Toilantrouble

VARIATIONS ON A THEME BY JOHN MILTON

You think it’s easy being God
Well, that’s just the trouble.
Let me give you an example.
I’m like, hey Gabriel, how about some tennis
He’s like, no, I think I’ll pass man.
He says he gets tired of game set match God all the time
I can’t even get up a crap game.
Who wants to shoot craps with God?
That’s where the three persons thing comes in
Where did you people get that?
Now if it was four,
We could play two-on-two basketball
The upshot is, who’d want to play
Any kind of game with me, but me?
Or is it us?
Me us, us me,
It is all one; I will sing of the sun …
I didn’t make that up
Ezra Pound made that up
But, then, I made up Ezra Pound
So you see how it is

There was only one person
Ever dumb enough to play golf with me
Lucifer … Lucie.
He used to complain
It was a girl’s name but I told him
No, angels are genderless
And anyway it means “light bearer”
And he’d say, I don’t see you bearing lights around
Like it’s my fault I can see in the dark
So he used to call himself Angel Pimp Numbah One
And I didn’t see any particular harm in it at the time
Any way, the golf game
I could see he was taking it really seriously
And I admit it I started tweaking him a little bit
Every time I got a hole in one, which was every time actually,
I’d make it thunder really loud
And whenever he’s shoot I’d play the theme music from
Six Feet Under, which would irritate him
Because he really hates that show.

So anyway, he goes down big in that golf game
Hello … I’m God
I can’t make myself lose
I mean I can and I can’t
I mean I can, but then losing becomes winning
It’s what you call a paradox
But I thought he did really well
Maybe he took this wrong but
I did like Edward G. Robinson in the Cincinnati Kid, I said
“You’re good. But you’re not good enough”
That’s when he told me to go to hell
Which … was … a big mistake.

But you know, I missed the guy
I even asked him back for another round
But he was like, No Way
So now he just sneaks around and steals my golf balls
And leaves cigarette buts all over the clubhouse
Like I wouldn’t know it was him
He was the only one who ever took up smoking up here
When he went through his rebellious phase
And started doing all these little things
Wearing his pants down really low
And I tried to tell him how silly he looked
I mean, I don’t know how much you know
About angel anatomy, but what I said was
Dude, what are you doing,
You don’t even have a butt?

So, when I think back on it
And I know you folks can do that too
But have you ever tried to think forward?
I know you think you can do that
But you know the saying
Man proposes, God disposes
Well as George Bush would have said
I’m the disposer
So what was I saying?
Oh yeah, thinking back (and forward)
I knew the guy was a trouble-maker,
So why did I let him get away with it?
And why do I let him run all over the
Neighborhood selling crack
And leading folks into carnal knowledge?
Well … here’s the thing.
Apart from its being part of my
Vast eternal plan
Until you people came along
He was the only thing that kept it
From being really boring around here.

CYCLES OF CHANGE IN ACHEBE AND YEATS

                Any piece of literature that works within a defined historical or social context derives a portion of its rhetorical power from its ability to transcend that context and reveal something about the universal human experience.  The colonization of Africa by European countries and the establishment of European social, political, economic and religious values as significant, and at times dominant, forces on the African continent have certainly formed the basis of much of what has happened there since the 19th century. To a large extent these events remain embedded in the African body politic, a fact that is reflected in the work of many African writers.  It is, of course, useful to read the literary reflections of Africans if one desires to understand the particular experience of Africa during the past century and a half. Chinua Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart, with its authentic depiction of Ibo culture and the details of British colonization in the late 19th century, has no doubt served in this regard as an important educative tool for its many American and European readers.  As with any great work of literature, however, Achebe's novel achieves not only the significant feat of illuminating the local, Ibo experience, but the more difficult one of linking that local experience to the broad sweep of human character and interaction. An examination of the novel's universality may logically begin with references to William Butler Yeats' 1919 poem "The Second Coming," from which Achebe took the title of his work. And whereas neither work is dependent on the other for its meaning, and each deals with its own particular ideas, the novel and the poem are linked by the clarity with which they portray each writer's perceptions of the patterns of human history.

                In order to make sense of "The Second Coming," it is necessary to understand something of the complex blend of occult and mathematical ideas that underlie Yeats' vision of reality. In the early part of the 20th century Yeats and his wife, George, developed a cosmological construct that they called The System, and which drew its principles from physics, theology and philosophy. Among its fundamental ideas are the balance of opposing forces—a concept found in Buddhism and other eastern philosophies—and  the notion of cycles of expansion and destruction, which finds expression in world views ranging from aboriginal Australian cosmology to modern Christianity.  Infused into The System is the notion of 2,000 year cycles brought about by the interaction of the divine and the mundane, as in the Greek legend of Leda, Queen of Sparta—who  according to the myth, was impregnated by Zeus—and the Christian belief in the immaculate conception of Mary through the Holy Spirit 2,000 years later.  In "The Second Coming," Yeats carries the idea further, predicting an end to the Christian cycle with the verses "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"  The term "the Second Coming" is used in Christian theology to refer to the unspecified time when Jesus Christ will return, earthly life will end, and the kingdom of God will be established; however, Yeats seems to have meant the term in a broader sense, theologically speaking, as evidenced by his reference to Spiritus  Mundi--literally, "the spirit of the world"--rather than to "God" or "Jesus." The idea of an end time characterized by disorder and destruction, as in the verses "Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned," is consistent with Christian belief as contained in the book of Revelations, but also reflects more ancient views, both biblical and non-biblical, of periodic destruction and renewal. Yeats' apocalyptic vision can be seen in many of his poems from the 1920s and 1930s, according to the Oxford Companion to English Literature, and is also described in Yeats' 1925 fictional work The Vision. It is also worth noting that Yeats had witnessed the awful destruction of World War I, a cataclysm that led many writers to doubt the future of human civilization, or at least to redefine their ideas concerning it. As Kwame Anthony Appiah puts it in the introduction to the Everyman's Library edition of Things Fall Apart, "he saw in the terrible destruction of the first decades of the 20th century signs that this Christian cycle was coming to an end."

                Achebe's novel also deals with an enormous paradigm shift, the loss of cultural and political autonomy by African peoples with the onset of European colonization; and whereas there is no evidence in Achebe's writings that he meant his novel to be taken as a direct analogy to Yeats' poem, the use of a key verse from the poem as the title of the novel does lend emphasis to the epochal nature of the African colonial experience. Appiah notes the irony that, "the cycle that is ending is, for Achebe, an age of autonomy in his Ibo homeland; and the cycle that will follows will be a Christian cycle," whereas, in Yeats' poem, it is the Christian cycle that is coming to an end.  Nevertheless, the idea of a change so sweeping that, as Yeats put it, "the center cannot hold" is relevant to Achebe's work. Okonkwo, the protagonist of Things Fall Apart, is, in a sense, a man without a center. According to Appiah, a professor of philosophy at Princeton University and author of such works­ as In My Father's House and Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race, Okonkwo's tragic downfall can be attributed to his "failure to seek balance between the manly virtues and the womanly virtues as understood in Umuofia." Okonkwo, shamed and obsessed by his father's "womanliness"—in other words, his lack of material success—attempts  to distance himself from anything that smacks of femininity, whereas, as Appiah points out, "he lives in a culture that requires a balance between masculine and feminine."

                  For Yeats, the center cannot hold indefinitely because each age contains the seeds of its own negation and, in seeking to become its own opposite, it destroys itself: "Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer."  In his notes for "The Second Coming" Yeats explained his use of the gyre as the opening image of the poem as a representation of the ultimate conflict within humankind: "In other words, the human soul is always moving outward into the objective world or inward into itself; this movement is double because the human soul would not be conscious were it not suspended between two contraries, the greater the contrast the more intense the consciousness." Yeats even included in his notes a diagram of a double cone, the narrow end of each centered in the broad end of the other, a static representation of the dynamic process of destruction and renewal—ending and beginning—that Yeats believed animated the universe. It is perhaps worth noting here that spiral and conical shapes also figure prominently in mathematics and science. An example is the so-called Fibonacci spiral, whose form can be observed in natural phenomena ranging from mollusk shells to the shapes of galaxies. Those mysterious energy sinks that physicists call black holes are also sometimes represented graphically as conical or spiral in nature.

                In Achebe's novel, the widening gyre in which the falcon no longer hears the falconer could be taken as a metaphor for a culture that loses contact with its own roots and is thereby destroyed. In Things Fall Apart, Okonkwo also ultimately loses his son to the missionaries, an event that might superficially be equated to a falconer losing control of his falcon.  There is no particular evidence to suggest that Achebe wished to draw such a connection between his novel and the image in Yeats' poem, however. Moreover, history shows that Africans have not entirely lost touch with their cultural roots, despite colonialism and the domineering influences of Christianity and Islam. Achebe himself was raised in a devoutly Christian household and educated at mission schools, and yet grew up to become one of the most powerful exponents of the authentic African voice in modern literature. Okonkwo's tragedy is that, for him, the advent of colonialism and Christianity does indeed represent the end of an age and the beginning of another, antithetical epoch. For Okonkwo, then, the events of the novel do represent a historical progression analogous to Yeats' vision of one vortex spiraling into oblivion as it gives birth to another that represents its mathematical and philosophical opposite. The thoroughness of Okonkwo's obliteration is encapsulated in the words of his friend Obierika: "That man was one of the greatest men in Umuofia. You drove him to suicide; and now he will be buried like a dog . . . " In a larger sense, however, the progression from African cultural autonomy, through colonization to modern statehood is more aptly described in dialectical terms, in which two opposing forces result, ultimately, not in the annihilation of one by the other, but in a synthesis that combines elements of both in a new paradigm.

                One of the most striking images in Yeats' poem is the description of the Sphinx-like creature in line 14 which, the poet writes "Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it reel the shadows of indignant birds." In the poem, Yeats locates his creature "somewhere in the sands of the desert," which increases the temptation to equate it with the ancient Egyptian guardian of the pyramids. The Sphinx is a ubiquitous and multifarious symbol in art and literature through the ages, however, and to limit its meaning to something so concrete is obviously a mistake.  Yeats, of course, does not call it a Sphinx or even give it a name at all. His notes, not to mention the placement of the image in the later part of the poem just before the ominous conclusion, suggest that he meant it to symbolize some sort of impending destruction. The conflicting natures of man and beast within the same being are also consistent with the poet's conception of the conflict inherent in the human soul. An analogy could be made between the duality of the Sphinx and the depiction in Achebe's novel of European religion and governance grafted onto the shoulders of the African people, an event which, to people such as Okonkwo, also portended destruction. To take this analogy to its conclusion, the Sphinx that is Africa--with its duality of traditional African and European influences--is still with us. It does get unruly and unstable from time to time, but, like the character the Dude in the Coen brothers’ film The Big Lebowsky, it abides.

                As with specific apocalyptic predictions throughout the ages, the general destruction of world order that Yeats believed would come with the end of the second millennium has failed to come to pass, although, to be fair, we may still be within a reasonable margin of error.  It is, nevertheless, perfectly reasonable to consider the broad sweep of human history as a series of interlocking epochs brought about by cataclysms, both natural and man-made, technological changes and other earth-shaking events. Moreover, often it is only with the perspective of history that one even sees that an epoch-making change has taken place. Among the many literary virtues of Yeats' "The Second Coming" is that generations of readers have seen in it echoes of events such as the Russian Revolution, the Irish Rebellion, the rise of Nazism and a host of other changes in the current of human history. Achebe's Things Fall Apart is similarly transcendent. True to its cultural and historical specificity, the story of Okonkwo is, nevertheless, a universal tale of a flawed but heroic individual whose vision is sharp, but narrow and who, like a mighty tree, is uprooted by the storm that leaves standing the smaller but more flexible blades of grass.

               

 

My hands and arms are starting to look like a farmer's limbs, all tanned, calloused, nicked and scraped. I have always worked in my garden, but this week I engaged in true manual labor for the first time in many decades. My friend Virginia and I decided to rip out our front lawns in preparation for the planting of drought-tolerant perennials. We rented a sod cutter and then spent the entire day on Wednesday wrestling the infernal machine through our respective sods. This is not the sort of machine that makes a job easier, we found. Rather, it it the sort of machine that introduces new possibilities for excruciatingly hard work. Without such a device, the idea of tearing out a well entrenched lawn, even a moderately sized one such as formerly existed in front of my house or Virginia's, would never have come up. Without such a device, the project would have been impossible. With it, it was merely difficult. Difficult enough to merit a series of gin and tonics upon its completion.

On Thursday, my son and I took spade and shovel and removed the bits of sod that were inaccessible to the sod cutter due to tree roots and sprinkler heads. On Friday I ordered three cubic yards of redwood bark and when it was delivered Sunday morning I raked and shoveled it around where the grass used to be. So now my front yard is covered and fragrant, and somewhere lies a grove of naked redwood trees.

Stream at Twin Lakes

I dipped my hand into a mountain stream
that brimmed with icy broth from melting snow,
water trapped for months in frozen froth
made molten by the heat that radiates
from places where the water goes to pool
and wait for the miracle of tiny seed

Younger, wilder than the poetry
of light and ice and swift colliding wind,

the oozing rivulets of life compose
in rime and form that holds its shape but long
enough to feel the current's stony force
and know it stops for nothing, not for death.
We lack the austere power of simple chemistry
but have the chance to glimpse the arc of mystery

My sister has just returned home from a week by our ancestral ocean. The warm summer waters along the Outer Banks of North Carolina were our family's favorite vacation venue and my two Eastern siblings have kept up the tradition of going there regularly to body surf and eat fried fish and steamed crabs. I had thought of going to join my younger sister's family but because I thought of it rather late the airfares were high and decided against it. I do not know if I would have regretted the impracticality of going more than I regret the practicality of not going.

Waves in the West are cold and creative, like icy surgical knives on the jut-jawed continental face. The waves I remember from my youthful summers were like a therapist's hands, firm but gentle and oil-warm.

And I am in great need of a salty tumble in that therapist's oyster-scented hands.

Summer rains are such a rare thing in Northern California. It bears mentioning, therefore that on this day, the 28th of June in the year two thousand eleven of the common era it rained substantially and consistently enough to call it ... a rainy day. I see the droplets dancing like thousands of mouse feet on the orange tiles of my neighbor's roof and dripping down like pinballs through the tendrils of the lilac bush outside my study window.

In this place of finely tuned agriculture, a misplaced rainstorm or an unseasonably cool spell always bears the disquieting potential for economic damage, which makes it harder to look at from a purely esthetic point of view; but there it is nevertheless, coolly and profoundly moist where one would expect it to be hot and dry as an oven-fresh biscotto.

I remember the summer rains of my childhood, when the hot dampness rolled and billowed and tumbled down like waterfalls, or sometimes simply seeped in like sweat. On those days the air was like damp swim towels and the sky like an empty gray beach. My friends and I would troop to the local swimming pool that, on sunny days, would be full of sunbathers and adults hoping to read peacefully on lounge chairs while their children mingled with the sun-jeweled water. There were no flakes of gold in the water on those rainy days, but we were happy with the silver skies and the deep blue emptiness that made us think of sharks and coral and other exciting things. If there was no lightning, and if it was not raining so hard that the bottom of the pool was invisible, we were allowed to swim and our games became the games of boys who lived with the water and were part of it. The lifeguards would open the deep end, normally used only for diving, and we would become porpoises and deep-sea explorers. Summer was the time to be wet and sometimes the world appeared to know it.

I have lived now for many decades on the dry side of summer but somewhere in the deep aquarium of my mind there lives an old sea-mammal memory that makes me want to dive into this summer rain and wrap it around my body.

Ladies, Ladies

One of the measures of the cultural significance of Shakespeare’s works and ideas is the frequency with which they crop up in popular discourse. Iconic phrases such as “To be or not to be” have been copied, paraphrased, parodied and used as titles or newspaper headlines for centuries. The moral, ethical, historical and linguistic issues with which Shakespeare dealt remain current, and the bard’s ideas concerning them are often quoted as germane or even authoritative in discussions concerning politics, psychology or other human pursuits. An example—one of many—is Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s use of the quote from Julius Caesar, “Upon what meat does this our Caesar feed, that he is grown so great” to attack his critics during the infamous “Un-American activities” hearings in the early 1950s and journalist Edward R. Murrow’s brilliant riposte that expanded on the same quote, adding “the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves …” It should not be surprising, therefore, that a play so laden with moral, philosophical and psychological content as Macbeth should be the source of numerous quotes and references in various fields of human endeavor. Take one small example, the character of Lady Macbeth.

            One interesting recent reference came in the results of a study published in the journal Science and re-reported in an article by Charles Cooper in the CBS blog Tech Talk. The study concerned the effects of hand-washing on human psychology and decision-making. According to Cooper, who titled his article “Maybe Lady Macbeth Was Right,” the study demonstrated that “Much as washing can cleanse us from traces of past immoral behavior, it can also cleanse us from traces of past decisions, reducing the need to justify them." In Shakespeare’s play, Lady Macbeth repeatedly admonishes her husband to wash his hands of the bloody business in which they have been involved and thereby to get over his guilt and move on with life. The study suggests that Lady Macbeth’s ideas about reducing or at least managing one’s guilt through the ritual of hand-washing were grounded in valid human psychology. Shakespeare’s point is, of course, that the enormity of Macbeth’s, and Lady Macbeth’s, actions renders such management ultimately futile. The playwright suggests that other psychological concepts, such as the notion that repressed trauma may result in serious neurosis, or even psychosis, take precedence.

            It is not merely Lady Macbeth’s stage behavior that draws references, however. The character’s very essence inspires modern comparisons. Lady M. is the iconic good-wife/bad-girl of literature. In another sense, she is the archetypal political wife, the driven woman who dedicates her entire self to her husband’s quest for power. A hybrid of the latter is the woman who is not merely the supporter, but the source of power for which the husband, the nominal power-holder, is merely a front. One particularly apt comparison appeared in a 2008 Chicago Tribune article about Patricia Blagojavich, wife of the disgraced former governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojavich. Blagojavich was removed from office based on allegations of widespread corruption. Like Lady Macbeth, Lady Blagojavich (she’s not really called that) is portrayed as a tough, ambitious politico in her own right who, like her husband, was implicated in a number of corruption scandals. The Tribune and other prominent publications such as the Washington Post, explicitly made the comparison to Lady Macbeth, calling upon their readers’ knowledge of the Shakespeare character as the ruthlessly loyal wife of a political villain. The fact that the comparison is imperfect with respect to some details—the crime here is not murder, nor is Patti Blagojavich accused of having initiated it—does not detract from its usefulness. Such comparisons help weave an event into the collective consciousness. Nor is Lady B. the only present-day surrogate for Lady Macbeth.

Other strong and controversial female political figures have also shared the archetypal spotlight with Lady M. A 2007 article by Gerard Baker in the New York Times’ online edition compared Hilary Clinton to Lady Macbeth. In the case of Baker’s article, the comparison serves as a convenient framework  from which to cast aspersions on Clinton by appealing to the inherent misogyny that, unfortunately still shades contemporary attitudes toward powerful women. Obviously Mrs. Clinton is neither a murderer nor a criminal of any sort. She is, however, a brilliant, powerful, assertive female figure who, like any powerful politician, has her detractors. For those who both know the character of Lady Macbeth and dislike Clinton, the comparison requires little explanation. That is the value of an archetype; it both guides our thinking and enables us to fill in the blanks from our own store of preconceived notions. In fact, try this experiment. Google any prominent female political figure from history—Indira Gandhi, Eleanor Roosevelt—in connection with Lady Macbeth, and you are likely to find references.

The kinds of comparisons that are made with Lady Macbeth, and frequently made, point to a central fact about Shakespeare in the canon of Western literature; the works of the Bard have become so central to our notion of human character that not only does all of literature imitate them, life itself does. The critic Harold Bloom, in his 1998 book Shakespeare: The invention of the human, advances the hypothesis that Shakespeare “by inventing what has become the most accepted mode for representing human character in language, thereby invented the human as we know it …” However overblown such a claim may seem to the casual reader, Bloom presents well over 700 pages of evidence to support his idea. And even a superficial look at the popular discourse presented in newspapers, magazines and on-line journals would seem to provide ample reason at least to investigate it.

           

ANNUAL FOUND POEM PROJECT

This is a "found poem" made from snippets of paragraphs written by my senior literature students last year.

WAR

 

 

It’s a mystery

Why people make war

Maybe that’s why they make war movies

So realistic

Feels like you’re in it

Something so inhumane

Absolutely fascinating

You get to be in battle

You get to use the weapons

To take the lives of people

You get to die in battle

 

It’s just so different from normal life

Because we don’t wake up

With people screaming in pain

Boys or teens that play these games

Want to be called men

This country was made on war’s behalf

Americans love war

 Feeling superior

A sort of revenge

For what is yours

Or what you believe

Football practice

Basketball games

Milk chugging competitions

War is a drug

We were built to fight

Engage in combat

Something about guns

And killing people

Appeals to the young

But at the end of the day

 you know it’s fake

In a game you can die

 and come back to life

 

War itself is completely different

Especially for a mother

 with a dead son or daughter

Human beings thrive off of power

And almost get high

When they see people suffer

You must never lose

I think people enjoy war

The control of it all

People start war

because they want others to know

What it feels like to get walked all over

I don’t think war will ever stop

Animals fight for territory

And so do we

It seems our lives are all about war

The holy crusades, God as justification

Pointless

I have a thought just like everyone else

Why should you fight me for it?

Why should hundreds of people die?

When they could just work it out

Death, separation, pain and sadness

I really like the action but I don’t like the part

When people get hurt

Greed, love, dominance, religion

The government wants us to like it

Honor, family, country, a home for a troubled child

Or it can make a person go mad

 

The blood of patriots

Good guys and bad guys

But the line between them is very thin

A fundamental part of us

To prove a point

But what point?

Young men, ready to venture into the world

Think themselves invincible

It’s a fantasy

Curiosity gets the best of us

War as a getaway

An adrenaline rush

It makes them look powerful

We think of the glory

Not the gruesome reality

Never start it but finish it

Streaks of blood on the theme of history

War is the center of our world

Easy to interpret easy to act out

But I think we overuse it

Only grudges and hate can be spread by war

Why try to harm someone

Play rock paper scissors

This makes it hurt to say

War takes lives away

What makes the human mind tick

In that strange war-filled way?

If I could I would

STOP ALL THE WAR STUFF

STOP ALL THE WAR STUFF

STOP ALL THE WAR STUFF

 

This year's seniors wrote about the meaning of life. The "found poem" is a combination of their words, plus a few idle comments from me and from William Shakespeare.

 

VARIATIONS ON A THEME BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE AND JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

 TO BE OR NOT TO BE

IS THAT A QUESTION?

OR MORE LIKE AN ALTERNATIVE

I ALWAYS THINK OF ALTERNATIVE LIFESTYLES WHEN I SAY THAT

OR MAYBE IT’S LIKE A CONTROVERSY OVER AN APARTMENT NUMBER

OR AN ANSWER ON AN SAT TEST

OR MAYBE IT’S NOT LIKE ANYTHING MAYBE IT JUST IS

YOU KNOW LIKE OOOOOOOMMMMMMM, ONE WITH THE UNIVERSE

 

The biggest challenge in life is fear

I THINK SOMEBODY SAID THAT

ANYWAY I HEAR AN ECHO WHEN I SAY IT

BUT I’M ALWAYS HEARING ECHOES

HAKUNA MATATA JUST DO IT LIFE’S A BITCH MAKE THE BEST OF GOOD TIMES

GO HARD OR GO HOME

ECHOES ECHOES ECHOS ECHOES

AM I HEARINBG THINGS OR AM I NOT HEARING THINGS?

NOW THAT’S A QUESTION

AM I EVEN LISTENING

LIKE THAT SONG OMYGOD THAT SONG REMEMBER THAT SONG

TIS A CONSUMMATION DEVOUTLY TO BE WISHED

I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS

BUT I LIKE CONSUMMATION I LOOKED IT UP

DID YOU KNOW IT CAN MEAN LIKE HAVING SEX?

NOW IF EVERYTHING COULD BE LIKE A CONSUMMATION

 

Life is an everyday challenge

WELL OK MAYBE NOT EVERY DAY

BUT SOME DAYS I JUST FEEL LIKE HANGING MY HEAD

WE BORN WE LIVE WE DIE

SOME DAYS THE CONSUMMATION JUST DOESN’T HAPPEN

YOU WANT TO KNOW WHY I CONTINUE TO LIVE?

TO SEE WHAT HAPPENS NEXT

YES HAVING A LIFE AND LIVING IT IS VERY IMPORTANT

WITH OUT IT WE, LIKE, WOULDN’T BE ALIVE

WE WOULD HAVE NOTHING WE WOULD BE NOTHING

IS THAT THE SAME THING?

 BEING,  HAVING

AND THEN THERE ARE THE PEOPLE WHO DO A LITTLE OF BOTH

GOOD HOUSE GOOD CAR GOOD PAYING JOB MY DREAMS

MY BRAIN MY HEART PUMPING BLOOD GIVING ME LIFE

JUST THE FACT OF GRADUATION MAKES ME WANT TO SPEED UP TIME

ALL MY PROBLEMS DISAPPEAR

 

OF COURSE THERE WILL BE SOME DUCK HUNTING

 

 

Return to My Native Sea

    I wrote this poem upon returning from a trip to Rio de Janeiro, where I was born.

 

I went home, although they say you can’t

Tore off my clothes

Took that exhilarating blind and bare bummed slide

But in reverse, to a place encircled in a salt sea

To the hot liquid dwelling place of all paradisal dreams

 

Or perhaps it simply seemed that way

 

A garden herbaceous and delicious

Full of oily flesh in the shape of longing

Embraced in full swelling hills

And the seething, crystalline kiss of Guanabara Bay

 

Sete crescentes de lua, a poet better than I

Called that shape of shorn memory

And I saw those seven crescent moons

Or maybe it was eight, even numbers

Seem to surround this climate

Like the legs of dancers, or the lips of wise young women

Even and round, like the imprint left in the sand

By one pondering the sun

Then dashing suddenly, diving into the ecstatic foam

Exploding into the pounding waves

To be poured, finally, onto the soft and steaming sand

 

Naylor's "The Women of Brewster Place"

   Gloria Naylor begins her “novel in seven stories,” The Women of Brewster Place, with a prologue that outlines the successive ages and ethnic identities of an inner-city housing project.  By end of the final paragraph, Naylor has set the stage for the neighborhood’s African American phase with a wave of exuberantly blended colors, smells and textures that evoke the physical and emotional presence of the book’s collective protagonist, its black female residents.  Naylor’s visual and olfactory images evoke the women’s assertive sensuality while a series of carefully arranged parallel contrasts conveys the emotional complexity of their lives in Brewster Place.

    At the beginning of the final paragraph about Brewster Place’s ethnic residents, Naylor nonchalantly uses the word “colored,” which until recently was the accepted term for people with any noticeable trace of African ancestry, to refer to the neighborhood’s present inhabitants. She immediately revivifies the tired old term by shining it through a prism of warm, earth-based tones such as nutmeg, saffron and ebony.  These exotic color images serve a dual purpose: they shatter the dull homogeneity that is sometimes ascribed to the lives of poor black women, and they establish a firm link to the daily tasks of cooking and washing that are woven into the fabric of daily existence.

    Later in the paragraph, Naylor’s references to “the aroma of vinegar douches and Evening in Paris cologne” hint strongly that the book’s characterization and plot structure will include an element of frank sexuality. Naylor further characterizes the sexual lives of the Brewster women with a series of strong verbs—cursed, badgered, worshiped and shared—which, taken together, suggest a complex emotionality.  She expands the notion of emotional complexity by adding a string of contrasting compound adjectives--hard-edged, soft-centered, brutally demanding and easily pleased-- that bring to mind not only the contradictory nature of human life but also the multi-faceted nature of the human psyche.

    As the prologue nears its conclusion, the author offers a spare, unsentimental summation of the lives of poor, black women: “They came, they went, grew up, and grew old beyond their years.”  In a writerly reference to the power of stories to ensure continuity and rebirth, however, Naylor transcends the seeming finality of her penultimate statement with the image of an ebony phoenix, suggesting that the vivid word picture each character creates has some lasting significance in the longer novel of human existence.