. Today's masterpiece:

woman inside my 
bible radio, 
voice crackling like a
frozen river,
tells of 
suicide jesus, 
suicide satan. 

"destroy me.
destroy me!"

daddy was charismatic, 
loved the women. 
possessed of smoothness. 
possessed of alcohol. 

Someone once referred to a set of my photos as my "work."

"I see your work up there," he said.

It seemed strange to hear my photos (on display at a restaurant) described as my "work." It seems strange to think of anything I will produce anywhere in my life as "my work." I have done plenty of "work" but to call it "my work" sounds inappropriate.

I had several window offices in Manhattan but none compare to the one I have now. It is not the 8-window corner office spectacular I had in midtown, nor is it the floor-to-ceiling view of Central Park I had at the 9 West 57th Street building. This view is better than those, and better than any corporate window office I can remember occupying.

The view of Central Park was like a picture from a jigsaw puzzle or a post card. The view of Radio City Music Hall, too, was one for the tourists. Those views did nothing but present themselves, and they bored me. Most beauty bores me.

A beauty-related conversation I had with someone at the Central Park window has stayed with me. I was in my early 20s when my boss (a woman in her 40s) told me "You deserve the best, most beautiful women in the world."

At the time I took the comment in the spirit of flattery with which she intended, but today I want to find that woman and tell her that beautiful is boring, and that beautiful is usually a pain in the ass.

Polecat
February 20, 2008

I should be a farmer, because I love the smell of polecat.

Better known as skunk, this "American musteline mammal" is said to eject an "intensely malodorous fluid when startled."

To me the smell of polecat is anything but malodorous. I find it bitter but rich. To me skunk is a savory aroma even as it gently turns my stomach toward vomit. It is of the earth, thickly organic, and to me it smells like life itself.

From a young age I remember the smell of polecat. I encountered the scent on many car trips outside of Tampa or through central Florida. One time my mother and I stopped at a roadside fruit stand on Highway 27 near Miami. Like many such vendors found along Florida's highways this place sold honeydew, strawberries, watermelon, and other such stuffs grown on nearby farms.

We stepped out of the car and could not help but notice the powerful smell overwhelming the place. The smell was so rich and fragrant to me that I actually thought it was the smell of the honeydew or the strawberries.

"What's the smell?" I asked, breathing deep. The vendor, smiling nervously, said "polecat!" Having never heard that word I thought polecat was some kind of sugar cane or abundantly sweet thing grown with honeydew and watermelon.

Filling my lungs with the earthy air I said "That's really nice."

I did not understand why but the vendor and my mother both looked at me with crinkled brows, quickly changing the subject to strawberries.

Later in the day I learned that polecat was skunk. I was told that most "normal people" would describe the stench as foul, putrid, acrid, and other such incisive obloquy.

I silently, happily disagreed.

Most recently I encountered Eau de Skunk en route to New York from Boston. The aroma, so foul to everyone else in the car, woke me from a light sleep. Conversation stopped and the car fell silent as the smell of polecat filled the air. The sudden silence of conversation revealed to me the sounds of the vehicle in motion: wheels thrashing, wind urgently pouring through the narrow opening of the sun roof.

My voice stepped into that silence with "Skunk! Man, I love that smell." I breathed deep to prove my love for the scent the others found repulsive. Glances of uncertainty, light chuckles of disbelief passed through the car, inviting me to elaborate.

"I love the smell of cow shit, too. And horse shit, when it's a well fed, healthy horse. That stuff even looks amazing."

I wanted to tell the story of the night a friend and I, 18 years old, drove to Elfers, Florida; a town of mystery and insularity that captured our young imaginations. I could not get to that story before someone changed the subject -- to what I do not remember. Strawberries?

A year or so later I spotted a giant mass of shit at Calvary. Far too big for dog shit, I wondered aloud what earthly beast could have dropped such a mammoth lode, and why would such a creature have passed through Calvary. I briefly imagined clydesdales or other ceremonial horses that might be part of a funeral procession, quickly dismissing such an unlikely scenario.

Then, as now, I wished I knew more about shit. Anthropologists, I would think, could identify the source of most dung laid before them. This turd at Calvary, shiny and dark (almost black), had been artfully deposited with a sphincterial twist. A Hershey's Kiss shaped flourish exactly in the center reminded me of how a bartender might draw a shamrock in the head of a pint of Guinness.

I would probably feel differently about skunk juice if I was attacked and soaked in the stuff. Skunkblast in one's face sounds like no fun at all, but the smell of skunk from a safe distance ranks high on my list of earthly delights.

All the Way
February 19, 2008

The food service industry long ago co-opted the phrase "all the way" to mean "everything on it," though I am not aware of any dictionary that defines the phrase in that way. "All the way" has a meaning similar to "supersize," another fast food term now used to describe things that have nothing to do with food.

In food service "all the way" usually means "everything on it," a potentially ghastly request should a malcontented chef take the order literally. "Everything?" asks the chef. "No problem!" he says, burying the burger under heaps of every spice on the rack, unsmashed bullion cubes, and (just for the hell of it) a few unpopped popcorn kernels. "Hope you like olive oil on your burger!" he warns as he pours Berio Extra Virgin with one hand and sprinkles Comet Disinfectant Cleanser with the other.

Why does this phrase interest me? Because "ALL THE WAY" is found on one of my all-time favorite receipts, the DININGROOM HOT FOOD PRINTER check of June 3, 1999.

The receipt is hoarse. The blood red letters record a seemingly contradictory order: MEDIUM ALL THE WAY.

In the history of the English language this may be the first occurrence of the phrase "HOT FOOD PRINTER," a fantastical contraption that literally prints food. I seem to remember seeing the phrase on this receipt and using it as a conversation piece: I had recently read about devices that would some day function in ways analogous to printers. Instead of using ink cartridges these devices would use cartridges filled with other types of organic matter, making it possible to zap into existence simple objects like silverware or jewelry, or even food.

"CHK 181" echoes a magic number in my life: among other happy coincidences "181" corresponds to my preferred mailing address for the last 17 years (PO Box 181, NYC 10185).

"DININGROOM" fits the spirit of the dinning room typo common around my neighborhood.

My inspiration to amass and publicly share my receipts came in 1990, at a diner on Canal Street. I ordered a bowl of soup and a Sprite.

The receipt, carefully hand-written by the waitress, alleged I had ordered

1 GLASS SPITE
1 BOWL SOUP

Spite! Had I known what I was drinking I would have asked for a bowl of hate to go with my spite.

1990 was well before the web became a public outlet, and even before I ventured into or even knew about online services. Public sharing of receipts, however, was nothing new. Found objects (receipts, shopping lists, notes to self) had been a staple of poetry 'zines and literary publications for generations. My idea was to save these scraps of story-telling detritus in overwhelming quantities, a project whose spirit coincidentally suited the infinite copy space of the web. As my life's experiences accumulated I imagined turning to this mass of paperwork and mining it for memories or story ideas. I also imagined that the quantity itself, this massive list of lists, would create something new.

Wonder
February 18, 2008

Friday it took several minutes of scrolling through the word swarm to find a word of any meaning to me. Today numerous words compete for my interest. I can't decide among minaret, godspeed, wonder, and interdigitate. Hmm.

I'll go with "wonder" because, coincidentally, I have lately begun to question the meaning of that word as used virtually everywhere.

"Wonder" appears in all levels of discourse, and is used to raise doubts and ask questions. "I wonder what that means," a question asked in the form of a statement, is a common usage matched by the first half of the definition "to be curious or in doubt about." The latter half of that definition is seen in "I wonder if she really meant that."

I recently started noticing these usages of "wonder," knowing of course that all modern dictionaries include definitions of "curiosity," "wanting to know," and the like.

Webster's 1828 English Dictionary does not include such directly interrogative meanings for "wonder," rather describing it as an emotional reaction to mysteries of grandeur defying human comprehension.

Modern definitions of "wonder" granularize these earlier, broader definitions, turning it into an introspective concept of self-interest.

I will not get to the bottom of this today, but my instincts suggest that "I wonder" is weak phraseology. Using "I wonder" to ask a simple question takes a concept of unfathomable mystery and co-opts it in a manner that attempts to elevate the intellectual status of the questioner.

"Wonder" refers to the incomprehensible. Invoking the incomprehensible to pose a simple question subtly attempts to lead the question toward no possible answer; implying disdain or fear of the answer; or even disdain of the person being asked the question.

I wonder what it all means.

Lugubrious
February 15, 2008

In my sophomore year of high school I impressed fellow members of my Latin class with my knowledge of the English word derived from the Latin lugubris.

None present but I knew the English word lugubrious, and none but I knew that it meant "mournful" or "sad."

I learned the word "lugubrious" at Sewanee Summer Music Center in Sewanee, Tennessee. The orchestra was preparing Rimsky-Korsakoff's "Russian Easter Overture," and I played the bells part. I don't recall if I asked to play that part or if it was assigned, but pianists did not play in the orchestra that often so it was somewhat memorable for me on that count. I attended a few rehearsals and played the bells in the final performance of the festival, an experience I recall when I hear that overture on the radio.

During one rehearsal the conductor explained an indication in the score. I don't have the score at hand, but it read something like "lugubrio" or "lugubria." Rimsky-Korsakoff, the conductor explained, wanted the passage played "lugubriously."

The conductor grinned a bit as he described lugubriousness. He used words like "maudlin" and "bathos," summoning chuckles from the orchestra of high school and college age musicians. He moved his hands, cupped, fingers upward, in a circular movement as he described "lugubriousness." He mock wept, holding his fists to his chest, imitating the over-the-top style of emotional catastrophe seen in silent films and in most of my relationships with women.

I remembered this incident in Latin class one day when the teacher asked if anyone knew what English word derived from lugubris, a word appearing on a Latin vocabulary list for the week.

I raised my hand and meekly said "lugubrious," prompting mutterings of "what the ... " from the other students who had evidently never heard this word. Some of them looked my way with wrinkled brows and looks of bewilderment, asking aloud where the hell that came from.

Their surprise had as much to do with the relative obscurity of the word as with my virtual silence in that class up to that point. I never raised my hand or spoke up in that room, and it must have seemed strange to the others that I broke my silence with such a learned sounding word.

I recently encountered the word in an environment far different from a high school Latin classroom or an orchestra rehearsal.

I was on 43^rd Street in Sunnyside, Queens, walking toward Calvary Cemetery.

43^rd Street passes under the Long Island Expressway, merging with Laurel Hill Boulevard. The sidewalk ends, and to get to Laurel Hill by foot you walk over a circular pedestrian overpass.

The path to that pedestrian overpass, by the way, offers a pretty cool view to the Empire State Building, rising up like a rocket from Calvary's skyline of the dead.

At the center point of the overpass I spotted a toppled wooden chair. On the floor nearby I saw some burned candles and a couple of framed prints of surrealist paintings. One of the prints was of Dalí's The Lugubrious Game, the other Magritte's The False Mirror.

I recognized the Dalí as a Dalí, but would not know its name without help from a friend with whom I shared this story and these pictures.

Though not quite bizarre I did think the scene strange. Someone had set up a chair overlooking Calvary Cemetery with candles and surrealist paintings placed nearby. The chair, on its back when I found it, was a decent looking piece of furniture (fully intact), and not the sort of thing you'd necessarily expect to find dumped off the L.I.E.

Tired from walking, I set the chair upright and sat on it for several minutes, looking toward the cemetery and breathing.

I noticed activity underneath the overpass. I looked down and to the left to see a man hanging laundry on the branches of the leafless trees and bushes. He had a few pairs of shoes set out to dry (it had rained the night before) and a number of aluminum trays containing small amounts of food (and rain water) littered the ground around him.

I did not make much of the situation but I did feel that I might be sitting in the man's chair. The arrangement of the chair and the paintings and the burned out candles was odd, but not so compelling that further interpretation of this place would reveal more than met the eye.

I stood up and walked the remaining length of the overpass, leaving the chair upright, and continuing my walk toward Calvary.

Intracranial Cavity
February 14, 2008

I fell in love with the Intracranial Cavity of Mary last year. When I found her high atop Section 2 at Old Calvary last summer I guessed she had stood there for well over 100 years, her skull cavity collecting earth and her quiet stare not flinching for longer than any of us has lived.

I coined the word "decraniated" to describe her gaping, shattered skull.

On days when white clouds blanketed the sky above I found that the jagged yet softly weather-worn outline of her skullblast blended in with the whiteness above.

I imagine Zechariah Sitchin, five-hundred-thousand years from now, finding these pictures of Mary. Analysing the pointed flap where her left ear might be Sitchin would conclude that Mary was a Vulcan. Images of pointy-eared human/alien crossbreeds, Sitchin would say, have endured across millennia as subconscious evidence that humans long to connect with their space alien ancestors.

The next time I visit Calvary I will plan to leave something for Zechariah Sitchin inside Mary's head. A coin or a trinket might suffice, but I want to leave something from which conspiracies could grow.

Such an object (evidence of some cosmic mystery) would turn this silent statue of Mary into the focal point of a miracle when someone thousands of centuries from now finds these words, finds the statue of which I speak, and reaches in to the decraniated skull of Mary to find something earthly where her brain used to be.