I Am the Work

I was supposed to be working yesterday but my mind would not focus on book blurbs. It wanted to think about Heather’s art projects, it wanted to think about stories I am writing, it wanted to think about boys and girls.

One poem started to flow out, about how a boy with a girl riding on his back becomes a curious creature with two legs walking, two legs dangling and kicking for balance, two arms holding and two arms flying, two heads bumping into each other. It became more erotic as it went along:

Her Weight on My Back (excerpt)

This strange and normal beast

Has four eyes turned inward to regard itself,

Two mouths that speak to itself

—and then press together to breathe into itself

and taste itself—

Two breasts that it caresses and holds

and feels held and caressed,

Four hips that press together

pushing into one

Then I had a think about Laura Ingalls Wilder—maybe because I had blurbed a big box set of her nine Little House books. When my kids were little, their mother brought out her Little House books to read to them, and I was introduced to Laura Ingalls, the character.

Not long after, I made a birthday gift to Corinne out of some books about the Ingalls’ and Wilders’ family histories—illustrated biographies that support some of the events in the stories, heirloom objects, etc.—and framed a photo of Laura and her sisters as though it were a family photo (I worked in a frame shop then). The items came from the museum trust installed on the Wilder family property in Mansfield, Missouri, which sells quite a number of books by and about the Ingalls/Wilder clan.

Laura and her stories and history became part of the family lore then, and I became increasingly interested in her daughter Rose Wilder Lane, who was a front-cover feature writer for some of the notable magazines of the 1930s & 40s. More specifically, I was interested in their relationship, particularly given how worldly and polished Rose became, though she was an only child with close ties to her parents. Many suspect that she heavily edited her mother’s stories, almost to the point of ghostwriting. But she insisted they were her mother’s, and I’m sure, given their relationship, that there was much back-and-forth. (Heather and I sometimes have a similar writing partnership).

Sorry, this is turning into a book!

Skipping more or less to the end: at some point I realized that, despite the fact that I’ve read both women’s work and felt the kinship an author bestows on his or her reader, in real life, who I am and the choices I’ve made in my life might not have sat well with these sturdy farm-bred folk. Corinne identified with Laura to a fair extent, and it was easy to imagine my leaving her would have led my friends Laura and Rose to side with her against me. Silly of course, but at the time those thoughts were born, I was much more vulnerable to that sort of think. Anyway, all of this was bubbling around in my head and came out in a poem about what one would say to one’s author-friends, and if the real-world person would be anything like her page personality. These are my favorite lines:

Wilder (excerpt)

What electrical blood passed between these queens

who finished each other’s sentences?

What small talk made up their lunches

while thousands read the daughter,

and millions read the mother?

Yesterday also happened to be Corinne’s birthday, again. It’s one of those days I wish I didn’t remember anymore but it’s too ingrained. I think when I can finally not push her away as an enemy and simply accept her as another part of the one we all are, I will have truly achieved something.

I blurbed books through lunch to make up for my lapse.  :–)

The two cultural artifacts of the title resonate with my time of fractured living—the still, dry, blanched season when love fractured my soul and I shattered my life.

There is a muted palette of non-colors from this time, when flowers were only branches and children were impossibly fragile, sunlight was only filtered and windows were bare, and the foundations of my life were only coffee cups and old toys. Everything fluxed, meaning was mutable, and bonds were tenuous at best.

This is when I learned that only what we invest in is real, and only to the depth to which we invest in it. It’s been almost 14 years, now.

Thank you, Mark Twain, for that perennial favorite crack. No, I haven’t written here in a while. Heather says it’s because I make such a big deal of everything, and that is probably more than half of the problem, but also, too, the format is not inspiring and I can barely get done what I do do. Okay, that’s lame, but choices must be made and the blog keeps ending up like the redheaded stepchild. Plus, I didn’t think anyone ever read it, so it seemed kinda pointless. But, miraculously, someone signed up for a membership! And so, in honor of you—even if you’ve already realized your mistake and moved on ;-)—I submit something.

Let’s see, now where did that something go…?

This morning I had a memory of an eastern Pennsylvanian valley I visited in the mid-1980s—Lehigh, actually, overlooking the town of Jim Thorpe, formerly and still informally known as Mauch Chunk. At the time it was redolent of eroding, 1950s-style Americana; it has since, according to Wikipedia, benefited from studies done by architect Robert Venturi that sustainable small towns blend historicism with tourism, and it is doing fairly well. There was a big stone church, a row of relatively stately workers’ rowhouses, a very 19th-century style train station, and two gingerbready mansions in the Packer family. Asa Packer, who served a term in the House of Representatives and ran for governor of PA and president of the U.S., and founded the Lehigh Valley Railroad and Lehigh University. There are some good pix on Wikipedia; look up “Mauch Chunk.”

I promise, I’ll make myself more acquainted with the graphic and layout capabilities of this blog so I can submit such things more spontaneously. Right now it’s just too much a pain in the butt to add the bells and whistles.

Here is a note I wrote to myself a few weeks back. I guess I should have put it on “I Am the Work”:

02-01-08: What is our purpose?
Continuity — to live on beyond catastrophic events and mass extinctions. To carry knowledge and experience beyond the limitations of a few generations and build as an entity. To be aware. To experiment. Our intelligence is an adaptation of survival that opens paths to species growth on a geological timescale.

I would apologize for not writing last month, but I don’t think anyone would even hear it.

Well, if anyone is out there, hello, thanks for stopping by. I’ll try to make it more worth your while next time. Love n kisses.

BTW, please feel free to sign up if only to say hi. Your information is nominal and completely private. No one need know who you are, and no salesman will call on you.

Fat pipes and beams of green-gray emit a machine light of industrial clatter in silence smooth but completely dull and wet with breath. Tiles also smooth and clattery with puddles of hard water spattering into rubbery haze when pinky feet slap. Reverb reverb voices and chirps and the crunch of water again and back and again. Solid water in waves of no color splintering fluorescent drops back into paint. All green but the pinky feet. All gray but the red exit and yellowed tubes. All echo but crackling droplets and puddles and streams.

Plastic and green truck. Elbows between pallid knees. Wet into spongy fingers. Gray water reaches and pulls me in like a slipped apostrophe. World one-eighty and one-eighty. Upside up again backwards. Small hands holding hard to gray pipe edging gray water. Holes that cannot hold feet. Calling peep peep into peep peep echoes. Big hands pull small arms out of a square ocean in moments.

Between green and gray is a time when the world came from a factory and big people knew what everything was and what to do with it and swimming was in a box in a room in a building between buildings and cars took you there.

There’s literally millions of people — from civil engineers to energy and environment specialists to sociologists to medical professionals to people who wish they could park their cars and walk in their own towns — who have determined that civil planning for cars over pedestrians degrades a community structure. These links are just a few indicators of cities that are taking non-vehicular traffic and pedestrian-friendly design seriously enough to heavily invest in it:

About ITDP
The Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP) was founded in 1985 to promote environmentally sustainable and socially equitable transportation worldwide. We work with city governments and local advocacy groups to implement projects that reduce poverty, pollution, and oil dependence. http://www.itdp.org/

San Francisco’s Pedestrian Master Plan:
Path to a More Walkable City
As part of the Better Streets Plan, the SFMTA Planning Division is leading the development of a citywide Pedestrian Master Plan (PMP).   The Better Streets Plan (BSP) will rethink how the City designs, builds and maintains the pedestrian environment. The BSP will create a unifying set of objectives, policies and standards governing all elements of the pedestrian environment. The BSP will be based on the understanding that the pedestrian environment is about much more than just transportation - that streets serve a multitude of social, recreational and ecological needs that must be considered when deciding on the most appropriate design. The BSP offers the City the opportunity to integrate all these considerations into a single framework. The BSP will consist of two primary components: the Streetscape Master Plan (SMP) and the Pedestrian Master Plan (PMP). The Plans will be closely coordinated with the ADA Transition Plan for sidewalk accessibility, which will be undertaken by the City’s Dept. of Public Works (DPW).  There will be an extensive outreach process, with many opportunities for citizen input. http://www.sfmta.com/cms/wproj/28717.html

Walkinginfo.org
In communities across the world, there is a growing need and responsibility to provide options that give people the opportunity to walk-to walk more often, to walk to more places, and to feel safe while doing so. The benefits of walking-whether for utilitarian or recreational purposes-can be expressed in terms of improved environmental and personal health, reduced traffic congestion, enhanced quality of life, economic rewards, as well as others. http://www.walkinginfo.org/why/

Turner Fairbank Highway Research Cnter
Approximately 6,500 pedestrians and 900 bicyclists are killed each year as a result of collisions with motor vehicles.

As a group, pedestrians and bicyclists comprise more than 14 percent of all highway fatalities each year. Pedestrians account for as much as 40 to 50 percent of traffic fatalities in some large urban areas. The 1991 General Estimates System (GES) data indicate that 92,000 pedestrians and 67,000 bicyclists were injured in this type of crash.

Many more injuries are not reported to record-keeping authorities. A study by Stutts et al. (1990) showed that fewer than two-thirds of the bicycle-motor vehicle crashes that were serious enough to require emergency room treatment were reported on State motor vehicle crash files. http://www.tfhrc.gov/safety/pedbike/research/srd95163.htm

WALKING 36 TIMES MORE DEADLY THAN DRIVING,
AMERICANS LACK SAFE PLACES TO WALK
Report ranks Tampa most dangerous metro area;
Decrease in Walking linked to Rise in Obesity
(WASHINGTON, DC) Pedestrians in Tampa-St. Petersburg Florida face the highest risk of getting killed by a car, according to a report that ranks the most dangerous large metro areas for walking in the United States. The report, released today by the Surface Transportation Policy Project, says the results show that walking is more dangerous in sprawling communities designed for the automobile. http://www.transact.org/report.asp?id=146

Walkable.org
Walkability is the cornerstone and key to an urban area’s efficient ground transportation. Every trip begins and ends with walking. Walking remains the cheapest form of transport for all people, and the construction of a walkable community provides the most affordable transportation system any community can plan, design, construct and maintain. Walkable communities put urban environments back on a scale for sustainability of resources (both natural and economic) and lead to more social interaction, physical fitness and diminished crime and other social problems. Walkable communities are more liveable communities and lead to whole, happy, healthy lives for the people who live in them. http://www.walkable.org/

The reason christianity and islam were both able to make such huge inroads into dominating the cultures of the world is that it’s much easier to ask large and difficult work of people who believe in an ideal, and it’s much easier to engender belief in a mystical ideal than a practical or ethical one. People can marry their hearts and dedicate their efforts to a religious belief in ways they never could to an earthly ideal of “peace” or “harmonious existence” or even “fairness.”

If you want real power, establish a religion with a seductive message and authentic spiritual details from established practices.

I was blurbing Cormac McCarthy’s book No Country for Old Men and was impressed (not in a good way) with the idea that there really are different breeds of human, and some of them prey on the others. This isn’t completely a new idea, but I had never thought of it in terms of being a separate breed, and one that was in competion with other human breeds for survival. I may have to pursue this theme:

So we now recognize that the ones who feel no responsibility for the damage they do are of a different, predatory breed. They are not only the criminals who pollute children with drugs, they are the capitalists for whom the markets are not people but abstract concepts of consuming. They are the chemical producers who daily risk the thousands who live and work near their factories. They are the manufacturers who build unsafe cars, pollute living rivers, bury toxic slime that will keep killing for centuries in the name of profit and business as usual in the marketplace. They are the ones who should know their payoffs in foreign countries spell the doom of whole villages, but they don’t want to know that, so they don’t. They propagate by building an edifice of permission to be this way.

The question is, will we learn to fight them in time? Will they outlive the ones who do care?

Raphael Gouda

He was six years old the first time he saw his name written. It was a Saturday, they were going to (ballfield) for a preseason game. His uncle brought over pumpernickel, prosciutto, cappicola, a big mortadella in a can painted with blue diamonds, gorgonzola, and a heavy log of cheese in wax paper with a beautiful red, white, and green label that read smokey gouda. From then on, Raphael he told everyone his name was Smokey.

His mother Lucilla was Venetian, a girl with high round cheeks and a round behind, who came to America in 1917 at the age of twelve because most of Europe was at war. Smokey remembered seeing a map of Europe in 1940 and mistaking Vienna for Venice, not merely relocating his mother’s homeland but placing her squarely behind enemy lines. He always imagined her fleeing with a human tide of panicked civilians, her hands over her head in a useless effort to ward off Kaiser Wilhelm’s bombs. No bomb had ever fallen on her, but the war had nonetheless ruined what little fortune her family possessed, so they joined her uncle’s family in Brooklyn. On a Sunday in May of 1925 she was dreaming of being the next Fanny Brice and working at (restaurant on eighth) when a bunch of hungover college boys came in looking for eggs and sausage and strong black coffee. One of them was Emil Gouda, and he serenaded Lucilla with music hall tunes and fell in love with her that very morning. Her family would not have allowed such a union, except that Emil’s people had all been artists as far back as the Dutch (spilt from Flemish) and you don’t come from Venice without appreciating fine art. That and the fact that Emil’s father had done quite well in the import business. Emil himself had never lifted a paintbrush, but it was in his blood.

******

Smokey is a minor league catcher in ~1951, moved up to the majors for one season, until a personal scandal or disaster involving a dead lover, and he took to drinking. On and off the team.

His life changes one night on a bender or resisting one. Sees a cat, talks to it. Cat talks back, spreads gargoyle wings, and flies away. Does he think it’s a demon? Maybe, but Smokey is not an especially superstitious type, despite some of his grandmothers. He sees the cat from time to time, who seems to be watching over him. It gives Smokey a certain confidence, even cockiness. He doesn’t drink any more, but he does get involved with some shady characters. He seems to have a golden touch — whatever scheme he gets into goes his way, and even the criminal types he associates with begin to talk about his luck.

He himself begins to suspect the gargoyle cat may not be the most benign spirit. He has a close call and begins to wonder if he might need to start redeeming himself before he dooms his soul. After he meets an orphan girl, things really begin to go wrong for him. She attaches herself to him, and wants him to help her escape the life of being used as a prostitute or worse that waits for her and some others. Smokey has to figure out who really is his angel and who’s trying to lead him astray.