Irish  Wake
revisit

http://www.firstofthemonth.org/irish-wake/

Walking at night, somewhere in Washington, DC.

Lincoln:  But a light can change your mind, the way lights have become, what you call them.  They'll change your words, the whole spooky interaction of blood and brain and man we have no real control over, but record, each to his own.  The new lights are bright, and they can change what you have to say, or rather, mainly make you forget, the revery, I mean, that makes them happen to you, an idea, a thought.  Trees in springtime, with a clear sky, a weird gushing wind, coming like ripples on the old Sangamon, blowing over forgotten towns, outcrops, really, collections of hewn timber made into squares with walls and roofs...  The stars at night when you're walking home at the end of the workweek, having slayed the awful dragon, cold, but could be worse, walking past the cemetery, the high iron fence, a road almost secret at night.

The tulip magnolia, that year, my boy died, they came into bloom early, just as they laid him down, just like this year.

I'm reading Dostoevsky now.  Of course I would.  The Idiot.    And that little bit at the beginning of Karamazov

(JF Kennedy mute, still, portrait like, as if in rocker, legs crossed, cigar in Irish fist...)

That bit about "a sudden flooding wind," it's only there in the author's introduction, and these are forgotten things, such revealing author introductions, guiding hand, that crucial immersive admission, that the writer is imbedded--if you will--in the writing.  He became a writer in the same way the writing became writing.  Who knew?  When did it happen

And these days, of course, we'll know less and less how that happens.  We'll bow to the new little I don't know what to call them, like demigod or demiurge or demisomething.  The distraction.  The light, the images, the people talking on the images as if it's them.

But that's all thrown off now...  I mean, unless you're allowed to walk around at night, a ghost like me, no one seeing you, no one giving a shit, completely anonymous, your footprints, your very trace, disappearing completely from the face of the earth, no matter what you do.

I crossed Sheridan Circle, one of those little field like places I wander, this one reminding me of fields and battle, I cross there, a ghost, no one sees me, I stop beneath the one old tree left--it's had some surgery lately, and many of the lindens have died now, but thank god the elms are still with us--and a Mercedes, what do you call it, drives by, and there are many of them, oblivious, even if I were alive they wouldn't see me, enwrapt as they are at attentions.  And there's that scrawny little runt of a fellow, Sheridan, and often it's the small little guys, the shorties, who have it in them to he emperors over fields of men.  Little terrors, really.  I could never have been like that.   The elephant moves slow.

And you, in your pain, Jack, I guess that kept you sort of in my realm, that old realm, the old Irish way, ha ha.  Go wander, the trees at night, the flooding wind, the weird stuff like that....

But we come back from our happy living oblivion death, our insignificance, our complete anonymity, we have to come back into some form of light, I would hope gas or candle, not electric much as I might have espoused such innovation, generally, but not for the creative spheres, to do our work, and then we're left to salvage our thoughts, and it's only through some great self-control or practice, that we are able to write down those few things of insight that establish, that establish our common base.

And look at now, look at what we've become, look at who the speaker is now, what he says, the light he is so stuck on being attracted to, the revenge of all electric lights upon us, the abandonment of the quiet lonely cemetery and the rain falling on the fresh entombed.  Rain falls drop by drop upon the soul until by the awful grace of God...     So as once was said, so still let it be said, and that's you, your brother, who said that.

That's Irish music...


All the little creepy men who sit under strange lights, thinking of such things as murder...  Let them walk, a ghost in this town, all the living gone to bed, strange folk out, and cab drivers, for exercise, for a break, when they could walk past the cemetery, feeling something human, I suppose.


MacGowan;

And it's 'how are you kid, and what's your name, and how would you bloody know...
In blood and death 'neath the screaming sky, I lay down on the ground,
and the arms and legs of other men were scattered all around...



Lincoln:

A writer is a writer by being a writer.  That's the only way.   Dostoevsky hated electric lights.  They turn us away.  More and more until the writer is as much of a ghost as I am now, obscure, a shadow in the night, writing about what appears to be nothing at all.  Forgotten.  Things from graveyards.  Nature at night, trees, the sky, water.  Birds.  We go full circle, from birth, back to obscurity.

The thing is not to fight it.  Lesser men, they always see it differently, grab for the attention of all the people, and the people, enchanted by the electric lights, will be numbed into hypnosis, believing the lies.  There's dignity in obscurity and dreams, in spooky things.

But so much of it, the chatter...  The puffed-up claims.

And the vehemence with which they attack.  Calling you a baboon, a tyrant, a creep...
Then you die, and truth comes out, as death is truth.  Then they leave you alone.

Kennedy:

It's enough to make you paranoid.  Like my old friend Dick Nixon.


Lincoln:

Yes, old Dick...  Well, the things you do in life...

And then afterward, after your act, there's that thing, there was always that thing, you wanted to be a writer, you wanted to be writing, up there with the oldest of stories, Job, Jonah.  Write that feeling you have when you feel that home is gone, that you never have a home, no more than you have any place to write, who are you, what experience do you have, and some would say I had a lot, sure, but at the end of the day, and life, we're all just amateurs.

And you, Jack, you had that gift.  No one doubted, this guy has a way with words, and life.

Kennedy:

silent

Lincoln:

You're still in flashback mode.  It's okay.  You'll get past it.  Despite, despite your schoolboy mischief, you were always a good student at heart, old boy.  And your old man helped you regather the dust of what it's like to grow up out on some prairie town and all that life will hold for you, the earthy people, the muddy circuit, the cross section of human legal misery, that great oozing mass or watery mess that in hindsight makes me feel like I was some frog, half submerged, my eyes sticking out above the water.

In life, I took great gallops around, wherever, whenever I could, when I got restless.  No one hounded you back then.  No one insisted, following you, bubble topping you.  In this after life I am the same weird night adventurer.  I go walking, out where the wind blows, where there are old trees out somewhere in the universe, made of all the elements...

"I am confined to fast in fires, until my sins are burnt away..."  Old Bill.

I'm out there walking, or riding my old horse, the same fellow he was, we know each other, and out there, yeah, there are still pigs stuck in the mud, and kittens, abandoned, species on the verge of extinction, cheetah spirits as they near mortality themselves, white bears, the poor whales, and out there there is no need of congressional acts and pork barrel legislation, thank god.  It's already been sorted out by the divine hand, as if the closest we might come to that is that nice park up in Gettysburg, you can drive your carriage through the points of the battlefield, Roundtop, Bloody Angle, the Peach Orchard, look down on Devil's Den.  Ever go through?  Well, you'll find all sorts of people getting all kinds of things out of it, leather POW MIA guys on Harleys staring off at sunset, not all of them innocent, except the school kids and the parents who take them there.  Where I stood to say a few things, well, I chuckle, because it's kind of obscure.  There's no sign.  Hah.  I was in and out.  Famously.

Well, that's all part of the fabric of the universe, like anything pithy we might say, knowing we're fucked, but knowing we still have a good long ways to go, and meanwhile the body is aging, and the possibilities are narrowing, and we are in political binds deep as molecular things spinning about, little genies of good and bad and...

Non duality.  That's what wisdom says.  Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so.  You know who said that.


I was, in life, given this great character.  Who said it...  "I saw his face, and what a face."  Whitman, the poet?  That face was an instrument of the divine, as much as yours, Jack, as much as yours.  As much as yours.  I knew, take some pictures, let them make a cast or two.  You left before they could do much of that, but, on the other hand, your voice was recorded, cut into little groves to make waves of sound for eternity.  Mine seems largely a thing of conjecture.  It was different from yours, Jack.  Different accent.   But as easy as yours to have fun with.  "Mr. Ch(ia)eerman..."  They were ready to laugh at the hick in New York, just as they were ready to laugh at Little Lord Fauntleroy in PA, WV, Texas, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Ohio, North Carolina...  My suit was ill-fitting, yours was perfect...




It is all about music really.  Beethoven was right.  And some of the music the kids listen to...  A politician should be a musician just to prove himself.  No one ever thought of that, except back in the caves, bison and deer in ochre.



Dostoevsky, he'd been through some horrible thing for his youthful rebellion, almost for the very same urge, off to some shitty place out in the sticks, worse than, worse than anywhere I'd ever seen or lived in.  For being a literary sort of gentleman, a reader.  A rearrangement, I guess you'd call it.  A reassignment.  A transformation.  An utter defeat.  One of those things.  I laugh at what I went through, in comparison.  A failure to get elected.  Well, back to the old law office.  Defeat.  Mary wasn't happy there anyway, Washington, and in a way I should have listened to that.  She would never have fit in.  Nor would I.  But, circumstances...  a divine need, if you will, something beyond us all, the universe needing some words, some words about its atomic structure, energy, all those things we float on, waves that we are.

Afterward, harried as he was, he loved the nighttime to do his work.  I've said it a million times, to myself, here in the hereafter, where this weird stuff counts,where personality and character really come out.  You go get your groceries, cook, eat, clean up, in the cold, and then, when everyone's gone to bed, you open up this fantasy life, and you write.  You write things down according to vision, something, and even then you have to figure out what you can get away with.  Brothers Karamazov.

He'd sit at his desk, doodling in the margins, rolling cigarettes the doctor wouldn't let him smoke.  He'd been in the hands of less than scrupulous publishers, and they even tried to take advantage of him, and to get through it he wrote about his greatest weakness, a compulsion.  He had to open up about all his sins, gambling, losing everything, his wife's jewelry and you know how they like that stuff.

He was a man.  It took him a while, a lot of figuring.  He'd sit on benches and listen to the way people talk, record such things in little notebooks.  All adding up to some vision.  Before he died.

You can't blame a fellow for being in love with the night.  Frost has that poem, the two roads in the woods, basic physics, really.  What are you going to do?

Now those planes fly over you, just as you reach that quiet time, just before the birds start their singing.  Roaring over the trees, you can't hide, can't think, can't hear your dreams anymore.


I wish he'd written about those things, you know, the things that make you feel a bit stupid.  Like that beautiful face, that girl who was part of you boyhood, Grace Kelly, but you weren't Gary Cooper yet. The things that you outgrow, the sort of things you never want to admit, what a hick you were, your own misplaced sense of attachment when you suddenly felt like you had no home, not here, not there, nowhere, and you felt like the girl would give you some sort of continuity, as if she knew who you were, deep in your heart, just like you know yourself deep in your own heart.

But the clock embarrasses you.  Time is time.  And you're still stuck being you.  And, well, the vain things, they boil away, and leave you with... well... you.


Daylight comes too early, my friends.   And I have failed.  Failed at everything.  But even then, I have still managed to bend space and time with my own little gravity, my own little love for the world and its creatures and sometimes its people.  You know what failing is like?  Well...  It's just weird.  In the end we're too gentle to do anything but.  But fail.  Live in some old soldier's home with our effects.  Strange it all is.


Kennedy (perking up):

So what's with that girl you were talking about?

Lincoln (turning):

(... chuckle...)  I don't know.  You always think of The Winter's Tale with these things.  Alabaster.  Statue.  Is it her?  Looks like her.  But you've let her down.  You could never live up to those particular standards, or... really, who knows why.  So clever, so smart, so gifted with words, and yet lacking a particular kindness in my direction, as I thought I always had for her, but now, it's kind of worn out to tell you the truth.  Years wasted because of all the strange stuff in me regarding her, telling the story over and over to myself, writing some strange sort of long poem about it, when we knew each other, sort of.  It cost me.

Mary, her embodiment, she came along, it was complicated, it worked, it didn't work, then it was done, how things happen.  She fit.  I fit.   The story worked.



But I was a master manipulator in life.  I played people.  I'm in no way the saint they make me out to be, no sir.  I was a politician, a lawyer before that, of course I knew how to play people, shrewder, more calculating than the next.  I got things done, but...

Old wounds of the flesh,
eventually they heal
themselves, close over.
The splinter works its way out.
Raw flaps of skin close as the beneath
hardens, then softens into normal,
the invading dirt repelled,
and pain leaves, to eventually,
be, more or less, forgotten.
This is nature's way.

Of their own accord,
and in their own time,
decreed.

There are the blips and the blurbs of the writer's mind and sketchbook, scraps of paper with lines, the thoughts that have no immediate joint, no standout alpha.


A sort of waking dream, after a bad cold, aches and pains from head to toe, as I found myself feeling somewhat better amidst all the imposed rest that had been building for a long time in the struggle.  I lie on the tribal rug and feel beneath the outer wrapping many rolled nets in layers pulled from a sea, such that the collection of nets is alive, almost as if there were a horde of tiny sea creatures gurgling about, as I drip on the outside, iodine and seaweeded, as if pulled from drowning or a long day on the cold sea in a curragh, leather skinned it is like me, black on the outside from tar on peat bog worthy skin and the ribs of found wood.  A tiny crab or shrimp -like creature would be at the big end of the scale as fluids adjust and I concentrate one by one on each nodule of vertebrae for how they all fit in this boat of life that is a fisherman's toil.  Beneath my skin as I lie, I am a skandha, a complex, of these nets that have seen the waters of the ocean and their life.  That life, all getting along more or less, but you take a slide, like those idiots who drop a bomb into the archipelago to see what fish live their by assessing and noting, but here, in this case, such a time-honored method, like the old dinghy like long boat good from here to Arran island, or rocky isle, those old nets of rope or twine tied into squares and smaller geometry, to then be tightened as they round the creatures free in their cold clear medium of water.   That's me, the writer, lying there, more or less defeated, or caught, but still breathing as tiny infant eels wiggle somewhere within.  A friend of the seal and all the kelp and things that take to rock and live in tide or depth in worlds obscure to us.  Electricity, the minute lightning and thunder that happens down there beneath that gray or green surface, inky, cold, as it must be off the West Coast of Ireland, or Maine, supportive rocks.    In metal form, as in airplanes, or bigger ships, it only increases the tragedy of simple lives, makes burst for an instant the old back and forth of the tide and the bravery of man, woman and child and houses and families.  The plane will, like the curragh, bring you back, in metal, catafalque, and you will to be that mystery of skin, outer husk of all you know of you, your face, and down through each layer of the seawater wet net-like wrappings, each one, not all neat, down to core.

There are the words in all of this.  Like the nets, they are very old, and as fisherman talk to fish and all creatures of the deep, there's the older way of talking, Shakespeare, John Clare, anyone who gets the guttural, as if we could still make up words, and still could hear them as we spoke them and they intoned in some deeper wooden part attached to jowl, jaw, tooth, lip, tongue, throat, collar, heart, clavicle, lung, while the old brain watches on like an owl silent in the dark wood.

Breathing, I feel the ribs expand of these wrapped coils of old hemp woven, those nets that give a dignity to sea and creatures swim.


My job, I always thought, was to be creative.  But I rest now, pulled up, nothing but wild, dripping...

When you become a writer, you become another thing, another animal, quite different, that lone beast you always protected, from childhood holding bear or doggie, friend of the cats that would come to you.  You stand, autonomous, wild, a creature in some habitat, hiding in the herd, a whale in depths.


Time and thoughts, they come from chewing, as we would, not from labors impressed upon us, the squeezers.

However you can sneak up upon, pass the gates and enter, waylay or entreat, simply befriend, entreat, set forth to, however you do it, whether by style and attitude, or by persistence or self-knowledge, need, superstition, dupe yourself into such belief, however you can do it to get over that magic fence and into that quiet nightly yard of the peaceful mansion where you find the spirits and become enabled to write and explore the muse however you might do, this is worth it.  No doubt, no surprise if some people take it to be a spooky business, a feat of augured listening.

Entering the sacred woods, knowing the way well enough, finding your skill honed by years as hunter or trapper or guide or one knowing simply how to live, what music you might find, you have to keep your field notes as to how you are allowed to pass in.

And once there, you have a time.  Its minutes are numbered.  You cannot be interrupted.  You have to remember the styles of history, to remember the penchant for visiting cemeteries with a wish to almost live in them seen in the Nineteenth Century.

We don't know what the product of such communing will be.  Ghost tales in the form of music, poetry...

I mean, most people are not of that mysticism, that possibility of that ghost yard world.  Of the peace that brings us in touch with ancestor or hereafter, I mean, in the way that we have to grapple with it, our own mortality, the death of people close to us....

Reading it reconstructed in an excellent biography, and having long loved reading him and Moby Dick, I can see why Melville would have like sailing and the sailor life.  Those vast open periods, the space of the sea, the sky at night with stars, seen from mast, silence, communication bound to the rituals of a whaling ship.  The strange tales of the professional sailors, the singing of the sea shanties. And all the tasks the jack of all trades a sailor must be, keeping a man occupied, while the mind works.

A lot of the Indie music these days doesn't do it for me.  I remain in appreciation of what The Pogues accomplished, taking from a large body of traditional music based on older traditional music sometimes directly, indirectly.

I took to wearing a simple daily uniform in the cold months of blue flannel-lined Dickies work pants, a white tee-shirt, a hunter green LL Bean chamois shirt.  A layer of jackets and that got me to work on my bicycle, a winter hat underneath a helmet.  Very simple, comfortable and wearable to work everyday and home doing the chores and the grocery shopping.  At night, finishing my shift, turning the lights off after the long clean up, the mis en place, the restocking, I changed out of my work slack and shoes, I'd get on the bike and head home.  I'd have a glass of wine, try to not watch too much television, stay up too late often enough, finally go to bed.

It was tiring work.  It became that on days off, despite other options, I'd take to the same outfit, making life simpler.

(And with this cementing of a simple life, my inclinations toward writing became secondary, at least temporarily, in part due to the sense that one must be skilled at something practical in order to live a decent life, a quest that might not been helped by my queer love for that writing habit, and perhaps in part to due to my talks with a professional, a therapist, who made me heedful of staying away from the old minefields of thought habit, which can leave you feeling impotent, handcuffed.   I was meditating anyway, though, with a steady yoga practice.)

The mind can make a lot of things.  I found a picture of an old girlfriend on the web after many years.  She'd been the kind your mind makes you pine for, hold a torch for, an old flame, someone the mind had lingered over, for some psychological reasons, for way too long.  You'd attempted to exorcise the whole thing presenting your side of the story in literary form, helpful in some ways, but not in all.  Finding the picture, though, I almost wanted to laugh, in a good hearted sort of way, no meanness to it.  Somehow, I'd known it all along, it would happen, eventually, in such a way.  A picture.   Not how you remember someone, but how they turned out, not idealized, imaginary, but real, as they deserved to be respected as such, real, not idealized, a living person.  A typical knowledge that comes to us, when we turn adult.  One can regret never really knowing a person, missing the chance, but that is how things turn out sometimes, and you've already lived it anyway, so it can't be a big deal anymore.

Lincoln wrote a letter once, expressing a similar realization over a fiancé.  In his case the situation might have been that she had put on a few pounds, which happens sometimes.  Lord knows, life is not easy, a physical strain, an endurance, sometimes grim.  We go on and plow our rows, and wonder what will become of us, and perhaps the best thing to do is to keep in shape with realistic expectations.  As they say, things turn out for the best, and some form of contentment falls, one no longer cares to be much embarrassed about.   Join the human race, welcome.

Perhaps this is a reason we like to watch violent movies, ones which often deal with revenge, from time to time.  Not out of lust for gratuitous gunnings-down, but out of some sense of peace come from slaying our oldest, worst, longest-standing demons.  And sometimes, maybe a little of Clint Eastwood, Outlaw Josey Wales, rises up in us, before safely diffusing itself into routing household chores and recycling.   Sitting on the rug, Japanese style, my laptop on a low table meant for breakfast in bed, getting over the flu, Clint pulls out his six-guns each time a bad guy rises, bang bang bang, groceries in hand one moment, four fully armed bad guys dead two seconds later, over my left shoulder, volume down on the television, as I write.

One would never get any writing done if it weren't for the alone time, and for this profanely sacred alone time, the road is long and full of tempting illusions, chimeras and dragons that seem to go hand in hand with tiredness and burdens and not feeling good about where you might be in your attempt to be a responsible adult and economic unit.  A long time asleep, a long time dreaming, a lot of time in your own little world, albeit one earned dealing with the general public of a barroom and a long list of diner reservations and the restaurant's scuttlebutt.

Perhaps it is simple, in some basic way, to take care of the human animal.  Hydration, protein, exercise, red wine to keep the bugs away, ginger and turmeric, age old traditions of staying well, mentally and physically.  Maybe even a little writing, notes to self, notes from the underground.  It's a private thing about private matters, and you don't feel like talking to anyone much after you've done it.

There'd been a reason why I liked the old Irish music all along.  The sense of humor, perspective, the quality of a mind liberated from the usual junk, the pricks, the assholes of which there are many.  That sense of humor, that's what keeps you going.  

With one illusion dealt with, may others fall.

Not fair it is to look at a photo and expect much of it, as far as being able to draw any impression, judgement or conclusion.  But, if that's all you are given, than that fact alone must tell you something.
(And yet, still good looking, more than twenty years later.)

Everyone in their own way had been telling me to get over the silliness, to forget all about her.  Perhaps some of us don't mind dwelling in grey areas and unhappy things.  But admittedly, with the weight it wasn't a good habit.  It takes the male of the species a visual, like a photo, to get over things, unfortunately, the only way.

And then, in that new light, freed, as it were, my old habits weren't so bad after all.  You can't blame a guy for liking the medicine of red wine, a bit of talk in a bar.  Dating is pushed on all of us, but it doesn't always work so well, those of us who need to keep to a modest routine.

The writings that change your life, that help you see things clearly, are not literary;  they must be spiritual.  They are not about a story, nor dialog, finer points of accuracy and evocation, but rather about the deeper story of life, as we might find, obviously, in the great texts of spirituality and even the lesser ones found in the spirituality section of a good local bookstore, contemporary as we in our own age deserve to express them as much as in any.   Each reader, each person, must react in his or her own way, to bring together what one's own readership has shown to be valuable, true, to the point, something to hold on to, something that speaks.

I have made the common mistake myself, attempting to tell a story, working on a craft, and I find ultimately that the story I must tell is my own, which is a cause for great humility.  Flaws, mistakes, weaknesses, all the things of the problems flesh is heir to, self-caused.  These are essentially the problems caused by thinking, thinking as opposed to the more meditative mode of being, mind and body in touch, as one, enabled to find then the healthy patterns for the conscious being of body and mind.  Thinking itself is the literary mode, too often, and a writer should sit back and let the deeper consciousness, perhaps even the unconscious, shine through the verbiage surfaced on the pool of the mind.  That is, to let the light shine outward, more so than the attempt to shine a mental light inward.

Awakening, I feel shame and humility.  Unworthy of grace, sad that for the immediate time being I must continue for the near future with the flawed roles the mistaken being fell into, ways prone to mistake.  But yet I am more armed against them, through yoga, through things that bring a better chemistry to the mind's body and the neurochemistry, through meditation, through peace and quiet and walks in nature, observation with a freshness to the day.  Am I deserving, a wretch like me?  Buddha tempted by Mara, sitting in lotus position under the Bodhi Tree reaches his hand down to touch the earth.  Jesus rebukes Satan's promptings.  Both are rooted here in the present, rather than being stuck in the past nor in the misguided behaviors that come of social life in a market society.

There is Alan Watts, and Thich Nhat Hanh, and Thomas Merton, any number of yoga books, Gospel stories of Jonah and Job, the Psalms, tales of Buddha, of how Mohammed went up on the mountain to get the prophetic stuff.

These are the things that lighten our flaws, to make them less of a personal burden.  Conventional literature is in contrast by detailing the myriad of the mistakes the imperfect mortal being will make, and eventually one might want to move past them, as it does little good to obsess over the particular causes, the particular actions, the particular mindset as if provoked, as such things might boil down, by the light of meditation, into false ways of viewing reality and the deeper reality beyond.

Yes, that's what literature must ultimately do, put an eye toward deeper reality itself.  This too is a human effort, but perhaps, hopefully, an informed one, mistaken things cleared away.