Childhood’s end

Mid morning and I’m trying to remember what it was that had me pining for the graveyard of my childhood.  That is not a metaphorical statement, I’m talking about a literal graveyard.  I know what reminded me of early morning’s reminiscences: I was rereading an article about Fred Rogers that says at one point that Mr. Rogers loved graveyards (Tom Junod’s 1998 profile in Esquire).  But what had got me dreaming about the cemetery at St. John’s LCMS early this morning?

I don’t think about my home town that often.  I haven’t been back since my father retired from the ministry (an act which, typically, has had little impact on how much he actually engages in the duties of a pastor) and my parents moved to a different rural town far enough away to make a day trip a reasonable imposition.  We have a hard enough time getting visits to the grandparents accomplished.  Beyond that, at last review (and this is a good few years ago, now) I had one real friend left in that town, and the state of my relationship with him is that he told me he would call me right back, four or five years ago.  I feel a little bad about never seeing the members of the churches my father served or the teachers from high school and grade school days (almost none of whom are still teaching at those schools - it has been, after all, twenty years).  They did a pretty good job of being my community growing up, and I’d like them to meet my kid.  But so it goes.

The parsonage, the church-owned house provided as a form of compensation for ministers, is becoming a thing of the past.  I learned this as an elder at a former church of mine, going through a difficult process of calling a new minister.  Nobody wanted the parsonage, they wanted their own house.  When my father retired the house I spent most of my childhood in stopped being in any sense mine.  I suppose that this is not a strange occurrence but it seemed to me of a different character from a house merely being sold and a different family moving in.  That house, I came to realize, had always had a separate identity, it was a property of the church, and had in some respects never been ours.  It remained an element of that community, the temporary home for a new pastor’s family.  If I went back, I’m sure there would be no objection to my rambling the surroundings, the little tangled grove, the orderly shelterbelt that are engraved indelibly in my brain (not the least of which as the scene of thousands of surreptitious cigarettes).  But I think I would feel like an interloper there, now.

I think I could feel at ease in the cemetery, though.  I’m sure it is technically the property of the church, but whatever the legality a cemetery is in my mind part of the Commons.  I surely know that graveyard as well as I know the fields and hills around my former house: I must have pushed a heavy lawnmower around each of its stones a hundred times.  And I went there in the night sometimes, while my parents slept, an anxious, restless, depressed kid, and found a peace of sorts among the dead.  Of course, what I knew then would only be a part now: who knows how many stones have been added to its field in the 20 years since I left home?

I’ll probably never see it again.*

originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Feb 11, 2009 11:21 AM

*An assertion of more style than substance as it turns out. I was there quite recently, in fact, for a special event observing the church's 125 year anniversary, where my father was invited as a guest pastor (the first time I have seen him preach in quite a long while). Will I be back again? Who knows.

Further update, May 31 2012... forgotten this writing though not the sentiment.  It says something about the true obliviousness possible on one's solipsistic internal experience that it literally never occurred to me that my father would have chosen this very field as his final resting place.  We did not expect him to be gone so soon, but go he did, the day before Thanksgiving, 2011.  And it turned out to come as no surprise at all that he had chosen this place where he spent more than a third of his life and most of his calling as the resting place (as they say) of his earthly remains.  So I was indeed back again, sooner rather than later, and will be there again, I imagine, many times.

Don’t you wish your husband was a wife like me

There is a “Valentine’s Day Sucks” thread at my favorite forum-discussion type website, causing me to realize that I’m mildly annoyed by people who scorn the Greeting Industry holiday.  Hey, I used to be against the gift of cut flowers.  Personally I am tearing it up in the Valentine’s department, arranging Saturday night babysitting and Serious Grownup dinner reservations;  I send pale roses and calla lilies to Jennie’s work (she’ll end up bringing them straight home but inspiring feelings of inadequacy in the men at her office and envy in the women is part of the fun).  A few hours after I ordered the bouquet I got an email informing me that my order is unavailable in my area and cannot be fulfilled.  I am invited to either call someone (please, what is this, the Twentieth Century?) or meander through some kind of online menu hell at the end of which I, uncharacteristically and without any clearly defined intent, request that my order be replaced with… exactly the same product I’d ordered in the first place.

The next day I get a confirmation assuring me that my order will be sent in a timely fashion.  Good heavens, is this secret that I’ve been missing out on my whole life?  Just ignore whatever is said to you and blithely insist that you dictate to the conditions of reality and not vice versa?  Clearly my life has been missing a rapacious if childishly innocent sense of entitlement.

Having scored my points today with the delivery of the unavailable, I peel garlic and ginger, seed a serrano pepper and turn it all into aromatic confetti, pan fry salt and pepper chicken lightly dusted with flour, roast hot madras curry powder in the oily pan, and stew it all together in yogurt curry with diced tomatoes and thin strips of bell pepper.  And everything seems all right with the universe, for a while, for a change.

Happy Valentine’s Day, kids.  I’m taking the rest of the weekend off.

originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Feb 14, 2009 at 12:17 AM

Rejectivism

Baring my teeth a little at midnight, once again, a station of the clock that has been tending to tumble heedlessly into the two-ish, ante meridiem, territory.  No good.  So why write?  To turn the page, mainly, I’m sick of looking at my little ray of sun (the blog is my browser’s home page).  Valentine’s Day is over, time for all us box-dwellers to get back on our heads.  It’s that time of things, the new year is starting to get stale, and it’s time for taxes, flexible health care spending account remittance, and similar delights of the grown-up world.  I’ve been slogging the finances for three hours and love is not in the air.

Actually I’ve been itching all day to scratch at my favorite topic, which might be called something like “I used to be really certain I was going to come upon a clear purpose for my life eventually”.  Itching and letting that itch fester: I don’t want to talk about it any more.  I used to be certain about a lot of things, big deal.  Yesterday I wrote a song that about filled  an 8.5 by 11″ notebook page and consisted almost entirely of just seven words, repeated.  You can get away with this kind of shit when you’re forcing yourself to “come up with something” every day, nevertheless, somewhere in the midst of it I definitely had an “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” moment.  I’ve been tending to short, pessimistic lyrics about general discontent.

Over

Nothing’s really ever over
so it appears

Not a dozen not a hundred

not a thousand years

not ends of days

of city states

no end of deadlines

or apocalypse dates

Though it all be drawn

into the swollen sun

yet still it will not yet be done.

originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Feb 17, 2009 at 12:39 AM

chain

I catch myself putting off reading the last of the unpublished poems in Bill Holm's posthumously released The Chain Letter of the Soul. And so sigh, and finish them. Maybe there will be more, later, poems or essays, squirreled away and brought to light, brushed up by his widow or a long-time editor. Or maybe not, this world being what it is, will maybe not find the money to put together more than one goodbye. Forcibly restrain myself from railing at the universe for its many specific examples of individuals I feel I could do very well without go on living into their late sixties and seventies and eighties while one man I very much would have preferred to still be here with us goes down at sixty-five. Pining for the deaths of others, however odious I might find them, just isn't on.

There's nothing for this. I decide that I will pick up another semi-secret project that went by the wayside during this king hell tornado of a year that's gone me by since Bill Holm died last February and try again to get inside of it, get myself mired in the center where there's no choice but to work my way out.

For it is life we want. We want the world, the whole beautiful world, alive—and we alive in it. That is the actual god we long for and seek, yet we have already found it, if we open our senses, our whole bodies, thus our souls. That is why I have written and intend to continue until someone among you takes up the happy work of keeping the chain letter of the soul moving along into whatever future will come.

—Bill Holm

The Music of Failure

My brother informed me this evening that my friend, the Minnesota poet and essayist Bill Holm, died yesterday.  For those not acquainted, the post I left about it over at one of my virtual haunts is a fair enough introduction.

I met Bill for the first time through my father, who loved getting to know local writers and took me to see him at a reading in some quirky rural rural town venue, some oddball town hall or rustic church.  I remember he came in the back door and kind of wandered over to a corner where an upright piano stood, and started picking out a tune by way of introducing himself.  I heard him read again later at a presentation of several Minnesota authors my father organized at one of his churches, but I didn’t get to know him until he came to give a reading at my college.  I hung out with him a little while afterward, smoking cigarettes and talking about literature and the (first) war in Iraq.  I saw him a few other times and exchanged the occasional letter.

Our correspondence (like so many others) had dropped off since I became a father.  Perhaps a year ago I’d come across his address at Southwest State University and tried an email which bounced back to me.  It was probably a misbegotten effort anyway, as he was an unrepentant Luddite who claimed to own neither computer nor television, and who I don’t doubt had little time for the internet.  I’d been meaning to write him a letter for a while; I wanted to thank him for his last* book, The Windows of Brimnes, that I’d read much of in various hospital chairs during a family medical emergency, and to tell him about the idea I’d had to get to know classical music better by looking for the many works mentioned in his essays and poems among the offerings of the digital music service I have a subscription to (perhaps I’ll finally get to this project now).  The letter never got written, never got sent, put off like so many things these days.

Don’t put off writing that letter any longer.  It may be later than you think.

I can thank Bill Holm that I’m not wholly ignorant of classical music, and for the fact that I have more than a cursory knowledge of Walt Whitman: I still think the essay The Music of Failure is one of the best things that has been written about America.  Tonight I opened Leaves of Grass for the first time in a long while.

Joy, shipmate, joy!

(Pleas’d to my soul at death I cry,)

Our life is closed, our life begins,

The long, long anchorage we leave,

The ship is clear at last, she leaps!

She swiftly courses from the shore,

Joy, shipmate, joy

originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Feb 27, 2009 at 1:08 AM



*last book published in his lifetime, as it turns out - Bill Holm's last writings and a retrospective of his life's work were posthumously published in The Chain Letter of the Soul.

Interruptus

I don’t know where I’m going next with this.  I’ve been fighting later than late nights for weeks now, you’d think somewhere in the midst of these dozens of single digit ante meridiem hours I would find a few words to say but I’ve been plowing more futile fields than that.  Chasing I know not what, I know not why.

I listen to my music collection online, sorting songs from shortest to longest.  For a period I collected a lot of strange ephemera online, I have an inordinate number of songs that are less than a minute long.  They’re up to 33 seconds and I’ve been at this for a while, now.

I’m sick of this world of late nights online.  Pressing the id of the “civilized” world against my eyeballs, putting off tomorrow.  How many nights, how much of my life have I spent creeping in the silent hours in houses full of early risers?  When I was a youth I wrote thousands of pages in journals during these hours, self-involved, intellectual.  They lie in quiescent  stacks on a shelf in some closet, my impossible printed hand nearly unreadable to anyone but (more or less) myself.  I have no desire to revisit any of these thoughts.

originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Mar 21, 2009 at 5:26 AM

Transition Porotocol

Everything in the world tells me to wait wait wait.  A biting wind blows us back in from a short, unsatisfying excursion out of doors, the pale dusting of snow infuriates me, but not so much as the fact that I have yet again fallen for the false promise of calendar spring in Minnesota.  I prickle at everything, the surfeit of opinions everywhere, every know-nothing is an expert on economics, politics, environmental science, I judge it all false bravado incantations against a bank of fog rolling over an inexorable night.  On a question and answer forum I sometimes haunt someone actually asks whether the global ecology is finally fucked enough that they can stop caring.  The sign of the times is that the question is actually allowed to stand.  The questioner eventually marks the best response to someone who replied: You can stop caring about the environment when you start shitting in the middle of your living room.  This is about as good an answer as such a question can get and far more clever than I could come up with, but the writing on the wall that everyone would rather pretend not to notice seems to me to be that clever isn’t going to talk our asses out of this one, and we’ve more or less forgotten how to be pleasant.

And this thing, another rootless, ill-defined project existing for no good reason I can see, is a tectonic plate, constantly shifting, how would you even notice or mark a transition, if one occurred?

No Tomorrow

There is no tomorrow for

the one you failed to say goodbye to

here I am struggling to finish

something I said I wouldn’t

even try to

Another poet struck down

more sweet words are lost

Sometimes I wonder if

even God pauses to count the cost

There’s no tomorrow I’ve

been waiting 37 years

and every greater ecstasy

came with its batch of
bitter tears

And if we had a thousand years

we still couldn’t say enough

I hope at some strange angle

I’ll be called upon to call that bluff

originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Mar 25, 2009 at 1:10 PM

Core Theory

…there are so many kinds of failure.

E. M. Forster, A Passage to India

I have virtually no formal training in music, and it shows, although I can nominally sight read music to sing - a skill acquired almost purely through practice, with the barest bones grasp of musical notation underneath.  I don’t really get keys or scales, I am a mediocre guitar player and play no other instrument even passably.  I played the clarinet for a few years in junior high school and muddled through with my substandard grasp of musical notation, falling steadily down the seating until I came to rest as the second of two bass clarinets, otherwise known as the worst clarinet player in the band.  I think I was a disappointment to my band teacher, whose name now escapes me: boys didn’t play the flute or clarinet in the provincial town I grew up in (and I received merciless shit for years for my choice of instrument), and I suspect he had high hopes for me.  I had good aptitude: I just didn’t practice.  Towards the end I actually made a tape of myself playing and ran it in my room to fool my parents while I lay in my bed and read crap science fiction and fantasy paperbacks.

The guitar was a bribe and supposed aid to quitting smoking I gave myself in college: it didn’t work.  I stuck with the guitar gamely for a good few years though, and played it intermittently thereafter: these days I almost never pick it up.  I change the strings from time to time, let another set corrode on the stand in slightly damp basement air, not a nice way to treat a guitar, but then it’s not that nice a guitar.  Singing is something I do every day without real thought or effort, though I haven’t really worked on my voice in a long time.  My singing is okay, it is nothing really special.

I made one genuine attempt to mount the hill of my formal musical ignorance.  In college I signed up for a beginning music theory class.  If memory serves (and it well may not) the name of the class was Core Theory I.   It started to worry me pretty shortly after registration.  Potential students were advised that they should be reasonably conversant with reading music, and I had momentarily talked myself into the position that my years behind the clarinet would do.  I had, after all, sat there many hours, with sheets of music on the stand before me, toodling out more or less the correct notes.  I might not have been particularly good at it, but I had certainly read music.  The closer the start of class came the more absurd this seemed, that my billet as second bass clarinet in the eighth grade remotely qualified as the ability to read music.  The whole scenario was uncharacteristic for me: I wasn’t academically brave about my choices in college, and I rarely took a class primarily based on my belief that it would edify me (my decisions were more predominantly driven by, in rough order, fulfilling the requirements of my major, fulfilling the fairly complex liberal arts requirements of my college to graduate in four years, avoiding excessive difficulty in my non major classes - in my defense, almost all of my major coursework in chemistry was excessively difficult, at least for me - and maintaining an easier time schedule).  I was a little over midway through my sojourn in the ivory tower, though, growing discontent with my chosen field of study, and thinking maybe there was something in my initial experiments in songwriting and performance.  Temper the uncertainties of a career in science by establishing a foundation as a rock and roll singer to fall back on.  Or something; I’m inferring, I don’t really remember my reasoning in taking the class very well, just that I was worrying I would not be able to hack it.  But I stuck to it, deciding I think that I would try to get a fix on the territory, maybe ask the professor for his perspective.

The first day of class the professor announced that while the course was open to all students and he could not give preference to music majors, there were in fact an insufficient number of seats for the number of music majors needing to take the course and that delaying it would for these students involve interference with the pursuit of their major program of studies.  And SO, if any non-majors might find it in their hearts to elect to drop the course, etc.

I didn’t pay particularly close attention to the rest of the class, and when it was done proceeded directly to the front with this big, ready made and irrepproachable cop out.  And that was that, I had a little bit of a credit gap, I believe it was on this occasion that a friend talked me into joining her in square dancing, which it turned out posed no sort of challenge whatsoever (it was pass/fail based solely on attendance.  I actually remember square dancing pretty well.  There was also a line dancing section).

How do you feel about a right decision made for perhaps the wrong reasons?  From the outside it looked like the choice was altruistic: from within I know that it was fundamentally cowardly, while potentially objectively reasonable as well.  This isn’t a piece of history I’ve spent a lot of time dwelling on, right, I don’t wake up grasping for it in the dark reaches of night.  I can’t say it would have probably made a whole lot of difference in my life if I’d kept with it, whether I succeeded or failed.  But it stands as a moment, ambiguous, unsatisfying, part of some larger design of what is ill fitting, incomplete still in my life.  I bring it up only as preamble, a little context for a new series of essays I’m about to launch (the subject of religion remains on the table, and will return in time).  More to come.

originally posted at spiritofsalt.com April 1, 2009 at 1:26 AM

self reproach

You will never be an artist, a musician, a writer: by all means go ahead and tell yourself you are these things even though you will never make a living at it.  Tell yourself you are a dentist while you floss your teeth while you’re at it.  Tell yourself whatever the hell you want to, telling yourself things is free.  Then get back to work, the work that pays.  It is pleasant sometimes to think of what Benjamin Franklin called “foolish projects of growing suddenly rich.”  In reality there are only two working varieties of such a strategy: the first is a confidence job, the second is a meaningless accident of fate.  You’re better off wandering around outside looking for winning lottery tickets on the ground.  At least you’ll get a walk out of it.  Looked at objectively the overwhelming likelihood is that the majority of people do not and will not ever have anything like a calling, a vocation, a life’s work.  While sad, this is necessary: somebody has to clean all the toilets.

originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Apr 4, 2009 3:32 PM

material

So why keep churning out the lyrics, though, that is an enigma.  Is it anything more than that old devil Sunken Cost? Almost four years in, what does it mean if I stop now?  Failing inspiration there is nothing but persistence…  I’m behind at the moment, a few songs backed up.  At this point it is basically a matter of catching up or it starts to get into feedback territory.  Why bother writing two songs if you’re still going to be two behind?  Worse, five? Ten? A couple or a few years ago when I was on jury duty I got in something like a month or more backlogged, climbing out of that hole in a sense confirmed, for some time, my commitment to the project, but lately it hasn’t been a matter of falling behind, much.  It’s something else…

I had a motivation when it all started in the first place, which was the band, such as it was…  But whatever that might have been it is about as done as a thing can get.  I really can’t remember what got me started again.  I remember it swimming into my head, and a sense of urgency and rightness about it, but any specifics of motivation are long gone.   I’ve never felt less engaged in any  intentional pursuit to make actual music (as opposed to merely generating piles of small, cryptic (or merely dull and pedestrian) lyrics); the main lesson of the most recent endeavor has been that in recording music at home there is a gulf of work between pushing out the kind of thing I push out in a day or less and ascending to the next level of polish and confidence and it just isn’t worth it, not for this hobbyist stuff. And professional grade is high above that, lurking in some orbital system forever beyond my reach.  Hardbound books of lined paper and ballpoint pens remain easy to come by, and it seems I can persist in this level of production indefinitely (I took a break in the midst of writing this and knocked out that backlog of lyrics, caught up with today, again.

I don’t even know why I’m talking about it.  Not ready to talk about anything else, I guess.  However, as Stephen Crane put it, the Swede found a saloon. What can I say: for now, it goes on, again.

originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Apr 11, 2009 at 12:24 AM

why persist?

Anyway, enough whining.  Nobody else is to blame for my pernicious generation of verse and if I don’t like it I can, of course, quit: that cup, in any event, I can relinquish if that’s what I really want.  I’m thinking to get on to the point that the music theory class essay was meant to frame, which is to introduce the classical music listening essay project… but not tonight.  I am beat, done over by Holy Week, still at the taxes, and fearing I’m about to come down with whatever crud my child is working on getting over.  Sha la la, man, as the man said, why’n't you just slipaway? (Good heavens, Street Hassle with full audio preview at Rhapsody… I would spend millions of dollars in this strange new world of music, at last for sale, all of it, all the time, instantly… if someone would just give me millions of dollars).

Real content soon.

originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Apr 12, 2009 at 11:41 PM

all I need

I have to confess I am digging this new Kanye West. And seriously considering getting myself a "Pussy and Religion is All I Need" t-shirt made...

The beginning of the intermittent new shit

Unexpected anger as I slap down a book I'd rather be retreating into, all the more firmly and obliviously ensconced in the linear labyrinth of text. Not knowing what to do with it, the anger, purse my lips and try to let it hover, around me, without feeling the need to put in anywhere. Most particularly not on the kid, as always, kids being kids and therefor in a near permanent state of doing something that might be construed as deserving of anger. But then again, it occurs to me, seeing immediately where the trend of this line of thought tends to skew, better to not let it land on myself either, not the least of it because it amounts to nearly the same thing (the kid, being a kid and therefor sensitive, acutely aware of whatever lash I might lay out against my own back). But mainly, realizing it does not have to be particularly complicated or philosophical, not wanting it on either of us, the same reason for both, because we do not deserve, and it does us some little harm and absolutely no good.

And with a heavy sigh, the thing making a familiar shift into deep and deeply held sadness, I think, five fucking years on the therapists couch, refusing the whole time to ever go prone on the thing, rather always sitting upright. And that better than five years ago, and still I am having to drag up these utterly obvious realizations, the fact that it hurts when I do this is a sufficient justification to stop doing it.

Thus with the beginning of the intermittent new shit, I guess, while I continue to reconstruct the archives of the defunct Spirit of Salt weblog in this all but untrafficked, hastily erected temple of badly managed commerce. Thinking, I deliberately elected to skive yesterday's song of the day to avoid starting a new year writing this kind of shit, this personal depression existential psychology shit, but there it is.