9/4/2017

Channel surfing last night between football and baseball games, and came across a speaker on c-span talking about academics, intellectuals, and progressives as being anti-American.  Academics and intellectuals control the culture, he said, and we must learn our history in order to defeat them.  I sip my coffee and try to grapple with the reality that many of my friends and relatives see me as one of them, and while the notion of being an intellectual is flattering, the claim that I am anti-American unsettles me.  Who are you to accuse me of anything, I mutter at the flat screen. I served. That should be enough, he says, though he has always known that service is never enough.

The speaker went on to speak about our founding fathers, how deeply rooted they were in the Judeo-Christian ethic.  I wonder if he has read Ben Franklin or Thomas Jefferson—the author of that much abused phrase in the Declaration, and Nature’s God. But then I am reminded that much of Jefferson has been removed from the Texas history textbooks and replaced with Mosses.  Jefferson it seems has some quirky things to say about the Bible and religion.  As did Franklin. Never mind Thomas Paine, but everyone knew he was a heretic.

I read an article about the new right and their embrace of Nietzsche and his notion of Übermensch or superman, though they misread him, about their notion of Christendom as opposed to Christianity. These new would-be fascists jettison the teachings of Jesus as a doctrine which empowers the weak to suppress the strong, and instead see Christendom as a unifying political force.  They envision a world where the strong will prevail. 

I take a breath. I am reminded of something Jesus said to Pilot when Pilot was telling Jesus he had the power to crucify him or free him.  Jesus spoke of power in an other worldly sense—Thou couldest have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above. (Tyndale) Pilot orders him crucified, and we are left to decide whether or not we believe the rest of the story. A stone rolls away from the tomb.

I know history well enough to know what fascism looks like, smells like.  I know what happens to the “weak” under fascism, what happens to “the other.” 

Then there is Jules in Pulp Fiction who, though he misquotes Ezekiel, understands in the end it is the duty of the strong to protect the weak, not to enslave them or exploit them.  

I think about these things in the morning after my walk.  I am reminded that my father always hated it, that I thought about those things.  That boy is always thinking, he hissed at me with his pointed finger.  But then I imagine he saw me as anti-American.

Love,

Brady  

9/3/2017

Sunday morning is already gone, slipped out the back when I wasn’t looking. I did walk the river today—and up the monster hill—for the first time in months. My body seems to be recovering slowly, or maybe a momentary reprieve. I stand up from a low chair without using my hands, a symbolic gesture of defiance on my part. I remember an old 1960s Playboy cartoon image of a mouse giving the finger to a raptor as its shadow, talons spread, looms over mouse and the brick wall behind him. I feel that way sometimes.

I sip the bone broth made yesterday.  Then coffee. An interesting combination of taste.

A friend tells me she doesn’t read my “literary” post, so I will try to refrain today.  I watched college football almost all day yesterday, the UT game while I was waiting for the Subaru service department to reprogram my car’s computer so the alternator will charge the battery on short as well as long drives.  They also replaced a dead battery.  UT lost.  The whole day seemed lost. Weekends during football season feel more and more that way for me. It’s as if I were addicted to a drug that no longer supplied the highs I remember but still had its hold on me. I wonder if the highs were real, or was it some illusion shared with people who have lost themselves in the mythology. I think the high was more from watching the girl in the brown coat walking across campus during the fall, the wind blowing her hair. Somehow the image of her dark brown hair merging with the sounds of the band playing at the stadium. The truth though is I am no longer sure she was wearing a brown coat. 

Barbara wore a brown coat when I first meet her, but that was years later.

The remaining two oaks outside my window look as if they are dying and recovering at the same time.  They drink the waters from Harvey’s rain. New shoots with leaves sprout from the thinker limbs while the old branches are bare. Searching for metaphor.

Myra posts about my grandfather on Facebook. There are just some people you don’t get over missing.

A cold front is supposedly coming next week. Barbara tells me she wants us to go to California after my rheumatology appointment on the 15th.  I have obligations, but the whole point of being retired was to be able to go somewhere on a whim.  There are people to see both here and there.  Let’s think about it, she says.  Of course that will depend in part on what my rheumatologist tells me.  Or it may not.

Love,

Brady

9/2/2017

Tiresias is visited by Odysseus in hell—blind Tiresias, seven years a woman, one who can understand birds, who informs Oedipus of his crime.  Oedipus who kills his father and marries his mother, the impressively hot Jocasta, all because he tries to avoid his destiny—which was to kill his father and marry his mother.  The lesson, I have been told more than once, is don’t mess with the gods, as if one could. Destiny gobbles you up either way.

Someone chatters about free will, something given by God so we can chose, though the choice is already known.  I sip my coffee and wonder if the architect knows exactly how many cups, or if his insights are more general in nature. The ritual, the sacrament—part of it being the coffee has grown cold, and the poet goes to the kitchen to pour a fresh cup.

The fat Buddha laughs at me. He’s been sitting on my desk for years—first in my office at the Baptist university and now in my home—collecting dust, laughing at me. Why do you struggle so much, he asks. Destiny, I answer. He laughs a deep belly laugh. Of course it is, he says.

I’ve hit a block, the poet says. Come to the point in my self analysis, in confronting my demons, where going both farther and further would risk hurting someone still breathing, someone who might—he doesn’t seem to worry about the dead so much, though he does find himself talking to them from time to time, making amends when he can.

Tiresias appears in the Cantos. I fumble my way through a stanza or two. All of western literature in a stanza or two.

This morning on our walk, the guy cutting the fields stops his tractor and comes over to talk with us. Haven’t seen you guys in months, he says.  He has been mowing the fields being turned into new subdivisions all over the county, he explains. Explains his supervisor has hinted he is slow in his work. So I showed him the map, he says. These are his exact works—holy shit. It’s a conversational mode I hear over and over, as if it were an old record skipping back on itself.  And I told him, is a repeated refrain. The unhappy, the dissatisfied—and I told him…

 I sip my coffee and toy with the notion of destiny.  The fat Buddha laughs and tells me to just let go.  But even letting go would be part of the knitting. The question remains, what do we ever decide.

Let go, the fat porcelain figure bought in Chinatown, San Francisco whispers.

Love,

Brady 

9/1/2017

I read Joan Didion whenever I get stuck in the goo that seems to clog the brain.  I love reading Didion as she goes through a drawer in her old bedroom and offers clues to a world lost from conscious memory—a bathing suit worn when she was seventeen, a letter of rejection from The Nation, three teacups hand-painted—there is no final solution to the items, she writes.  We are sucked in, however, to these clues, to a world where some kind of hope still clings. Didion offers herself as a sane voice in the midst of a crumbling culture, and we tend to believe her.  Or I do.  But the crumbling world, the vandalized cemetery, the pregnant underage bride at a Las Vegas wedding—her father making jokes with his son-in-law about the “wedding night”—who tells her mother it was everything she hoped it would be, the pretty girl on crystal taking off her clothes in an “amateur-topless” contest with no particular sense of moment, serves as the foil for Didion’s sanity.

It’s a common pose, common because it works.  The world is bat shit crazy, and the author offers a few sentences that seems to make sense of it, as if the world may be crazy but you and I see it for what it is.  As if seeing it for what it is makes us not crazy.

We settle into our coffee, sitting at a table at Mozart’s or Central Market in Austin, Texas, and talk about romantic and existential philosophy, about boot camp in the late 1960s, about the war that never ends, about the last time each of us saw a certain woman who captivated both our hearts. She was so damned smart, smart being beautiful. And we both know that it is the talk that makes it true and beautiful and good. We seek shelter there.

I sip my coffee. It has grown cold. I pour a fresh cup. I take a breath—single breath meditation.

Switch the music from meditative binaural sounds to dance and sweat. You know the moves. I get up and dance, loosen the tight muscles, shake it out… I’ve eaten a quarter watermelon so my stomach jiggles. I sit down and set Didion aside for now. In the coffee shop of memory, I listen to the surrounding conversations, or the tone and rhythm of the voices. No crazy rants about illegals immigrants, just the smooth rhythmic noises of people in concert or accord. The world may be mad, but a good segment of it isn’t.

I’ve been reading a Dwight Gray manuscript lately.  His poems are sane and clear.  Each poem asks you to reconsider your held assumptions. That’s what poems do.

Outside my window, because of the recent Harvey rains, the grass and weeds that make up my yard beg for attention. Something about the need for cut lawns in America.  I load the washer.

It’s Friday. I miss my old job mostly on Fridays. That was the day the department, or some of us, went to the campus cafeteria and ate lunch together. Jonathan who ate skimpy calorie frozen meals for lunch during the week would load up on Fridays, eating at least two whole plates of meats and vegetables then topping it off with a stack of waffles. The dinning room was loud with student conversations, the pitch and rhythm different from ours. Their world was no longer our world, but it was at one time. We didn’t want it back, but it was comforting, at least for me, to hear it, to be surrounded by it, at least for an hour on Friday.

Love

Brady

8/31/2017

Dylan singing the background. She’s got everything she needs. She’s an artist, and she don’t look back. The sun is clearing the horizon, the sky already a light blue with a little purple on the fringe.  We will walk later this morning if it doesn’t get too hot. I am taking Charley’s car to our mechanic in a few minutes. They ran over a truck tire in the highway on the way to the eclipse, had to replace two of their own tires and temporarily tie up a part knocked loose in the undercarriage. It rattles, so I’m taking it in to see if the temporary fix can be made permanent—though nothing is permanent when it comes to cars.

Dylan switches to “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”—and my best friend, my doctor, won’t even say what it is I’ve got—Sweet Melinda, the peasants call her the goddess of gloom…

There was a time when we listened to Dylan in Jim’s old dorm room as if he had something to say, as if we had stumbled onto some reality kept hidden from us all those years growing up with Mickey Mouse and toothpaste commercials. We listened to his voice and felt freed from the cave and its shadows. We saw the sun for the first time. But the world lives in the cave—you know the story.

Something Laura G. told me the Sunday morning we walked the Shoal Creek trail from Seton hospital—it doesn’t matter what we know or believe, we live here in the world. I nodded, having come to that conclusion some years ago. But here is flat, sometimes worse than flat.

Laura was a childhood friend of Melinda’s.  She once helped me paint a duplex between tenants, went to MIT, counted cards, genius—I’ve not known many. I number the people named Laura in my life, but run out of fingers.  Once, in the early 1990s, we had lunch at a café near Harvard yard in Boston, then toured the Ware collection of glass flowers.  A few years ago, Laura and her two daughters took me to the Chihuly glass garden in Seattle.  I’m just now making the glass to glass connection, looking for metaphor.

Dropped off the car. 

Harvey has moved northeast, and the day is hotter.  On the fringes of the hurricane we had a couple of days of steady but light rain and cool.  In Houston, Beaumont, Port Arthur, and the towns surrounding them people are being taken by boat from flooded houses to higher ground. A man calls to say he has lost track of his 88 year old father who was rescued by boat but taken somewhere, and he doesn’t know where.  Thousands misplaced. People drown. In the mix you begin to see the difference between people who measure moments and people they love and those who cling to something else. You can just feel the love, two young women were telling a reporter. I’ve lost everything I’ve worked for, another was saying. Sooner or later, the poet says—so easy for you to say.

He looks up from the rim of his glasses.  I know what it’s like to lose everything, his eyes tell her. And yet nothing important is ever lost when you figure it out.

I understand why old men buy motorcycles, he says, supposedly changing the subject.

Love,

Brady

8/28/2017

Listening to a David Foster Wallace interview, something about how the business model works to keep us all children who are encouraged to feed the id, to act on every impulse, every desire, to keep buying—it’s really a kind of slavery, Wallace says.  Masquerades as freedom. How the business model works well for the economy, but does not serve the person, the country, the world very well.  We know this, or at least some of us know this, but knowing it doesn’t seem to help.

I read the comment section of several interviews—the number of people who feed on ridicule, who taunt anyone who finds Wallace a sympathetic character—these people bother me. I find myself wondering why I have to share the same earth with such people.  Not the best in me. Still, I am weary of them, weary of the simplicity in their smugness. But my reaction becomes just another variation of the game. I despise you, you despise me—we find a certain comfort in that pose, but it’s only a pose, a wall made of egg shell.

Houston is flooded.  So far only five dead.  Only five—which in the scheme of things, but if you are one of the five, know one of the five.  How many people die each day. Some old, some so very young, alone or surrounded with those who love—No one really dies, he tells himself. It’s become a mantra. No one really dies—the various ways of seeing it.  The person who graduated from Killeen High School one evening in 1964 is no more alive than his grandfather who died two years before. Just memory—which is so unreliable that everything is really just a fiction.

So in a sense, we are already dead, the boy who actually ordered and ate a cheeseburger one afternoon during a snow when the Beatles where playing on the drive-in loudspeaker. The girl sits next to him, her leg touching his. He is breaking up with her, because she was seen kissing another boy on a school bus trip, although he doesn’t want to break up with her, doesn’t care that she kissed another boy, only cares that she is sitting next to him at the moment—but it is expected and the moment carries itself, and years later the two compare notes.  Nothing matches.

Then years later the memory morphs into a poem which really isn’t true, though it becomes exactly the way she remembers it. 

But then we have the man who would be president claiming he saw thousands and thousands of people celebrating in the New Jersey streets on 9/11—I saw it on TV, he claims. Other people say they saw them too—as if just wanting it to be true, as if the reality of a thing is irrelevant, as if simply wanting it to be true is enough.  It isn’t true, the poet mutters. Truth matters. Life matters. Even if getting a handle on it is difficult.

Pontificate, pontificate—

I don’t own a TV, Wallace says.  If I owned a TV, I would be watching it all the time.

Love,

Brady