Returning from Elsewhere: Resolutions

Traveling again. Leaving home for non-home, this time dislocation from home more poignant. This time there are shadows on the road, deep trenches one may plummet into if unaware or taking the road for granted. The world is so fragile sometimes. The world is made of glass.

I need to travel. I have to travel. At least some days out of every few weeks. Even if I just go away for two days, no further than a day's drive and back again. I stagnate and putrefy in my own juices if I am stuck at home for too long. I learned that the hard way last winter, when I stayed home for a full six months. I should at least have gone out to California in the depth of winter, to get warm, to change my scenery. I won't make that mistake again, and this winter I already plan to head out West come late January. Sometimes the photography is the reason for travel, sometimes it's just an excuse.

This time the reason for traveling is horrific family problems, inherently dark and stressful material, another round of dying and endarkening. This time leaving I feel resentment for having to put my life on hold again just as I beginning to get it back from oblivion. This time I will not give in and take care of others before myself. This time I am traveling and none of it so far has been sublime.


Pacem In Terris, near Warwick, NY

Except for some portion of an hour at Pacem In Terris this afternoon, when I sat zazen beside Frederick Franck's gravesite there in the sculpture garden behind the house. Before I set out I planned to stop in, and spend an afternoon there. A way of soaking up some spiritual succor, tranquility, and support, before being gravitationally impelled into the latest family black hole. Yesterday it came into my mind's eye to see myself sitting there by his grave, companionably, weeping. Which I did, today. It also came to me to ask the spirit of this man, this longtime mentor to my spirit, for advice. And in my mind's eye, he smiled from behind his grave, and said, You already have all you need. I knew that was true. Even if I wanted more, even though there was no more that I needed to hear. He said as little as possible to me, with a smile to remind me that I already knew all this, of course, so go on and let me sleep.

And so when I sat crosslegged by his grave, this afternoon, meditating, watching the light change and the breeze flicker the trees above us, all was silent. He was silent, my heart was silent, and I managed at least a few minutes of no-mind. The silence was a balm, even the non-silence of people wandering through the grounds. Some might have even taken a photo of me meditating there next to Dr. Franck's grave; I don't know, I had my eyes downturned, sometimes closed. I suppose I was for a moment an icon among the icons, for part of this afternoon. The grounds were busy; there was a concert about to happen, and the concertgoers were wandering the grounds.

After awhile, I laid my left hand on the ground. I felt everything dark flow out of me, absorbed into Mother Earth to be cleansed and returned as living energy, the way tree-roots exchange molecules and worms churn the topsoil, cleansing everything. It's a wonderful truth that everything in the soil that we use for our flowers and vegetable patches has been through a worm's gullet, one or more times. Compost is the end-result of death and destruction. I formulated it to myself many years ago, and wrote it on a drawing I made: Shit and blood grow healthy roses. I felt my hand being pulled down further. It seemed as if the grave of the human man next to me was in league with the earth, both cleansing, both recycling the spirit to the pull of light. We are compost, we are starlight, we are the essence of exploding suns, we are dirt. Everything gold is supernova shit.

Eventually, I felt done. I rose and wandered through the gardens as before. I spent a long time looking at each of my favorite sculptures—he called them icons, or images—before deciding whether or not to take a photo. The light was very dramatic, and I made some photos that are unique. Even the previously-published photos of these icons, in his own books, don't look quite like what I saw and captured today. The light on the icons changed their meanings subtly, deepening and resonating. St. Francis' birds were more in flight than ever.

I thought about attending the concert, but I was called instead to spend more time amongst the icons. This was the right choice, because it led to me being all alone in the gardens for another hour, in near-silence but for the natural sounds of cicadas, birds, and wind, and the typing of the traffic. I spent a lot of time waiting for the shadows of the trees to move across the faces of the icons, just to get the right feeling in the photograph, the right blend of natural light and shadow on the steel and stone and glass of each natural face. I will look at those photos tomorrow night, not before.


The Unkillable Human, by Frederick Franck, at Pacem In Terris

This time out on the road I am destined to arrive wearily and warily at the home of my relatives, who are dying and losing their minds. This time there may be nothing I can do, or anything I can learn that will help us learn what to do. This time I already accept my helplessness in the face of willful denial of mortality; I'll just nod my head and pretend to play along and agree, and do what I choose to do, what I need to do. This time I have license to be the Trickster.

This time I have the rare license to use my vast powers for manipulation and management and grey eminence control. This time I can use those powers because they serve the highest good of all concerned. I rarely have such permission. We all have abilities and powers we choose to use seldom if at all; just because we carry them around with our wheel of archetypes doesn't mean we're to use them. This time I have license to watch the vampire's eyes. These are powers I've known I've had for a very long time; but I almost never use them. I am capable of many things: I am capability. Even less often do I get such permission. These things have to be handled the right way, by right action, even when right action uses patterns and tricks usually considered of the dark.

This time I will have to struggle to remember to treat my relatives as fully human. It's hard right now. This time I will have to retain some kind of discipline to get my own projects done in the midst of all this chaos and denial. This time I must keep myself centered despite all odds. To be human against all odds. To remember also to be gentle with myself. Dead deer by the roadside, the smell of a skunk, a possum laying by the highway rail, looking dead, but who knows with possums. The animal voices talking to me all day, in the clear light. This time to listen is to remember what I trust, and what I don't. To venture out from what we trust, remembering always to carry them within us, and to return home to them.

This time I will be happy to go home again, many journeys later.

Returning from Elsewhere: Theories

Well-known and influential literary critic and professor Hugh Kenner wrote in 1998 a small themed book of reminiscence and theory combined. Titled The Elsewhere Community, it discusses the mode of learning new ideas that involves travel. It also contains memories of his encounters with many of the literary Moderns, many of whom created displaced, expatriate communities elsewhere. The book is in five parts, which are talks originally meant for radiobroadcast. So a little necessary repetition occurs between sections, so each can stand on its own.

In talking about the Grand Tour, a common practice a century ago of visiting the central cultural sites of Europe, Kenner defines, if only indirectly, what he means by an Elsewhere Community:

"All humans, by their nature," said Aristotle, "desire to know." A special and unparalleled way to know is to go where you're never been. And the key to this quest for knowledge is "elsewhere." In going there, you join what, in these lectures, we will be calling an "Elsewhere Community." It's a concept that is impossible to define strictly. It can name where you dream of going—where bluebirds fly, perhaps. Or it can describe the people you've met somewhere, memories of whom have helped to change you. Or it's an awareness of your own growth and change, arising from the places you've been: Rome's Sistine Chapel, perhaps, or the Zen Gardens of Kyoto, or the green oasis of Manhattan's Central Park.

Going someplace I've never been always makes me feel alive, alert, aware, and undulled. Even on a long day of driving, if I'm on a highway I've never seen before, surrounded by lands, lakes, mountains, fields I've never seen before, I feel particularly alive. It is my goal, in the next few years, to visit all of the US National Parks, and every state in the Union. At some point I want to drive along the Canadian passage to Alaska. I love the north country, and I don't want to just fly over it to get a notch in my belt for visiting Denali, and making photographs there. Photography is the goal, but in a way it's also the excuse. Just going, being able to go, being able to travel, is equally important.

I like to travel slowly, if possible, to take several days to get where I'm going. I enjoy seeing the land along the way. If I could drive to Hawai'i, I would; next best would be to take a boat there. But I'll probably end up flying there, renting a car, and taking off. Who needs hotels when you have fields of pineapple to explore?

Where I differ from Kenner, and from his generation's assumptions that the Grand Tour was to those places that shaped our history and culture, is that my own Grand Tour is about places more than people, geology more than landmarks, geography more than culture. Kenner's artistic generation was drawn, as children of immigrants, to Europe. The Grand Tour was essentially a cultural tour, a tour of the great cities, artists, museums, and history of Europe. Kenner's own form of the Grand Tour, which he describes in his book, was to visit those literary greats of the generation of Moderns that he could encounter who were still alive. He traveled to Europe to see Eliot and others; he traveled in the US to see Pound, Williams, and others. From his encounters with the Moderns he noticed that so many of them had been ex-patriates, displaced, travelers, living overseas; and from this observation was one of the roots of his idea of Elsewhere Communities.

By contrast, I am drawn to tour the National Parks. I want to be there, to feel that wind, that air, that light, that silence, for myself. I am further drawn to visit many state parks around the Union; for state parks often are equally beautiful to the National Parks, but they are relatively unknown. You can almost always find a campsite at a state park, and there are often state parks so near to National Parks that they share their geography and beauty.

For years I've envisioned myself traveling in a small van which I would have converted to sleep in, and have in it a small workspace corner, a small kitchenette. It would allow me to travel and camp at places that are sometimes too hard to set up a tent in, or unsafe to do so because of weather or local wildlife. (Like the time I pulled into an Everglades campground only to read several signs warning about cougar.) I could travel at a slower pace than I do even now, stopping whenever I was tired, or wanting to work. It would be the Zen of Travel: travel when you're alert, sleep when you're tired.



One of the great Chinese poets, one of my favorites, wrote in one his poems the state of being that an aware traveler takes on: Heaven my blanket, earth my pillow. Yang's approach to poetry changed, when he began to travel, from a focus on the poetry of the past, to that inspired by what he saw right in front of him:

Mountain thoughts, river feelings—never betray them.
Rain forms, sky patterns are always beautiful.
"Closing the door and searching for verses" is not the way of poetry.
It is only when you travel that poems will come naturally.
(trans. by Jonathon Chaves)

Yang says, It is only when you travel that poems will come naturally, and this echoes my own attitude, based on my experience. It is a classical Chinese and Japanese poetic attitude, seen in the great Chinese poets, in Basho, and in one who was self-admittedly inspired more by the Moderns' discovery of Asian literature than by their own experiments, Gary Snyder. That's a capsule summation of a central thread of my own literary lineage. I do some of my best thinking when driving on a long roadtrip. I do some of my best writing, my best photographic work, when traveling. It is from encountering the land directly that the poem arises. When I come home and start to work with the materials I've gathered on my most recent travels, I am still Elsewhere even though I am Home. I see my photos, as I sort through them, and they bring up bodily sensations—memory is an experience, not an idea—which give me more poems, art-making, and music. It's a paradox of inspiration and memory and making.

When I think about the van I want to eventually travel in—face it, I'm not 25 anymore, and setting up a tent under some conditions is really hard work—I also think of William Least Heat Moon's travelogues, beginning with Blue Highways, in which he traveled and lived just such a converted van. I also think of the station wagon that Ansel Adams traveled in on many of his journeys, which he sometimes slept in, sometimes traveled with others in, and on the roof of which he had built a platform for his camera. Stories abound of Adams pulling over, quickly setting up, and making a photograph.



I have to say, here, that I had the idea of traveling in a converted van for myself; but I am pleased that other artists have had the same idea. It's a natural idea, seen in many cultures across many times. The word "caravan," from which "van" is derived, is itself a very old word.

In my own instance, rather than a rooftop platform such as Adams used, I would build a small corner behind the driver's seat, with a computer and flat-panel screen built in on shockproof mounts, where I could download and archive the day's digital photos, and begin to work with them, at night, camped, after a day's travel.

I realize that there would have to be a bookshelf in the van, as well, secured somehow against the books scattering onto the bed at every sharp turn in the road, because as I sit here writing, I realize that I am pulling books off the shelves and scattering them on my desk to make these references. I would have to carry at least a few texts with me, there's no way around it. Some for inspiration, some for pleasure—a lazy day when you don't want to go anywhere, just loaf and read all afternoon, is bound to occur on any given trip—some for knowledge.

Hugh Kenner says, a bit later on:

Within The Odyssey we find the story of a second journey. A supernatural being named Circe—a female magician—tells Odysseus that the only way to get around the Sea God and get back home is by traveling to the Far Shore where dwell the Dead. Once there, he must consult the ghost of a sage named Tiresias. And so Odysseus undertakes a journey after knowledge, fueled by his desire to get home. The knowledge he acquires turns out to be his means of finally getting home. For to travel is always, in some sense, to learn. What we don't know yet, is to be found Elsewhere.

I want to continue with that idea: people traveling after what they do not know. Such a pursuit is a way of seeking entrance to the Elsewhere Community.

So we set out after knowledge, to see places and people we've never encountered before. Joni Mitchell once wrote in a song from her "road album," Hejira:

People don't tell you where they've been
They'll tell you where to go
But till you get there yourself
You never really know.

Hejira (the word denotes a journey to escape danger or oppression) is an album of music that lives among others in my truck as a permanent fixture, as a central part of my road music listening collection. It's an album I listen to mostly on the road, because it perfectly captures the feeling of long-distance traveling, its dislocations and its joys. In another song, Mitchell writes:

I pulled into the Cactus Tree Motel
To shower off the dust
And I slept on the strange pillows
Of my wanderlust.

One point of traveling with a few creature comforts, like in my theoretical caravan, is to minimize the effects that "strange pillows" have on one. Sometimes you want the pillows to be exotic and strange and unknown. Sometimes you want to carry your own pillows with you, and sleep in your tent, even when the parcel of ground you're on changes every night. And even my own pillows can seem strange, at times, when I've been traveling for a long time.

In a final turn of strangeness, when we have danced so hard that we slip sideways into other times and spaces, we come to the most recent, most technological form of the Elsewhere Community: the Internet. Kenner discusses the Internet near the end of his book, describing how it has the potential (not yet fully realized) of becoming a truly global communication tool. It creates virtual relationships that collapse geography, bringing people who share affinities into apparent close proximity and dialogue, disregarding the separations of actual distance. In this, Kenner follows the ideas of Marshall McLuhan, who was one of his first mentors. (McLuhan was traveling with Kenner when they first met Ezra Pound; it was this first meeting with Pound that shaped a great deal of Kenner's future interests and career, and Kenner cites Pound as another of his great mentors. Mentoring writers was, after all, one of Pound's great contributions to modern literature.)

Because the Internet collapses space, traveling to learn is less necessary. Your library desk becomes your office or home desk, where The Library of Babel is available now, mostly, at your fingertips. The Final Encyclopedia or Universal Encyclopedia is starting to manifest itself. It is a scholar's paradise. Both data and interpretation are available directly from sources that in previous times would have been either unknown or unavailable. One can go out and do research, and make relationships, in ways both simpler and more complex than ever before.

The Internet is made by its users. There are portal-tenders and gate-keepers, but the content of the Internet is ultimately made by, contributed to by, invented by, its users. Kenner describes the Internet as not being owned by anyone yet; other writers have also described it as a free zone of thought, a temporary autonomous zone, and the last (or next) wild frontier of free thought and free speech. Its attraction to me lies in those realms, in fact: democratizing connection and removing the gatekeepers of discourse allows me, as well as you, to go out there and say what you need to say, for better or ill.

So I don't need to travel as much as I did, to get knowledge. I can stay at home and find many things out. Still, I do travel to learn, and I travel to go see places I haven't seen before, because I want to let those experiences have an impact on me, and change me. I use the Internet a lot for my pre-roadtrip research: to find out about places I want to visit, to find out about places along the way where I might want to stop, to discover information I might need to know traveling. And there are always surprises on the road, nonetheless. The Internet contains only an illusion of approximate total content; in fact, a great many experiences in life cannot be virtual, and never will be. It's easy to get caught up in the "new is inherently good" cycle, that dream of progressive technological utopia that is a principal legacy of Modernism, without ever conceding either consequences or alternative channels of learning. The Internet is still the new toy on the block, still very shiny, still very narrow-band in what it can actually give us.

The chief danger of virtual community is that it might only be pseudo-community, an apparent community that can fly apart from its own energies at any time. Sometimes we think we know people better than we do, online; virtual reality gives us a sensation of intimacy, especially intellectual intimacy, which can be illusory. (Hence the high drama of betrayal and argument cycling constantly throughout the literary blogosphere.) Relationships can be built across vast geographical distance, yet one perceives is still a representation, a persona, an avatar. It's not a matter of who you trust, or what you believe is real. It's rather a reminder that in some ways, all of experience is maya, illusion, virtual or otherwise, and it is necessary to sort through all kinds of noise to get at the signal.

If the Internet is not a huge Elsewhere Community, it is at least a collection of many Elsewheres. Some merge and overlap, many do not. But discovering which is which is another kind of learning journey, another kind of roadtrip for the mind to discover and gain knowledge from. And be changed by, even as the land and what we build upon it change, albeit at different rates.

•

Other entries in this series:

1. Returning from Elsewhere: Narratives

2. Returning from Elsewhere: Sidebars

3. Returning from Elsewhere: Dislocation

Returning from Elsewhere: Dislocation

Having spent much of the last month living from a tent—sleeping in a tent, waking when the sun hits the tent, going to bed when tired, traveling long distances by driving, all across the northernmost parts of the Midwestern parts of the US, the northern regions of the States of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota—I'm having serious difficulty with re-entry. I feel dislocated, like I'm not really here. Here I am, back home, after some serious driving, feeling like I'm camping in my own house: like it's not real, just a bigger tent; like I don't really live here or own the building; like it could fall away from my life at any time, be folded up and put aside. For awhile, after almost every roadtrip, I feel like I'm just camping out here, with no real sense of ownership, or mutual contractual possession. Eventually I can sleep in my own bed again, but for awhile I sometimes find it easier to sleep on my camping air mattress, on the floor, cocooned in my usual nest of blankets that I sleep in when camping out. Things fail or refuse to work properly, when I first get home, that I used to depend on. You can be scared by how enraged that makes you.

Time is part of my dislocation. I wake with the dawn, even as I usually do when sleeping in a tent. It's that one is not ruled by the clock, so much, but that the clock becomes irrelevant. Where's the sun in the sky? Is it warm enough to emerge now from my cocoon of blankets? How much sunlight do I need for today's chores and/or planned activities? How much daylight is left? These questions are more relevant. But so are the questions raised by the spiritual reading I tend to do in the morning, and even take with me to read in the tent, first thing in the morning, over a cup of tea brewed on the propane-powered portable Coleman stove. That first cup of tea makes a huge difference.

So it is with a recently published book by Zen master and teacher Dainin Katagiri, Each Moment Is the Universe: Zen and the way of being in time. A book compiled from transcripts of dharma talks, like many similar Zen-talk books, this one is themed around the questions of time, organized around the central truths of Zen philosophy. Katagiri-Roshi says, for example:

Sometimes we think doubt is not good, but doubt is important. It's not so important that we should become crazy from it, but if you are questioning, that's fine. We need to question. Even though you don't get answers to your questions, all you have to do is just swim. Questioning is always going on in real time; it is always returning to zero. So, little by little, questioning becomes questionlessness. That's why Dogen says to swim on the surface of the ocean with your foot touching the bottom of the ocean. This is just swimming. We have to swim in the big scale of the world. Then questioning is also right in the middle of time, and very naturally questions disappear. Why do they disappear? What makes them disappear? Time, truth, buddha-nature, makes them disappear. Time gives us questions; time gives us answers to our questions.
—Dainin Katagiri, from Each Moment Is the Universe

Space is part of my dislocation as well. I've been a peripatetic wanderer much of my life, semi-nomadic even when rooted. This comes, perhaps, from traveling so much as a young boy that I don't have a real feeling of Home Town, the way most people seem to have: when your childhood is literally split across the planet's antipodes, and you don't have a sense of growing up surrounded by one familiar set of surroundings, people, and culture, sometimes the only sense of Home you can generate is about where you are right now. The nomad's Home is wherever his tent is set up for the season: you carry Home within you, and constantly re-plant it. This I do know.

Thus I had a most peculiar sensation, yesterday, driving across Michigan's Upper Peninsula—a rare sensation for me, even a phantom one—that this land, this place was Home. That I could, eventually, move there, settle there, feel at home there. I can't explain why Michigan, as a larger place, would start to feel like home to me, now, after years away, and even though no one specific place in Michigan is Home, just that sense of being up North in Michigan. Perhaps it's because my parents' ashes are now buried in Muskegon, in northern Michigan soil. In one day's driving, up and down the Leelanau Peninsula, then over to the UP and down, I crossed the 45th Parallel three times: that mid-way line between planetary equator and pole. Each crossing seemed significant. My thoughts wandered. But nonetheless Michigan around the 45th started to feel as familiar as I imagine a Home Town must feel to those who, unlike myself, have had one in which they grew up: the land, the light, even the smells, are familiar, comfortable, known. I felt perfectly at ease, at rest—able to come to rest—comfortable and calm on the roads and trails, wandering along under even a bleak rain-filled sky.

There is little nostalgia for place in me (except for sacred places I have encountered and significantly remembered), and very little sentimentality about childhood. It's not that I lack feeling, in fact I feel rather too much from childhood still, it's that it isn't sentiment, which is always unearned emotion, it's a sense of place. I am connected to the North American land—geology, lake, formations, and textures—in ways I can feel deep under my feet but that words cannot contain. Right here, under my feet, I can feel the distant hot throat of the Earth's mantle, and every layer of new and old rock between my feet and the unimaginable antinomic alloyed core. The crust of our planet, from a certain point of view, which many geologists learn to see from, is as chaotic, messy, fragile, and changeable as today's news. It's all a matter of time-scale, of viewpoint. The earth feels permanent to us, who move quickly across it, but it all changes, has changed, and will change again.

In a life of dislocation, how many things can you learn to trust, and to continue to trust? Only those few things that remain universal, despite your travels, that have never let you down. I trust the stars, even when they change overhead as I travel. I trust the earth under my feet, its sense of solidity and geologic history, which I have a strong feel for, in that strange way that geologists become slightly odd about time, flipping back and forth as they must between considering deep time and making sure to steer the car down the road rather than into an outcrop.

So I'm reluctant to dive right back into the fray, to re-engage, to take up the sword of cutting remarks made to display wit's weaponry in arguments about absolutely nothing. The world expects you to dive right back in as soon as you get back, no hesitation, no pauses, no time to re-adjust, and I find myself rebelling, even angrily ignoring those demands. So much gets put back into its proper perspective when one travels and returns: The news is not newsworthy, but a filler of silences and a slurry of time you could spend in the garden; the news would have one believe that the apocalypse is always happening, right now, and we'd all better care that the world is coming to an end. But the world is always coming to an end, and always has been. The things people seem to care about most matter the least; you know you're supposed to also care, yourself, but you find yourself unable. What I linger on is what I've encountered at the end of a bad day of departure: a six-point buck standing by the roadside, waiting to cross, its gaze meeting mine fleetingly; a mature bald eagle in a branch of a tree ten feet above the road, talons and beak digging into its prey, in its majestic self-confidence unafraid of the road beneath it, and who might pass fleetingly by. If they're not dead, they live there still.

The endless arguments and debates one encounters wherever one turns are about nothing, and matter nil. I pay my bills, I read in the morning, I ignore the news. (Every genuinely important piece of news gets through to you, anyway, when a friend calls to tell you, or you get an email, or it's everywhere on TV interrupting everything.) There are events and pseudo-events, and the news mainly reports the pseudo-events of minute changes in the political climate or the lives and deaths of the celebrities whose lives one is supposed to live through vicariously. As though we peasants had no lives of our own. I see in my absence one of the morning glory plants has exploded with new leaves, and is beginning to attach itself to the stone wall next to it, training itself horizontally along the slates. Is that not news that matters?

I let my beard and hair grow a bit shaggy while traveling this past month, and I see some white-haired, wizened poet's face in the mirror this morning who I don't recognize. He looks more like an experienced, now-deceased 60-year-old gay poet I've renowned, James Broughton, than he does like the 20-year-old uncertain young man I often still feel like, inside, unsure of what he wants to do when he grows up. Am I finally grown up? Humans have a unique ability, it seems, due to the gift of consciousness, to time-travel between younger and older selves. We play like children at any age. We fool ourselves into fixed opinion, thinking it to be wisdom, far younger than we ought; then we spend our adulthoods stripping away those youthful certainties, not replacing them with new certainties, but with deeper questions. If we can learn to live the questions, time-travel between older and younger selves becomes all that smoother. Time gives us questions; time gives us answers to our questions.

My slogan this epoch, invented jokingly with friends while camping earlier this month, probably something I'll design a t-shirt around at some later date, was:

DISORIENTATION

It's not just a choice.
It's a lifestyle.

I remain disoriented by what I'm told I need to care about, which I mostly find myself unable to care about. I cannot claim, like a monk, to never watch TV; but I do claim to strictly limit that diet, and to do my best to avoid its junk-food components. I cannot claim, like a wizened poet, to have an experienced overview of what really matters in life; I can only claim, at this point, that there are few things that really matter, after all. One of those is love. I do my best to remember to say I love you to those people I do love, at the ends of regular conversations, just in case it's the last thing we ever say to each other. Freshly back home, when the little technologies and means of daily life fail, I am scared of how angry it can make me. Can't the Things in life just work right, for once, just for once, without falling apart or failing? Just once? We know we live in an entropic universe, which is the modern Western scientific equivalent of the myth of the Fall. Myths, if you recall, are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Entropy is the new face of evil.

One of the stresses of travel is change: travel is a real breaker of routines. Those patterns of habitation and possession one builds and collapses into when living in one place for a long time all get thrown out the door when you hit the road. You have to remember to take enough of your routines with you that your health and well-being remain guarded and cared for. Some days you even have to remember that you get tired, simply tired. Travel is tiring. But so is returning home. Which routines do I want to pick up again? Which as necessities, and which are optional? You find yourself asking these questions anew, and perhaps making changes. When I come home again, I can briefly see it as a strange place, just another hotel room, with an objective eye that reveals what might be improved, might be altered. I make decisions about what I want to do next with the place. Some of these are organizational, but others are aesthetic. It's a brand new home, each time you return to it. Maybe that's why I only get around to fixing some of those failing technologies when I'm fresh home from a roadtrip: they irritate me more, or newly enough to do something about them.

So where am I supposed to feel at Home? I still feel like I'm camping out here, back "home." It's all very familiar, yet it's also rather alien. I can't seem to summon much interest in anything, especially in diving right back into the fray. Maybe the old myth, found in more than one nomadic culture over the millenia, is true after all: If you travel too fast, or too long, it may take a few days before the soul can catch up with the body. And so I must wait awhile, before taking up those burdens of life again. It takes a few days to really arrive. If I ever really do.

Returning from Elsewhere: Sidebars

Still finding it difficult to re-engage, or to want to re-engage. Still listening to silences found. Yesterday, the day after returning from the woods, I spent the afternoon at Madison Pride, which was entirely too loud by comparison. Today I'm being forced by inner forces to Do Nothing, take a day off, whatever. I'm just a little numb.

After arriving back home near midnight, the next day was spent driving again up to Madison, to spend the afternoon at Madison Pride, a late entry in the annual Pride season. Arriving on a dust-swept island next to the convention center, covered with colored tents and rainbow flag banners, not too many people about, my first feeling was, It's good to see Madison doing a Pride again, but it's so tiny next to the last few Prides I've attended, notably San Francisco's. Matters of scale, location, and economics. One thing noticed: fewer LGBTs here advertise themselves loudly. Perhaps it's a local cultural effect on branding, to make it more discreet. Nonetheless, the rainbow or HRC bumper stickers are more discreet, less noticeable. You only realize you're parking in the right space after seeing a small, almost hidden rainbow flag on a parked SUV, so you park next to it.

My purpose for going to Pride at all was to sing with Perfect Harmony, a short Pride concert of an hour's duration, excerpts from our last two shows. Think of it as a summer pops concert. Mostly our lighter material. Perfect Harmony is Madison's gay men's chorus (and gay-affirming, which means we've had non-gay members before), and so has a bit of an ambassadorial function. So it's good to sing at Pride events, or Pride-like events.

I drove up from Smalltown after shopping at the downtown farmer's market, then going home to make a real meal. The sweet corn is starting to be sold. This year has been a good one for corn, with early rains, then lots of heat and humidity in July. The fields of corn as you drive by on the country roads are deep grain, without that yellow fringe at the edges early in the season that indicates underwatering: signs of drought that have been present for over a decade, banished these past two or three years of high rains. We've had flooding at times, especially along the Rock River, but the high rains have also been replenishing our aquifer, so the groundwater reserves are back to full strength.

I wandered around Pride for awhile, visiting each of the booths, overly aware of the loud music coming from the main stage and the tent with a partial dancefloor, gritty with dust and grains of dirt, which was starting up an hour of country music line-dancing. Social dancing is big in some zones of the LGBT subculture: line-dancing, square dance, waltzing, swing, all these living archaic social dance styles. I grew up with isolate solitaire dance styles being the cultural avant-grade: punk mosh pits, rock & roll mutual touchless grooving. Being touch-starved, I always appreciated social dancing. When I was a shy boy, I was actually good at square-dancing. I remember going to some barns in small town Michigan for square dances, with some friends and co-workers, pre- and post-college. It was good fun, but it didn't set deeply into my soma. Contact improv and contemporary modern classes, which came later in my life, left deeper marks.

I shopped a little at a couple of the storefront booths. I bought two or three new LGBT lapel pins. I collect and wear lapel pins. Except for some necklaces, some of which I make myself, which are more tied to neo-pagan urges, I wear no jewelry except pins I can attach to clothing. No tattoos, no piercings, no jewelry, no rings, nothing. Wearing gold makes me crazy after a few days. I only wear silver or pewter, or non-conductive materials. It's something energetic. I found a few rainbow-patterned LGBT pins that I liked, including one that's a Taoist yin-yang, only the white side of the evolving spiral is rainbow-patterned. It's all branding, it's all advertising. We use these logs and markers to broadcast who we are, ever so subtly. How often do you find an Eastern religion icon being combined with LGBT patterning? It's very rare. I may have to design a Buddhist eight-spoked wheel with rainbow insets. The yin-yang-rainbow is unusual enough in context. You can find rainbow crosses, fishes, and other Christian icons all too readily. As usual, very little is available for us non-mainstream religious types, unless we make it ourselves. Actually, I'll have to make a rainbow medicine wheel, a rainbow pentagram, and other icons, to fully express my own inner spiritual diversity. I found at one store a pewter raven icon, which I gave to my Radical Faerie friend named SilverRaven; I gifted him with that name, and now with an iconic calling-card raven emblem: pattern recognition.

I had a snack of Jamiacan jerk chicken, and a bottle of water, from a food stand. I chatted with friends for awhile. I walked around some more. I took some candid photos of the crowd, and attractive bodies within the crowd. It was a hot day, and shirts were often off. Soon it was time to perform. we gathered near the stage, listening to a loud queer rock band doing mostly 70s rock covers. Why is it that so many lead singers in such bands play bass? Bass players seem more grounded than guitarists, and often compose and sing. At least four or five great singer-songwriters in pop music are bassists. (I admit to bias, being a bassist myself.) They were a loud band, but a good one. Rings of tough-looking women were in front of the stage, some dancing. A pair of gender-indeterminate swing dancers circled near the mixing board. We did our hour-long set, and several times made the crowd laugh, or nod and sing along with the music. We pulled them in, and joined all of us in the music.

When we were done, and offstage, I was so tired I could barely walk back to the truck. After a week of camping in the Northwoods, and the long drive home the day before (300 miles from campsite to front door), I found this entire Pride festival entirely too loud. It was great fun, and too loud for me. I love that Pride is a celebration; I don't always like that it's a party, and not always very political anymore. Our set onstage reminded us all of some of the politics, with songs about rights, about being who we are, about requiring more than mere tolerance from our culture.

I drove home in silence.

I have spent all day today collapsed and exhausted. The days have been tiring. I've needed the downtime. Tomorrow is soon enough to listen to voicemails, to answer emails, to re-engage with those aspects of modern life I feel no desire to engage with today. Perhaps not even tomorrow, but the next day. After a long time camping in the relative quiet of the distant wilds, I'm reluctant to re-engage at all. Time changes: it slows down. Time becomes a daily cycle rather than clock-driven demand. Time stretches. When time changes, so does space, because they're inextricably linked. You can change one by changing the other: and their effects on you. Today, mostly tired, mostly silent, not even wanting to read very much, having reached the end of words, the limits of words, I find myself wanting to do no more now than watch the lingering dusk, listen to the small frogs and crickets out the window, and feel the cool breeze after another hot, dusty day. There is no need to fill this silence with noise; no need for any rush back to the Usual Stuff. Why rush? It will eventually catch you up. The trick is to make it work for it, to make it work hard to get you back, to postpone the inevitable re-engagement as long as possible.

And that is what vacation means.

Returning from Elsewhere: Narratives

Well. I'm back.

From eight days camping in the Northwoods. Off the grid. Off the map, even. From dipping into Lake Superior's mists and shoals. From No Place Between. Northernmost Minnesota, above the Lake, in the Arrowhead counties that have few paved roads once you leave the shoreside highways and towns behind. Where they call the region The Top Of The Map. Where you're as close to Canada as you can get without treading waterlines, where you're closer in mood and art to the Arctic than to life in the cities.

Back from all that happens when you go: those rapid intense changes to the self that happen when you're focused in and there's no outwards distractions to keep you from mortal spelunking. From being dislocated at least once into a shards of what you once believed, given permission to fall apart on the lawn and take several days to stitch yourself back together, a kind of reconfiguration that honors the old pattern of self without duplicating it, or its mistakes. From the annual hard work of camping with others that takes its toll on your strength and energy: having fun at such a high intensity is as tiring as having a meltdown, because living life at such high intensity for more than a week is always exhausting, and requires time to process. From sleeping in utter dark and silence, with a loon calling occasionally from the neighboring lake. From getting out of the tent in the middle of the night for a moment, to witness the Milky Way covering half the sky, foreground veiled by the tall silhouettes of cedars and white pine. From starlight bright enough to see to be able to walk the trail. From the long glare of a close meteor, so bright it leaves a long tail behind it, so close the fireball at its head is green-white with the light from distressed burning ions. From where a bachelor wolf came into the cabin clearing the other day, a little bit lost and curious. From dipping naked into the Temperance River, and Hare Lake, and showering outdoors under water hand-pumped cold from the well and heated in 55 gallon oil drums over a small fire to run down the hill through hoses and valves and emerge as liquid ecstasy.

And I'm not back.

Part of me always wants to linger, after returning from a week's camping, or a roadtrip, or a photo travel expedition, or just going to visit someone Elsewhere. I'm always reluctant to dive back into the virtual world of Connexion, be it online, via phone, or even just to let the neighbors notice you're back. Of course they will, anyway, when on a steambath morning in August you're unloading the truck, shirtless, and piling clothes and blankets for laundry, washing the road dust off the windows, and opening the tent to air and dry it out. The tent lies on the lawn on its back like a satellite dish or an upturned beetle kicking the air, helpless and cleaned out. It's a downtown market morning but do you really want to do the work of getting dressed and going out.

You want to linger in the silence that you slept in, comfortably, for the past week. You get no better sleep than sleeping outdoors in a tent, in utter silence and darkness. Sometimes very strong dreams emerge from it. Time has shifted; nothing ever seems quite as urgent as it did before leaving. Reluctance to re-engage with the high speed traffic of email and Connexion from everywhere via cyberspace, that feather-light non-touch that means nothing to the body. Even reading books in the morning, the usual morning practice, shifts away from deep thought towards deeper thoughts in fiction or poetry, those truths that can tell deeper human truths because they cloak them as lies.

You want to take a few more days to return, to gear up to speed slowly and gently, not grinding your gears, not pushing or being pushed faster than inner quiet requires. To spend at least a day doing nothing but laundry and silent integration before you take up all those other conversations that Connexion requires.

And eventually get back into the pace of everyday life. But maybe slowed down a little. Maybe a little more thoughtful than before. Maybe with a slight sideways look at what people take for granted, don't think about much, a look with a little suspicion that it doesn't have to be that way, that it could maybe be better, or at least different. A little detachment brought back from No Place Between, to protect you from the vice of egoism, the sin of pointless drama, the sadomasochism of everyday life. A bit of perspective, no judgment on it, a bit of detachment, learned from Elsewhere, and those gods that walk there, reminding you that whatever you think you need to live, there's Something More than this.

Whitman Sutra (Tantrayana)

I sing the body physical
    shaping my cells out of the orgasm of creation
    pulling DNA-rapt bones around me like a Navajo blanket
    wrapping myself in the illusion of matter, eternally foaming
    living light wrapped in the thunder weave and quantum sea
I sing the body mental
    never separate from the physical
    but abstracted and far too full of myself
    able to build whole worlds but
    contradicting myself with hidden truths divisive
    double-willed, double-walled
I sing the body emotional
    pulling me into lust and action
    towards you, my infinite row of loves
    those I have loved, those I love, those I will love
    loving the women in the men and the men in the women
    equal balancing, newly incarnate,
    hope-fear under the rose
I sing the body spiritual
    the angel-beast ceaselessly climbing into the light
    pulling me onto then off of paths of desire
    divining the twin pulls of head, hand, and heart
    leading me with glimpses to find the good red road
I sing the body erotic
    fingers button-pushing energetic nerves of activation
self-touched and touching, tickles of sweat down ribs
    joineries of lips, hands, thighs, breasts, and fevered loins
    the whole skin come alive at once and tingling
    flushed from eartips to tarsals, brown aureoles red aflame
I sing the electric body
    grown hard and handsome in the cyberlight—
    if the body is to be transcended, let it be
    in the way of ecstatic spirit, not of ascetic cybergnosis,
    the avant-garde agnostic denial and scourging of the meat
no, no, yes I will yes, I sing the body sexual
    the pulls of semen and milk
    every flavor of sweat and secretion, febrile and erotic
    fevered and glowing in the inner eye
I sing the sensual sexual refrain proclaimed by the Old Body Poet
the first electric god, who if he’d had a guitar
    could have out-ecstasied Jimi and all the rest
I proclaim the body sensual
    all girls and boys of every age filled
        with adolescent hormone surge
    all pornographic incandescent illicit pleasures
        those lovely mergings of fluids
        minglings of desire and intent so dangerous
        to the stability of the State
    all engagements and weddings of every gender
    all wedding rings and love rings and sex-rings
    all starving naked poets drooling toothless and drunken
        over pretty boys and girls unclothed in summer’s heat
    all old ones grown wise as crones, and still in love
I proclaim the poetry of the body
    poetry of bodies aflame with desire
    poetry of self-loving masturbation
    poetry of coupling and uncoupling and tripling polyamory
        until the numbers rise past count
    poetry of touching yourself and touching each other
        in loving touch, gentle and tough and desirous
    all the poets of lust and innocence and masturbation
I sing the fulfilling promise of the timeless ecstasy of orgasm
    merging of sperm and saliva and vaginal pomegranate juice
I sing the forever moment
    encapsulated in chemical explosions in nerves and brains and groins
    involuntary spasm twitch of structural muscle and bone
    surge of vibrant juices
    tingles in belly and behind the knees
I sing the ultimate man, the ultimate woman,
    the compleat tumescent naked boy, the uncensored uncensured girl
    the men and women and children who freely exchange their very beings
        trading couplings and loving experiments
        like bees encircling their goddess-queen,
        the eyes of rising sunflowers
I sing all of myself and all of you
    joining in one quivering sexual thrill
    worldwide simultaneous orgasm that never falls off the crest
    exploding forever in lifelove
        (and Shiva dances in the flames:
        the world, the world’s on fire)
    resetting itself to one with every tick of tiniest quantum clock
    always on, even as everything flickers a billion times
        in and out of existence as I sing
I sing the man-woman of many parts and all time
    being and oneness rising from nothing
    decaying into glowing compost of spacetime
    bio-luminescent and strangely attractive
I sing the divine body
    perfect form of the lover
    who waits at top of stairs with glowing eyes
    and dissolves into diamond seawater sparkles at our touch
I sing every moment of absolute sexual fulfillment
    from hugest singing whale to oldest sun-loving lichen
    every million years or so adding a new verse to the eternal song
        a new chorus of voices rising into light
    coming round and round to the chanted refrain
    uncountable voices crying every moment in ecstatic climax release
I sing the music that never dies, that cannot die
    love of men and the love of women
    love of every moment for every location
    mutual masturbation of exploding spacetime
    the big bang, continuously created universal orgasm
I sing the coming and becoming
I sing the one that is every one
I sing the word that is every word
I sing the one song that is every song
I sing the creator seeing itself through the eye of the created
I sing every love-drunken poet who ever lived
    to proclaim the frantic lovemaking
    of one universe endlessly permeating itself
    penetrating and receiving in timeless mutual bliss
I sing every lover, every boy and girl, every girl and boy,
    and every boy and boy, every girl and girl
    and every boy girl boy, every girl boy girl
everyone and everything
I sing that I am you, that I am myself
I sing that I am everything and everything is me
I am singing to you, you are chanting back to me
    words of union and respect
    cadences of desire and sustaining love
    one final chord of resolution in each other’s arms
we sing the dissolving oneness of the divided
    yin melting into yang, yang melting into yin
    oneness that underlies all twoness
    union with the Beloved
we sing the mutual interpenetration of bodies
    and of hearts and minds
we sing each other into being
    coming together, two made into one
I sing you and you sing me
we sing each other into being
    we sing the body physical
    we sing the body mental
    we sing the body emotional
    we sing the body spiritual
    we sing the body erotic
we sing the body electric
we sing the body electric
    the Old Gay Poet, birds nestled with love in his beard,
    was right, was right, was always right
we sing the body electric

•

This poem was originally written in 1995, as one of the Sutras. It was the first of three poems that I've written, so far, to and for Walt Whitman, icon and poet and grandfather. Published here and now in slightly revised form, summer 2009. (©2009 AP Durkee)

Also in this series:

Ode to Walt Whitman (2008)

Walt Whitman's Summer Wander Across North America (2009)

The Ode to Walt Whitman is also part of a series of Odes I am writing for and about queer poets have mattered to my thinking and writing.

Brief Lives Sutra (Tantrayana)

i.

Nothing casual about it.
You arrived so unexpectedly, it had
to have been planned.

So I had you for a day,
part of a day and a night,
though it seemed much more.

In sleep a beast whose breathing
was rough and tender,
probably from smoking;
I was content, enveloped in
the warming touch of your skin.

Shall I be jealous of a dog? But she’s
your best friend, the only one you really trust,
who never leaves your side.
Deep brown spaniel eyes, dark and ageless,
watch me with dismissal: I’m not you.
Your marriage of eyes and walking
has preserved you best: so be it.
She has you forever. If I only have you
for a day, that’s enough.

ii.

Comfortably naked after showering, after
a morning of sweaty woods work,
plagued by flies and biting sun.
I didn’t want to get dressed.
Room enough in the shower for two.
He wanted to watch everyone bathe,
but had to coaxed out of his clothes.

Walking nude down to the lake,
half-hard, I hid myself with my sarong
in front, nothing behind.
Boots and shaman necklaces enough to wear.

The blue sky, the endless water,
spring-clear and icy. Loons called all morning, lost.
Not only the body naked.

Lying on my back on the raft, sunlight, and cool breeze.
He said, “May I?” and I said,
“Feel free.” And before I knew what,
his lips encircled my cock, worshipful.
Instant electric pulse through the entire body,
back arched on the wood of the raft,
warm and soft-sliding little noises.
Imagine my surprise.

I touched his hips and cock and chest
and the obstetric line hatcheting his groin
below full balls.
His cock bigger than mine,
but he kept telling me how much
he loved mine.
Kissing nipples till I came.

Came everywhere, endlessly,
in the heat and sun,
on the floating raft by the marsh grass
and rocks. “Wow, that was a big load,
you must have been saving it for a long time.”
Imagine his surprise.

To be pursued, surprised, caught
and released. I am God’s fish,
the favorite catch of the day.

Talking in the tingle of afterwards,
kissing. The smoothest skin in any state,
the roundest shoulder, the firmest breast.

Fulfillment of a prescient wish:
to make love naked by the water
in the sun in the woods naked
and alone and alive the whole world vibrating.
Now the sky bells, blue ringing.
Worth a little sunburn.

In the cool cabin light he says:
“I can’t wait till tonight,”
and kisses me.
Who is the fish? Who is the fisherman?
The Beloved caught up in the catching,
hooked by hooking.
I have waited so very long.

Nothing casual about it.
You arrived so unexpectedly, it had
to have been planned.


iii.

the effeminist, androgynous torso
soft still very male
in the as yet unheard echo
bonfire crackling under stars as they turn
deer cries, owls, songs of tamarack
needles crying out as they cast free and plummet

narrow-hipped Nataraj
dancing in and out of nearness
leaping the bonfire nude
an instant before dry balsam explodes
missed searing his scrotum
by microseconds

but I catch him on film
not a repose between dances
rather a stillpoint amidst turnings
a fast enough shutter
to freeze an illusion of stillness
caught outside time’s black flow


iv.

the loons call throughout the night
surrounding your senses with flight and benediction

in the coldest hours I want to snuggle
close to your back, breathe your sweat,
burrow deep inside your heart,
remind myself of existence

sleep comes fitfully: how many years
sleeping alone, naked, comfortless?

even in the darkness I see your whitened skin
the dark hair that so contrasts
even in the dark, you lighten the tent

beeswax candles flicked the aureoles of your breast
as head back, kneeling above me, you came
I worship at the shrine of your semen
climbing a thin white rope towards god


v.

in the dark mustiness of the cabin noon,
pants down around my ankles,
you sucking my cock,
the slam of the screen door
as someone comes in.
odd that it doesn’t bother me
to be caught like this.
but it’s just my brother,
he smiles and waves,
grabs the ash bucket and goes.
back to business.

sleeping in the cold night tent,
bodies pressed together for warmth.
it had been hot in here earlier,
lit by one candles and two bodies.
he sleeps deep and long,
not noticing or not minding
when I touch his torso
in the middle night,
wondering if all this is real.
(which is the dream? butterfly or sex?)
he snores in stages, four growly honks
a ruminating grizzly
then quiet for awhile.

and before it fades to black,
a few brief scrawled letters
then back to the long listening:

one shoulder naked
in northern lights
sun aurora sentinel moon
shoulder breast and body
glowing by firelight moonlight candlelight
skywheel spinning behind your head
halo of stars

before it fades

before

Gluten-Free Baking

Since I had to go gluten-free a year and a half ago, I've been learning to bake all over again. I've actually enjoyed myself a lot, learning to use new materials, new kinds of flour, new kinds of techniques and blends. I've viewed this as a fun project, not as a hardship.

When my friends were visiting from out of town, we had some fun experimenting with baking. We made a key lime pie from fresh key limes. We made a few other projects, for fun. I've found a gluten-free pancake and waffle mix that I really like, that makes great waffles. I found my mother's 1970s Oster waffle-maker when I was emptying out my parents' house. It was buried in the back of a cupboard in the kitchen. I doubt anyone had seen or used it in years. I've been enjoying making waffles periodically ever since.

A few days ago, then, we made scones. I used the basic scone recipe from that classic of cooking, The Joy of Cooking, which I have three different editions of, from three different decades. It's fun to have an old edition of Joy, as it contains recipes dropped later on.

We made scones with white chocolate chips and blueberries, following the basic recipe. The result was fabulous. Delicious, tasty, and perfect.

One of the tricks of doing gluten-free baking is that, obviously, you have to find another binding agent for the flours, since wheat gluten is not possible. I use xantham gum, and I also use an egg yolk.

From the egg whites left over from the key lime pie, we also experimented with making maple meringue cookies. That was less successful, and we undercooked them. But it was an experiment, and although they were soft and didn't shape up right, they were delicious.

But I'm real proud of the scones. They were fantastic.

Dinner With Friends

Recently I hosted a big dinner party at home, with friends visiting from out of town. I served on the redwood table on the back porch. I had planned the meal for a few days beforehand, and done shopping and preparations. Afterwards, I was really tired, but it was a good dinner. The extra glass of wine, sitting on the porch, as the dusk surrounded the house after folks had left, was soothing.

Since I had to change my diet and go gluten-free a year and a half ago, I have been learning to bake all over again. A lot of the cuisines I have been cooking and eating for years were already virtually gluten-free—a lot of Asian cuisines use rice rather than wheat products as a matter of course—and others have been not hard to modify—I love Italian, and am a major user of Marcella Hazan's recipes, especially her classic book Essentials of Italian Cooking.



For this dinner, I had envisioned and invented a sort of Italian pan-roasted chicken variation. I cut chicken breasts the long way and pan-roasted the strips on the stove in my largest pan, lightly covering them with lemon juice, minced garlic, and a pinch of rosemary. I turned the strips a couple of times, and let them roast on the stove for about 25 minutes on low-medium heat. Then, for the last two minutes of cooking, I glazed the chicken with a reduced-orange glaze I’d made the night before—the juices of two oranges, simmered slowly on low heat for about two hours, with a pinch of tarragon—sprinkled them with more minced garlic flakes, and broiled them for two minutes to brown the glaze. I also dribbled small chunks of Boursin cheese on top of the chicken, which added another spot of flavor; as the cheese melted and browned under the broiler, and the orange glaze browned, the dish was all done.

The chicken was then served on a platter, on a bed of rinsed spinach. The heat from the chicken wilted the spinach just a little bit. The orange glaze wasn’t at all sweet, but tart and citrus, and the pinch of tarragon added a complementary savory flavor. The only flaw in this recipe was that the chicken was the tiniest bit dry; I think next time I make this, more of the juice from the pan-roasting phase needs to follow the chicken into the broiler, to keep it moist. But the flavor was terrific.

I served the chicken with saffron rice, with raisins in it. Everybody seemed to think the meal was delicious, and the raisin-saffron rice was a good complement. I only used just a tiny amount of saffron, so it didn’t color the rice much, but did a hint of flavor to it.

I served the meal with a favorite pinot grigio from Tuscany.



I had seen this meal in my mind’s eye a few days before, but I did look up pan-roasted chicken in Marcella Hazan’s cookbook, just to make sure about timings and flavors.

For dessert, my former neighbor J. made a black raspberry silk pie in a gluten-free pie shell, from berries she’d picked from her garden around his house. We had that with Cool Whip on top. I had made a key lime pie, too, only this time I had gotten a bag full of key limes from Mexico; we juiced about 30 of the little limes at great personal peril to make the pie. It takes about a cup of juice for a big pie—those gluten-free pie shells are about double the size of the store-bought regular pie shells, so they hold a double recipe. We made a but more juice then needed, so the pie came out extra-tart, which was wonderful. I’ll probably make key lime pies most of ten from the store-bought juice that’s really good (Nellie & Joe’s Key Lime Juice), but this was a good experiment, and a good result.

Flag Interlude

I am a patriot: I believe in the values upon which my country was founded, and by which it tries to live. It's unfashionable in intellectual, educated, artistic circles to be a patriot; yet I am one. I share many of the ideals and values stated by the Founders of our country, and the Framers of its Constitution. I also believe, 233 years after the Declaration of Independence was written, that times and culture have changed, and we must evolve with the changes, even as we hold to the ideals and positive values that the Founders put forth in their writings.

I am not a thoughtless, soundbyte-wielding, emotional-button-pushing patriot: if I criticize my country, it's when it hasn't lived up to its own oft-stated values and ideals, when we haven't done the best we could do, or enacted the beliefs we stand for. Few things raise my ire faster than blatant hypocrisy, or double-standards that people employ to avoid walking their talk. I believe that a person must live their beliefs, adhere to their principles, and enact their ideas in their lives, by example, not by words alone.

I believe in healthy dissent, and in political dialogue. In my lifetime, I've been a LGBT rights activist, an anti-war activist, and an environmental activist. I've marched in the streets, I've been in a riot or two, I've practiced civil disobedience en masse. I believe that the political and economic powers do not often have the best wishes of the nation or its people in mind, and must be always monitored and spoken to. I've spoken out when called to by circumstances, outrage and events.

Poet and former AIM activist John Trudell once said, "Don't trust anyone who isn't angry." What he meant was: complacency is death; silence is death; if you are not outraged by world events, you are either enlightened or complicit. If you are not stirred by the suffering of others, if you are not moved to compassionate action, be it quiet and invisible or public and vocal, you leave behind your own humanity.

When Patrick Henry said, "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty," what he meant that the people must always be on the alert against those forces who would erode our liberties in the name of their own power, especially when those they cloak themselves in the flag, or in religion, or in the name of a greater security. It is easy for the government, and the corporations who attempt to control it, to manipulate the truth only when those governed remain silent. So it's our duty to speak out, when we see injustice and the erosion of our civil rights as people. Benjamin Franklin, another of the Founders, said, "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."



In these political sentiments I am very much a Jeffersonian: Jeffersonians believe that liberty is the quintessence of life, and government is a necessary evil. Jefferson believed that government must be kept on the defensive at all times—something our contemporary media seems to have forgotten. Jefferson believed that the people have not only a natural right to withdraw consent from their social contract, they in fact they have a duty to periodically shake up government to remind their governors that they serve at the pleasure of the people, and not otherwise. Jefferson believed that liberty is an ideal that must always be strived for, must always be defended, and must be reinforced through necessary dissent. Politically, I am and always have been, a Jeffersonian. Who I vote for in any given election is nobody's damn business; but be assured that I do vote, that I do actively participate in our Jeffersonian democracy.

One of the central values upon which my country was built is that diversity of opinion is to be respected, and disputes are to be resolved by dialogue and discussion. I believe that it is sometimes necessary to dissent from the majority, if one believes strongly. I believe that the dynamic tension of argued values is what moves us forward towards making the world a finer place in which to live. I believe that many of my fellow citizens say hateful and cowardly things and use the principle of free speech as a shield to hide behind when they speak; but while I might hate what you say, and not like you for saying it, I will defend to the death your right to say it. Either speech is free or it isn't: either we can all speak our minds freely, without suffering retribution, or we cannot.

My values do not require others to share them. I do not believe that everyone must believe or think the same as I do. I appreciate diversity. I dislike enforced conformity.

Therefore I am not a super-patriot; I do not believe in those jingoistic "my country right or wrong" or "love it or leave it" sentiments. Super-patriotism is designed to shut down disagreement and dissent. It intends to enforce conformity. It is one of the most thoughtlessly tribal of discourses. It is often intolerance and hate concealing itself behind patriotism. Nationalistic jingoism is one of the most venal of political stances, because it allows no tolerance for dissent or debate. It is anti-Jeffersonian in its claim to be in support of liberty while actively seeking to suppress dissent. It is tyrannical at its root, and it reviles thoughtful consideration of political issues from multiple viewpoints. Jingoistic patriotism is proudly anti-intellectual, proudly rightist, and openly contemptuous of civil political discourse.



I am a patriot because I believe in the values for which my country stands. I am not a super-patriot, because I don't believe that everyone has to share our values, or that we need to impose them upon others. I believe in peaceful coexistence, diversity, and dialogue between those of good intent and with differing opinion.

I do not make the stupid mistake of thinking that the symbol is the real thing. I never confuse the symbol with what it represents. I might appreciate the beauty of the symbol, but I do not reify the symbol into something sacred in its own rite, therefore conflating the symbol with what it represents. When you mistake the symbol for what it represents, it's all too easy to focus on caring for the symbol and entirely neglecting, or even forgetting about, what the symbol represents.

Our national flag stands for liberty and freedom, for diversity within unity, and for equality among all those who adopt the values of the nation for which the flag is an icon. The flag is a visual, symbolic locus of values and ideals. The Stars & Stripes are meant to wave boldly in the face of tyranny, and proclaim liberty; they are not meant to be sacred in themselves. Those who would make of the flag an untouchable, unchangeable, inflexible icon that may not be commented upon nor desecrated have already forgotten the ideals of liberty and free speech that the flag represents. They impose tyranny in the name of liberty, and have no true understanding of the meaning of liberty.



The lovely annual custom in my small Midwestern town is to raise numerous flags on Memorial Day at the local veteran's cemetery, and leave them raised through the Fourth of July holiday. The lawn there is covered with small flags at every graveside, and the summer trees are filled with the light rippling off fifty large flags on tall poles. There is also one tall on a yet higher pole at one end of the cemetery, amidst all the other flags, circled by a small garden, with benches for quiet sitting and contemplation. It's a quiet, lovely place to sit and remember, and give back thoughts of love, honor, sacrifice, and thanks.



I appreciate and like this annual custom. I believe we ought to honor our veterans, living as well as dead, and I honor their sacrifices. And I also think all the flags moving in the breeze are majestically beautiful, purely as living visual art. I am the opposite of a nationalist jingoistic flag-waving super-patriot; and I have always thought the US flag was very beautiful, both as a symbol and as a piece of inspired graphic design. Inspired is the exact word. From Betsy Ross' original design through to the present day, several of the US flags that have been designed and flown are elegant, simple, iconic, beautiful works of art. Few national flags have been so thoughtfully, even archetypally, designed and flown. I admit to some national bias in this aesthetic judgment, yet I also think it's a valid artistic judgment.



This year at my new home I chose to follow my town's custom, and raised a flag, on the garage wall at the front of my home, on Memorial Day. I intend to leave my flag up through the Fourth of July, following the local custom.

I had to buy a new flag, even though I had kept my late father's old flag. The mounting brackets on the wall had disintegrated from weather and age, and so to buy a new mounting bracket, I had to buy a new pole, and a new lightweight flag as well, as a combined kit. My father's flag, which I have folded carefully to store, is a large, heavy, all-cotton flag; it's far too heavy for the new mounting bracket.

I am the opposite of a flag worshipping, jingoistic patriot. I say it again because it's important to distance oneself from the worst forms of nationalism. I have made political protest art incorporating the flag. I love the image of the flag but I do not confuse it with what it is meant to symbolize. I have used the flag's image in satirical art, in collages, in processed photographs, and in other ways. In many ways I remain a political radical who understands the (psychological, spiritual) power of symbols: to evoke, to incite, to inspire. I've participated in anti-war protests. I've had close friends who were Vietnam veterans, who flew the flag upside down, the classic distress signal, all during the first Gulf War. I sympathize with their feelings, their fears, their hopes, their intentions.

Yet I was moved, when I raised my new flag, to stand at attention and give my best imitation of a good Marine salute. I've never done anything like that before. Ever. I'm not military, or ex-military and never have been; although an uncle I was close to was in the Navy in WW II. I respect the Warriors I have known who are ex-military. (And I have dated ex-military; a long weird story for another time.) I have nothing but contempt for the totalitarian impulse in our country to ban flag-burning as political protest; I will always come down on the "free speech" side of that argument. Yet I was moved to salute the flag, when I put it up on Memorial Day. I respect the symbol, and what it stands for. I understand the emotional power the symbol carries. I care deeply for my country, even if some folks have called me subversive and un-American at times for expressing opinions in my art that are in opposition to the mainstream. No one was more surprised than I, that I might stand and salute the symbol. I don't always know why I do what I do: I do know, however, with all my heart and intuition, when something is the right thing to do. As I've grown older I no longer prevent myself from doing the right thing even if it's the strange or embarrassing thing. I've come to trust my feelings, and my intuition, and the field from which they arise.

So, I stood there under the lip of the overhang in front my garage, stood at attention to the best of my ability, and saluted the flag. I don't know why, and I don't need to know why; and neither, I believe, do you.