The Mimosa Effect 2

I really had to think about this one. I tried to cast my mind back to the first few poems that really made an impression on me as a kid. It started with Shel Silverstein’s poems and with the book “Alligator Soup”, delicious fare for a youngster in the mid-seventies. I lapped that stuff up, but I never understood it was poetry until much later. I didn’t really read much grownup poetry until it was shoved down my throat in high school. Disliking intensely the way creative works were dissected in school (before being killed, I might add; it was the cutting into them that killed them), I soon hit on a strategy. Whenever we were given one of those readers, full of distopian stories about the world ending and man-against-fill in the blank (man, nature, society), I would sit down and read it all the way through before the teacher had a chance to sink their teeth into it and rip it to shreds. Same with poetry. Then I would daydream and doodle in class while it was taken apart, keeping just enough of an ear open so I could regurgitate whatever it was they wanted to hear on the next test.

T.S. Eliot was the first person to show me that poetry could be powerful. I had, up to that point, envisioned other people’s poetry in pretty much two ways – fun (as in Alligator Soup), and pretty (as in Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening – the only poem I was ever made to memorize; how times change from when my grandma was a child, and you had to memorize everything). Oddly enough, when I started writing my own poems (around age ten or eleven), they tended to be kinda harsh; a reflection of feeling troubled about life and the world and not having been taught any other way of expressing it, I imagine. When I read The Hollow Men, it really blew open my perceptions of what poetry was. The language of it was unlike anything I’d ever come across before. It probably seems more dramatic in hindsight; I think it was actually a fairly subtle effect, initially, that grew on me over the years. I do remember it was one of the first poems I read multiple times, not because I had to for class, but just because I wanted to get a feel for the shape of it. I wasn’t quite a cynic yet, and the ending disturbed me. I’d never been disturbed by a poem before, either.

It may not be a surprising choice; it may even be a bit cliché, to pick something so well known. But for the impact it had on me, and for all the really good bits in it (too many to count), and for the fact that you can read tiny bits of it or all of it or some of it and still get something out of it, here it is:

The Hollow Men
T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)

Mistah Kurtz – he dead.

A penny for the Old Guy

I

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us–if at all–not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death’s dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer–

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

III

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.
Is it like this
In death’s other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
and avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
and the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

I’m not going to even attempt to analyze this poem. For one thing, I hate analyzing poetry; it’s like taking apart a live frog to see how it works. For another, being one of the most famous poems in the English speaking language, it’s been analyzed to death already by thousands if not millions of people, only some of whom really have any clue what they’re talking about. That said – if you’re interested in what various people have to say about this poem, you can find tons of links online (not to mention countless dusty books in your local library). Here are a couple I came across that seem to have something intelligent to say, to get you started:

T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men
What T.S. Eliot almost believed

Gotta love moments like these…

Benton and Buck are paddling a canoe on a sewer, in an attempt to penetrate Geiger’s hideout. Ray is holding the lamp for them.

Ray: I’ve never been so humiliated in all my life.

Benton: Could you hold the lamp a little higher, Ray. If we bump the sides we’ll have to return the canoe scuffed.

R: Do you have any idea what’s in this water?

B: I would suppose a high percentage of ammonia, phosphorus and cyanide.

R: Wrong. Rats. Rats this big. You know what they’re doing? They’re laughing at us. I’m in a canoe with two wounded Mounties, and I’m being humiliated by rats.

- From Due South, episode: “Manhunt” (first season)

By Mark Harrison (used with permission)

M. would normally put something like this up on his own site, here, but the Bjournal doesn’t have any way for people to leave comments.  So for now I’ll be posting his SS and PT contributions here, so he can get some feedback.  People have written about the everpresent monster of fear, that influences so much of our lives whether we want it to or not.  This is about another everday monster, one that is as brutal, dangerous and hard to fight as any dragon or bad guy with guns: addiction.

Morning screamed in Gerry’s face. He put his hand up to stop it, but it didn’t quite work. His hand shook too much. Besides, without curtains or even a sheet to cover the window, he’d have to hold it there ’till night came again.

He rolled into a sitting position on the edge of the mattress. His stomach lagged about a second behind. As he reached out to grab a pack of smokes from on top of the T.V., he realized that his hands weren’t the only things shaking. The tremor seemed to originate in his out-stretched hand. It travelled down his mottled arm and down the side of his rib-cage. Restless snakes writhed under his damp grey skin. When his leg started to shake and then bounce crazily on the ball of his foot, Gerry grabbed it with both hands. He threw himself onto it, holding on like a man wrestling an alligator.

…More…

This doesn’t exactly fit the Sunday Scribblings “monster” theme, but there is a kind of benign spirit in it, and one can always point to one of those chronic real life monsters, uncertainty, lack of self confidence, and the kind of hoping/wishing/waiting that one can do for far too long, before one wakes up and realizes one hasn’t really done anything at all. 

I don’t normally dream about authors. Pretty much never, as a matter of fact; not that I can remember, anyway.  So I was rather surprised last night to find myself walking up a narrow set of stairs, in some big multiple-story yet homey store somewhere (likely some place that featured books or whatnot).   I was heading to a smallish room that I remembered having various musical things in it, along with a few trinkets and used books and the like.  When I got there, I found a long line of people, wrapping around the room and through the pillars.  They were chatty, happy, some slightly impatient and fidgety.  And then I thought, oh yeah, I remember now.  Neil Gaiman’s here, doing a book signing.  How lucky that I just happened to drop by.  In that handy way dreams have of speeding up time, in a blink and a thought the line had pretty much disappeared, and the room was emptying out.  I was alone at the signing table, and people were starting to put stuff away.  And there sat Neil, and the first thing I thought was, he got a haircut.  This was the most surprising thing of all.  No more shaggy, always looking like he needs a haircut rumpled artist look, but a neat and tidy short normal person hair. 

Now, I know that even if you’re a Neil Gaiman fan, and especially if you’re not, you’re getting fidgety yourself right now.  People’s dreams are, after all, normally mostly interesting to the person who experienced them, and that’s about it – unless they were oddly prophetic, or involved something kinky going on between you and someone you wouldn’t normally do that kind of thing with.  But there was something oddly surreal about this one.

 For one thing, I woke up with an inexplicable amount of sand in my bed this morning.  (For anyone who doesn’t know, Neil Gaiman is famous for creating a remarkable graphic novel series featuring a character called the Sandman – not the old creepy comic book character from way back when, who if I recall went around with a gas mask on or some such thing, but an immortal in charge of the realm of dreams; who looks oddly like Neil when you think of it, at least in the pale, shaggy dark hair kinda way).  And aside from Neil getting a haircut, it was what happened after I got to the table that made me wish with all my heart when I awoke that it had been real.  To start with, I didn’t have a book for him to sign, but there was a pile of copies of his biography on the table (which, as far as I know, is something that doesn’t exist in the real world), so I grabbed one of those.  And then we were obviously in one of Neil’s stories.  It’s funny how the details of dreams can fade so rapidly, but the gist of it was, there was some kind of benevolent animal spirit there, a wolf if I remember correctly.  And no one seemed at all surprised or bothered by it.  The power it had, was akin to the “uplift” power in the David Brin novels – sort of.  It could reach into you, and unlock the potential to create and imagine great things that lives inside all of us.  Sounds cheesy, I know, but just think – all those wonderful ideas that are always just on  the tip of your brain, all those amazing things you want to say but can never figure out how to say them, all the things that are just on the tip of your tongue, fingers, toes, hair follicles… just waiting to turn into something astounding.  Only most of us just get a glimpse of them in our dreams, and very few are able to harness them in the waking world. 

The wolf/spirit reached inside all of us that were there – me, the staff members helping to clean up, the remaining few fan-boys still lingering about.  I was going to wake up, and it was all going to make sense.  Instead, I woke up to sand in my bed, and it was, after all, just a silly dream.

Of course, I was puttering around the garden yesterday, and our street is horrendously dusty from all the construction.  I walk around barefoot as often as possible during those months it’s warm enough to do so.  So there’s a perfectly logical explanation.  It was just odd, is all.  And damn it all, but it would have been so darn nice if it had been true.

Or – “Some interesting ways to get some variety into those boring panels where some dumb writer has a bunch of lame characters sitting around talking for page after page”.

I might be a geek by the standards of normal people, but I wasn’t enough of a comic book geek to have any idea what this was about until I read about it here.

You don’t necessarily have to have read many comics as a kid to appreciate this, it’s also just kinda neat from a pop culture history / art history point of view. Joel Johnson not only provides a succinct write-up of the history behind the panels, but also free downloads of several versions of the original panels (printable quality), including a cleaned up B&W version.  Heck – I mean, if Joel Johnson isn’t a comic book name I don’t know what is, so he must know what he’s talking about, right? 

Poetry Thursday: Time.  This started out as a freefall experiment that eventually led to one of my favourite stories, a little piece called A Field of Echoes.

an echo in the dark
glass globe falling to the floor
bounces twice, cracks
an explosion of glass, snowstorm of shards
too small to see, enough to cut
the pungent smell of scented oils reeking along her skin
she spreads her arms in the flames like a phoenix, like a bird taking flight
the sea covers her in waves of fire
spreading along her cracked skin,
smooth ebony of time burnt into her eyes
a tower reaching to the sky
knifing through clouds, piercing the ionosphere,
needling into space, splitting time like an atom
as flames rise up along jagged spikes of broken glass,
all turns to smoke, sparks and cool grey ash filtering down
settling into earth, into decades of layers upon layers,
her memory dancing above it all,
like feet on hot coals, dodging bullets
and fine sea spray, cursed to circle endlessly
a lone gull above the empty, sagging, burnt black tower
tipping against the coming darkness, impossibly still among
the rollers tall as mountains, moving like earthquakes, like the heart
of one who’s known too much, loved too hard
in a heartbeat, a surge of life against the void
against the voice of time and death
against the dichotomies of new and old
young and wise
sorrowful and foolish

- T.H. (Oct. 2000)

Word of the Day:

blateration    /n/    1656 -1864
chatter; babbling

Example:
I’ve had just about enough of your garrulous blateration, you clod!

From the Compendium of Lost Words at Phrontistery.

 

 

Thanks to the person who sent this to Neil.

“All writers know that on some golden mornings they are touched by the wand—are on intimate terms with poetry and cosmic truth. I have experienced those moments myself. Their lesson is simple: It’s a total illusion. And the danger in the illusion is that you will wait for those moments. Such is the horror of having to face the typewriter that you will spend all your time waiting. I am persuaded that most writers, like most shoemakers, are about as good one day as the next (a point which Trollope made), hangovers apart. The difference is the result of euphoria, alcohol, or imagination. The meaning is that one had better go to his or her typewriter every morning and stay there regardless of the seeming result. It will be much the same.”

- John Kenneth Galbraith

I don’t know if it’s really true, but an awful lot of really successful writers seem to think it is. That’s one of the things that keeps me up at night, worrying that I’ll spend my whole life waiting, and wake up one morning to find I’m old and senile and haven’t done a thing. So whether it’s true or not, it’s certainly worth a shot. I’ve tried to get into this kind of habit before and failed miserably, but that’s a poor and pathetic excuse. As the little green guy says: Do. Or do not. There is no try.

Been reading ’bout the trials and tribulations of writing on several friends’ journals lately, from issues with deadlines, to trying to find time to be creative in an otherwise busy day.  This is something I wrote not that long ago, and it’s still applies unfortunately.  I’m writing lots lately, but mostly journally posts and poems.  Meanwhile, my four novels-on-the-go and several novellas-needing-editing (and god knows how many short story ideas) languish in the land of the neglected.  Oh sure, I’ve done a bunch of point-form plot doctoring and character development stuff, but no real, solid chapters for a while now.  I know, when it comes to the novels, I should just pick one and finish it already, then get to the other three in whatever order makes sense.  The problem is that the worlds and characters all live in my head at once, and if I get an idea for them while I’m just about to fall asleep, or in the shower, or in the middle of a cuppa joe, it could be for any one of them.  How to knuckle down and just pick one has been a big dilemma for me.  Anyhow, on with the poem-like-thing… (oh yeah, and it was also written while listening to music and browsing my MP3 list, so some song titles and lyric bits made their way in).

I should be writing chapters,
not verse
should be getting people from here to there
the shuttle bus of plot devices
chugging away
I should be building mountains
not casual sand castles
doodles drawn in the sand
by an idle finger

Lilies with candy
knocked on the fortune teller’s door
asked for a cup of sugar
and not a drop more
Diana asks me,
where does the night go?
does it fold up its dark carpet
shaking out the glitter dust
wiping off its makeup
does it pull the curtains wide
to let in the morning sun
let the windowshades up
with a tug and a zip and a snap
blinking and squinting
nostrils flaring at the smell
of freshly brewed coffee
or does it curl up in a corner
somewhere safe and warm
a calm, inky pool of shadow
waiting for the call
to spread itself wide once more
a breath of cold air
making candle flames gutter and spit
hot wax burns fingers
seals letters
drips off table edges
stains cloth
you can get that off
with a hot iron
and a piece of paper towel

any several Sundays
you can touch the water
it won’t even make you sleepy
a new work by an old master:
escape, and back again.

- T.H. 2006

The prompt on Sunday Scribblings this week was “The Inner Life of Pets”. For a brief, evil moment, I thought of posting a link to this story there, but I doubt all the people writing fluffy journal entries about Mittens and Ruffy prancing happily after their masters would appreciate it very much.

Update: What the heck.  On the prompting of one commenter, I posted it anyhow.  No offense meant to the people writing happy stories, btw; I love all my pets, and the feel-good stuff is appreciated too; this is just, well, not that.

A Night On the Town – By Tanah Haney

The streets are wet from the rain. A car goes by – seems like it swerved deliberately to hit that puddle. A hapless pedestrian gets soaked from head to foot, curses after the taxi. Antennas squeak as the wind spins them around. The sound of someone cursing leaks out an open window; through the cracked glass, the smudged image of a man, his belly bulging over the rim of his baggy sweat-pants, getting up to fix the picture on the T.V.

Above, a black bird flies low, skimming tops of buildings, its feathers ruffled; rain beads on the oily plumage and rolls off. In the alleyway between two buildings, a wino bunches himself up tighter in a doorway, pulling newspapers down to cover his feet, and falls into shivering sleep, dreaming of the bottle of whisky the young thug stole from him just that morning.

I stand looking out at the neon and concrete soup, blurred by the steam that rises from the sewer grates. I slip from the alleyway, and dart across the street in front of a slow-moving city bus – the driver, if he’s superstitious, might cross himself for luck if he saw me. I hug the shadows, keeping my nose into the breeze. Dodging the blowing garbage, I spring effortlessly over puddles, and lay back my ears at the old bag lady who’s holding out her hand: “Here kitty kitty kitty…” Her teeth are gone; she gums the words like soft taffy. I heard she fed the stray dogs chicken bones, and one of them choked to death.

I catch a whiff of the greasy fat sugary smell coming from the donut shop; they must be making a new batch. One of the guys who works there always has a tuna sandwich for lunch. If I purr loud enough and meow with just the right tone of ‘look at me, how skinny i am, i haven’t eaten in days’, he gives me a piece.

The crow is still flying above me. He knows where all the good dumpsters are, like the ones behind the chinese food restaurants. He likes to pick the bits of chicken from the piles of mouldy noodles. Once he found a newborn child in one of those dumpsters, but the police shooed him away. He was disappointed, he hadn’t had a find like that in months.

The cops don’t like the dirt, the slime – they always keep those uniforms clean, and curse if they spill a drop of coffee on those crisp blue pants. The street kids jeer at them from the safety of rooftops. The old bag lady, she wraps the filth around her like a camouflage, blinking myopically at the handle of the battered old shopping cart as she trundles along. The left front wheel squeaks; I hate it, it reminds me of the rocking chair in that house I used to live in, before it burnt down. The family had too much to worry about after that; they stopped leaving food out any more, so I left.

It’s hard to remember what it was like to see from those eyes, to stand so tall. But there was a time when I was someone else, a time when I, too, needed to feel rooted in place, needed to have a roof to sleep under.

There’s only one memory that I seem to be able to hold on to. It’s a night much like this one, a night that makes people hunch their shoulders, pull down their hats, and tighten their collars against the damp. I was different then.

….More…..