Notes on the Winter Solstice and Our Most Recent Apocalypse

...I swear apocalypses are happening every couple months these days...whether based on the Book of Revelations, Mayan Prophecies, or somebody just having a bad day and spreading the news on Facebook....but, like I always say, who doesn’t need a good Apocalypse now and then?

Apocalypse, we’ve all been there,

The same old tricks, what should we care?

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

...been watching this movie called Decasia: The State of Decay...made up completely of old film stock that’s breaking down...in some cases almost completely melted...leaving only ghostly, rapidly disappearing traces of whatever hopes and dreams went in to it, whatever was meant to preserved...images lost and devolving into chaos, soon to be nothing....and, by the way, it makes a really cool-looking movie to space out to...
 

Oh well. If the world doesn't end tonight, it's not the end of the world.
Salman Rushdie

...in addition to being the Apocalypse, the day that just ended here on the east coast of the United States was also, of course, the winter solstice...when darkness reaches its peak for the year, only to gradually give way to light, day by day, until the process reverses itself six months from now....works for me...

Midsummer Blues & Greys...

Summertime, child, and livin’s easy...
The Gershwin Bros. (via Billie Holiday, Janis Joplin, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Herbie Hancock, Joni Mitchell, Miles Davis, Chet Baker, John Coltrane....)

...wracked with traffic tickets, impending dental bills, internet problems...etc....etc....etc....escaping the coming heat wave, at least, to walk on a beach at one a.m....early enough even on the summer solstice to be suitably dark....some select stars shining through the eastern haze of humidity...listening to Richard Thompson through ipod headphones....

...everything you do leaves you empty inside,

time to ring some changes...

...maybe not quite so bad as all that, but he’s got a point....even later, inside reading Duino Elegies, salvaged, earlier, from my dad’s bookshelves...(soon to be emptied by people who get paid to dispose of stuff other people can’t bear to get rid of, themselves).....thinking I gotta get up early to take screens in to be fixed before the renters come next week....then coffee, air-conditioned yoga, and waiting for the cable company...a beach house ill-kept of late...where, if nothing else, I’ve done an awful lot of writing...among other things...in the past....now with a For Sale sign out front....finally, a long walk down to the point as the sun sets on this longest day of the year, its heat diminished with the light...another cosmic cycle moving along on its way...

Denn Bleiben ist nirgends.*

Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

* For there is no remaining,

no place to stay (David Young, trans.).
For staying is nowhere (J.B. Leishman and Stephen Spender, trans.).

,

...can’t complain too much about going barefoot on the beach the day before Thanksgiving...even in long pants, t-shirt and sweater under rain jacket, knit cap under hood...just a few drops falling, blown by wind that, along with the tides, has so dramatically shaped hills and runnels in the sand...clouds light, dark, and in between, seeming to move in all directions at once...a bundle of half deflated party balloons floating past unintentional driftwood sculpture into the waves as I move slowly along....finally deciding to turn, head inland, put shoes and socks back on to walk the road back....some kinds of beauty can only be taken in for so long...

Five Years Gone

You were so tall,
how could you fall?
Billy Bragg, Tank Park Salute

The untold want, by life and land ne’er granted,
Now, voyager, sail thou forth, to seek and find.
W. Whitman

...spent Sunday, August 14, 2005, with friends at the beach...used a broken yellow plastic sand mold found at the water’s edge to dig a hole deep enough their little son could stand up in it...

...back at their place, enjoyed a seafood cookout, and sat reading their copy of the second-to-last Harry Potter book...R.I.P., Dumbledore the wizard...finishing it some time after midnight...

...had left my cell-phone on the bedside table in the guest room that morning....getting ready for sleep, saw there were two messages and a text...each from my older brother...each saying the same thing, repeatedly...call me, tonight...with a sense of urgency that made me want to put the phone back down, go to bed, pretend I knew even less than I did...

...less than a week before, handed in grades for my summer course at Cornell...effectively marking the end of my academic career....without regrets...I’d be getting home the next day, Monday, August 15, 2005, to an editing project a friend hooked me up with, and lots of ideas...day one of the whole new thing just waiting to dawn as I made the call...

...some things we think we know will happen, but really don’t...not until they actually do...and even then, it can take a while...and even when we think we do again, there’s layer upon layer of knowing and unknowing, like a cosmic onion ever-unpeeling...

...a car accident...mom was okay...you were not...

...Saturday morning, August 13th, had breakfast with you and mom at McGlade’s on the boardwalk, then left to drive north, stopping to visit friends for a day or two before heading home...neither of you really clear on my career plans, so I explained, again...was gonna try to do what I’d always wanted, work free-lance, write...venture off into the unknown, the untold want...see what happens...

...mom was apprehensive, but you, surprisingly, weren’t...seeming to step away from habitual pessimism, the criticism and negativity that kept me at such distance...in our last minutes together, you smiled almost boyishly, told me how excited you were about what I was doing...proud...happy...

...thank you...

Walking With Waves

...thinking, wondering, imagining...lust, love, loneliness...building, dissolving, receding...this, this, only this...*




*...was walking by myself along this beach in south Jersey, from populated areas to a somewhat wilder one by the wildlife sanctuary—sand above the surf line roped off to protect nesting areas for piping plovers, people allowed to walk through but not stop, sunbathe, or swim, since the shy little birds need to run to and from the water, and won’t if anybody’s in the way...seems reasonable enough, so keep up a steady pace—seeing no plovers...(sorry, that’s not one in the picture)...though can’t deny looking probably more than watchful boyfriends like at women in bathing suits...but, more than that, another, less superficial and piggish aspect of mind caught on someone...far inland...wondering if she thinks about me...imagining, hoping...that old song...tip-toeing a narrow course between solitude and loneliness, dipping precipitously, despite such gorgeous tranquil surroundings, seemingly made for peaceful reflection, toward the latter...trying once again to be mindful...and all that...observe thoughts floating by instead of getting caught up in them...gain that awesome sense of wonder found in pondering the infinite in one’s own breath, sun on skin, cold salt water on the toes, even a bit of pain in one hip from walking so much in the sand...for a sudden moment feeling somewhat jarring comfort in the knowledge that, really, I know nothing else...the rest only thinking, imagining, longing...speculation on reality that’s always something else...and not even that ten minutes later...gettin’ all Krishnamurti-like n’ shit....and then, of course, thinking about writing about it, maybe quoting that famous William Blake line, something like “to see infinity in a grain of sand, eternity in an hour”...( having to work by memory even once the walk is through, since there’s no Collected Poems of William Blake nor consistent internet access at the beach house)...though, by the time I got back, reduced it all to the few simple formulae above...wondering if the wave thing’s too clichéd...as well as whether a cliché’s always such a bad thing....or whether anybody’s gonna get what I’m talking about at all....anyway, it works a whole lot better than all this...doncha think?

Recycled Blogging for Earth Day

...the staff here was gonna come up with some brand new material for Earth Day...before thinking about just how just many blog posts are wastefully manufactured every day, only to end up in virtual landfills...

...so, instead, decided to root through the blue crate on the curb in front of the Yoga for Cynics corporate offices and, using approximately 90% post-consumer recycled blog material, craft an Earth Day piece for Elephant Journal...which has gotta be worth at least a couple carbon credits...so check it out...and, y'know, try not to mess up the earth too much...

Thanksgiving: Two Takes

Religion—It's given people hope in a world torn apart by religion.
Jon Stewart

Today I’m gonna go knocking on the doors of strangers...get them to invite me in for dinner. When the meal’s through, I’ll tell them thanks and gently show them to the door. That's where it gets tricky. Often as not, they refuse to leave...try to tell me it’s their house...give me no choice but to use force...don’t even seem to appreciate it when I offer them a patch of ground in the backyard. No sense of gratitude....

If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.
Meister Eckhart

Actually, I’m going to the beach...South Jersey...Cape May...chilly but beautiful this time of year...with some but not all of the family...including my eighty-two year old mother...for whom I’m especially grateful...glad she’s still here...

though it’s hard not to think how much has changed, how much gone...or of what’s inevitably to come...impermanence no longer a philosophical concept or theme for airy poetry, but an inescapable presence at the Thanksgiving table...

then, going to the shore also reminds me of how much time I’ve spent playing on beaches, building ramparts of sand to hold back the tide as it comes in...but it always does come in, never failing to wash away whatever’s been built, leaving as little trace of today as it did of yesterday or the day before...

so, what is there to do but try and be present...enjoy the sea and the sky and the sand and my mom...and be grateful....