Song

The star has but one purpose,
One place in Space
To shine.
Born to fixed position,
His powers eminent,
The planets ringed round him,
In orbits coalesced.

In one fixed place,
Requited, or not,
--we would never know--
To shine for perpetuity,
Then finally to expand
In gaseous death,
Imploding,
To take all with him,
Even the light he shone.

The tree too,
One place shall he grace,
His limbs spread overhead
To abide with sundial's dignity.
It would depress,
Upset, confuse,
For him to move
His spot where
Sunlight meets the shade,
For wind's caress,
For rain to kiss,
For sleet to hiss,
For snow to tendril in.

Doest one say to the tree
Or to the star in yonder heaven
Why have not ye moved,
Moved on?

Moved on?
What is that?
What would that entail?
What would that be,
Sayeth the tree.

I effect all near
And all far
Just so, from here,
Sayeth the star.

Move along,
That’s for the policeman to call
When fears of public riot grow,
Or to hide from private eyes
The trade he plies.

Me, I tried a poem today.
What more is there to say?

Bourdain

Here's a creative guy, free flowing, imaginative, his brain not turned off, feet on the ground, able to deal with people, strangers, hungover parts of the world.

He has habits you begin to recognize, drinking a beer, a tone of voice, eyes open. A listener.

The things he eats sometimes. Monkfish, in all it's entirety and small part, prepared in Tokyo.

Classic, classicist, modern creative.

Here's a guy leading the way. A way. Not by specifics, so much, but by example. Listening, watching, maybe taking too much abuse.

Got to love him. God love him.

Kerouac did a lot by himself, like all that writing, but he had the same sort of blend of collaborative experience and personal reflection. Genetically different, of course, Kerouac, more literate, minutely, reflectively, in great extensive detail for which he is known, if you had to pin a word on it, but, maybe there is some form of similarity to a traveling chef, rambling, yet edited.

Okay, I'm having a beer. More later, maybe.

The problem in a recession, could it be, is a lack of imagination. Too much same old, same old, proliferating everywhere with its dull already-known obviousness, like tracts of townhouses raised up overnight on farmland habitat, now sitting empty, the precious natural resource of land and habitat scarred for eternity. It is an economy stuck in a rut, of the plan to be part of the web of making a buck without any thought, without adding anything new, anything fresh. No new ways of doing something, no doing something new, tattooed upon us.

First, there is an admission of the fault, an observation of a need for quality of ideas rather than just copying something in a rote manner. Not just micro-chipping everything better, not just letting one listen to a song quickly and easily, all derivative stuff, but new ideas, new material, or even the appreciation of good old material. (That’s what we’ve invested in, technology to better copy and broadcast everything, and there is some good in that, an education, hopefully not a drowning; let’s not forget originality and fresh invention.) No wonder it's the 'derivative' investing that so inextricably a part of the current mess. They don't call it that for nothing. (And now what are they trying to do, with life insurance policies, betting against real people, real lives, the new bright idea.)

It takes a Presidential act to declare the need for imagination. “We chose to go the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” Or a look backward, an observation of a testing of a national idea, as Lincoln gives at Gettysburg, still relevant today.

Build a new Parthenon, just as an invigorating construction project. Duplicate a thatch-roofed Connemara house. Recreate a real log cabin. Create a hiking trail. Celebrate nature. (WPA did stuff like that.) Go back to your roots, and learn something unexpected along the way.


Now some things we say, we regret. That goes without mention. Somethings we wish we said better. Sometimes we realize what we write might sound rather stupid. We fall sometimes into pained exercises. But yet to always be so guarded doesn't help the imagination flow freely, or let the brain reach out and take its own less-rational stab at something. That's something else to learn, something to practice. A reach for a mistake, who knows, could be something else entirely different.

Artists, poets, yogis, musicians, are there to remind us of something, how to create, how to refresh the mind, not just be a blind consumer shoveling into it, ‘getting and spending.’ That is where the modern anxiety comes from, from being stuck into the consumerist traps, not having the chance to do something new, individual, fresh and different. The autism of receiving a thousand messages with no chance to personally create one. There is, after all, a reason some people feel most relaxed when they have a chance to be creative, and some people even seek that out at weird hours, alone, wherever they can.

Have things grown to so big a scale the individual imagination is irrelevant? Invest in the arts. Read history. Write your own poetry.

My cat, she is the reincarnation
Of some samurai
With a long white whiskery mustache
Who guarded a wintry temple long ago,
Keeping strangers and callers out
So that the thinkers within
Would not be disturbed.

She lies down on her side
Just as he did,
Ready to jump up
In the flash of an instant
And fight.
Other times she whips her tail around,
Cutting the air,
Like he did with his sword,
Practiced and intimidating,
Gripping it with deadly accuracy,
A show of fury,
As I sit in my chair with a cup of green tea
Wondering what to write
In my legal pad notebook.

Warm within her furry robe of calico,
Ever alert and at the ready,
She guards the back deck,
Looking over the garden
With perfect economy of motion
And stillness,
As snow falls,
Her closed eyes open to any intruder.

The Zeitgeist of Hamlet

Hamlet has made his way back into the limelight, the front page of the New York Times Sunday Arts & Leisure, thanks to actor Jude Law and a new production. There seems to be a newfound respect for the role, the deeply personal ups and downs, ‘the readiness’ for teetering on the brink of going mad. And today, like a gravedigger or clown from the bard’s frame of a scene, the Times front page gives us a good look at a master carpenter who cannot find work and has given up trying.

The AMC series Madmen punctuates the upheaval to the personal and professional lives of those who work in an ad agency with President Kennedy sitting down with the nation to discuss clearly, calmly, straightforwardly and soberly in understandable terms the events as they were unfolding in the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was one of his great moments before he left us, a rational thinker looking into the face of moral insanity. And certainly the passing of Senator Edward Kennedy reminds us of the politics of the generosity of the New Deal in the face of the disaster caused by financial market speculations. Such efforts represent an effort to find a moral guide to do the right thing in the face of the irrational. As such they do not exist so spiritually faraway from the efforts of Hamlet, just as Madmen lets us in on people dealing with issues of family and marriage and moral choices.



Indeed, people are scared, terrified, hanging on, disheartened, waiting for the next shoe to fall. Living ‘morally’ is all we can do. Of course, these days the word is a troubled term in need of redefinition from being pulled selfishly and opportunistically in so many ways, patriotically and otherwise.

Jesus Christ pointed out to the poor, the meek, the suffering, the sick and the mournful, highlighting them as a factor in the world as if they were the reason the world exists in the first place. His enemies called him, more or less, a moralizing little bastard with no credentials. When in fact he was quite the opposite of a bastard, his moral stuff was in fact on good solid grounds and that his work, amongst publicans and sinners, was in fact a fine credential. Happy are the meek, etc., because they may be associated with the very light that shines into the world and lends it its daily existence.

(Lincoln himself expressed the same ideas at the end of his career in the Second Inaugural in his phrases of binding up the nation's wounds, caring for the battle-scared and the widow, charity for all and a call to cherish a just and a lasting peace, all of which I have spontaneously remembered and rendered without the necessary quotation marks, the words being his, and his alone and not mine. Lincoln was, maybe, a pretty good pre-New Dealer.)

J.C. performed miracles. He had, in other words, read the old scriptures correctly, grasped their points and formed some good policy decisions.



The banking practices that got us into the sub-prime lending situation and all the attendant messes contain a proof of the Buddhist laws of illusion of selfishly minded investing, the morally questionably nature of exploiting the weakness of people’s sensual desires to have a roof, or at least the temporary illusion of one, over their heads. (A peculiar thing, the banks peddled, almost a kind of pornography.)

Reagan had already come along and wiped out the social safety net, the practical worldly attempt to do good works for the homeless, the mentally deranged, social security, etc., all with a libertarian smirk of holier than thou justness. Did he expect God himself to come down and wipe away such problematic types and cast them into a fire thus ridding us of the problem and letting us go on our way of making as much money and being as rich as we felt like personally entitled to. Reagan took away the money to pay for things, destroying a lot of perfectly healthy partner programs between private charity and public effort. He called the effort, and the illusions of wealth and promise detached from the basic troubles of human nature, godly names that sounded good and strong, words invoking trust, security, enterprise, decency, fairness, good politics, etc. He cast the efforts based on simple Christian morality to ease the pain of real people as the problem, and let wealth accumulate where ‘it belongs.’

Trickle down, was his further prophecy. People should be as rich as they wanted to be, and after having used the structure of society to get where they were, give nothing back in return, except, oh yeah, piddling service sector jobs that don’t pay the rent when times get tough. The same mentality sent jobs and opportunity for skilled labor’s development overseas so quickly that it never had a chance. Leaving the wealth of Walmarts in the hands of the few.



The national crisis is a unique opportunity, one that obviously doesn't come often here, one that potentially may lay some important issues clearly before us. We have a chance now to remember the compass of basic morality, the gold of the laws that pertain to our existence on the planet, hidden in plain sight amidst the greedy alchemic schemes of charlatans of illusion. We are left with, or rather given as a democratic tool, the Internet, to blog away in our poor obscurity, but to at least stand for some basic good things. We are left with the chance to say that now is not the time to be a Center-seeking party wanting to please the old Reaganites, but rather the time to be a wild New Dealer, finding a way to put people back to work, a charity that is the face of dignity itself, both in accepting it as well as tendering it.

The novel. The internet. Combine the two, and there is a chance for a kind of democratic revolution, a chance to be read, to be judged on quality and connecting with the reader, to bring forth a greater variety of issues placed before the reading public outside of the established tastes and boundaries.

The published book risks becoming an animal of the market economy rather than an organic creation. The book is crafted for sales, thought of only in such terms. But a book can be deeper than that, deeper than what that appeal offers by way of history and how-to; in its origin, it must be so. Natural growth is stifled by attention to what is already selling, the Stephen Kings, the Danielle Steeles, etc.. There are course good and worthy writers, the tirelessly productive and wonderful Joyce Carol Oates, but is there a great marginal benefit to each new piece given all that's out there? How much benefit is there to the space given some 'critic's' shallow self-advancing careerist note about the latest work of recognized writer X, as such notes quite typically ignore the most crucial and obvious faults and issues and sad realities of modern times, whereas instead a good simple healthy moral light could be shined in favor of good things out of good honest people? The surfaces of everything literary are so littered, the original source literary objects, shining in their own simple human beauty, so hard to see beneath. And yet, why pick on the literary people, the least of all our problems, if not our saviors?

Maybe one just writes one book, an All Quiet on the Western Front, let’s say, and that one book captures something, be it a democratic ideal, a subtle critique of sacred cows. Lincoln is boiled down for most to the two speeches on the walls of his memorial, and the two go a long way for covering what he had to say, great, solitary, away from frivolous nonsense, written under a realization that there is a time to write something, not much time left to do so.

As everyone, agents, editors, publishing houses, is pressed in a direction by, and pressed into service for, the market, unable to absorb the broad originality and range of written work, the great breadth of the democratic, the Shakespearean, the inclusive, perhaps a time comes when independence must be declared from the present publishing world's function as government and powers that be.

What can one do, but break out of the lonesome cycle, declare one’s own inherent goodness and reality. Reject those whose judgment over you was that you were a bad student, a bad future writer.


The novel is written out of freedom and spirit. It is wild and democratic, representing people as they are. It may offend some people and certain private sensibilities. But it is also a gentle act, an act of compassion broader than for just one individual or institution. It is an act of risk. It asks for little in return, but simply to be read, judgment quietly suspended. Its call is to the imagination, to that beyond the ways we normally think, are asked to think. It must be given to the world freely and without shame, out of compassion for unheard voices, far from being a selfish act.

To follow through with an act that began long ago, not as a risk to take for something granted in the way of reward, but as thought, as careful consideration of education, years of toil at other things, letting the writing mature slowly, the events of life maturing the writer, and then finally the writer has real reasons to write, quite beyond technical virtuosity or aim for the reward of being published, but for his work to see the light.

JFK comes as close as anyone on the importance of poetry, at Amherst, October, 1963. “When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truths which serve as the touchstone of judgment. The artist, forever faithful to his personal vision of reality, becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an officious state.”

One can easily enough succumb to the notion that he will never be a writer of any significance.

But that is not what the child believes, as when he picks up a pencil to draw. Nor is that what the college kid believes when he listens to records of JFK speeches on wintry days before a turntable, with headphones on, in the music library, drawn by cadence and a tone of voice, by the power of words.

One believes, can only believe, in himself. One believes in himself as a writer, and the belief, I suppose, is the primary, the main, the principle thing.

Any writer is a boy who dreams. To do his work, he must be solitary.

We all want, in a way, the heroic parts of ourselves, to be Lincolns and Kennedys. They were public men who understood poetry and drew on the power of words. Perhaps we think of going to law school as the logical start. But not all of us have the resources of a wealthy father, or of deep ambition and confidence and a patience to find the crux, the principle matter of the day.

To be a statesman of any sort, in any line of work, be it one of letters or music or art, one must believe in himself, in himself just as he is, just as his tastes are, crafted by his nature. He must also have a faith to develop his own nature.

One will fight all sorts of things, strange things, obstacles, the variety of human nature, weaknesses and indirection. There are pitfalls and traps, and one falls into them such that he may well lose his pride and ambition, enchanted as he has become by his own downfalls and the repeated failings of bad habits. Those are the sorts of mistakes that develop wisdom, shrewdness and character, from the very things that one feels tarnished by.

It can be, it may be, easy to miss the common blood of ambition in the boy, particularly when he has fallen. It will help him if he’s had some ambition before, to remember--even if it was little more than arrogance back then—and recognize the fine stuff that breathes inside of him still. For certainly he will, through the difficulties and complexities of life find himself fallen and lost, so as to bring worry and anxiety upon his house. Even by goodness of heart may he fall, for not clinging to a calculating nature.

Then, as before he knew, as a student he will find as a tool, by which to begin to dig himself out of the hole he’s fallen into, something within. His eloquence will have survived the bad years, the lost times, the night, the vagrant companions. Even in his fallen state, it will feel a good and necessary thing for him, to write. He knows this eloquence as the thing to carry him from the mess he has made for himself.

And then, even those who would, out of little fault of their own, shun and avoid him and count him out, will hear his eloquence and take note.


When I was a young fellow fresh out of college I read books about politics. I read about Lincoln. I read about JFK and RFK. And who hasn’t, taken with a flush of adolescent dreamy optimism and hopes to achieve something that stands in the world, something good and wise.

And then there comes a time of apparent realism, apparent realization. Less prone are we to reach for such books, and less optimistic are we that we might ourselves ever live such influential lives. We find realities abounding, and none of those twists of fate that fall in line to raise one up.

Hopes fade. Maybe they are kept in secret reserves, kept out of the light of day. I turned away from Making of the President 1960 and Sandburg’s Lincoln, and more and more I read fictive literature. I put away histories of moral causes and legislative works. I read about people in odd and unhappy situations, as if they reflected my own world. I gained in empathy as I put hopes aside.

And then, as if through reaching an end of a certain weary chapter of my own life, I remembered afresh the vital importance of those works I had come to shun, those of the special people for whom politics and speeches are incredibly creative, boldly and broadly imaginative as art.

To empathize on the one hand, to keep on the other a form of active hope for the issues of the time, of all time, developed out of the seeds of thought into some fruition: this was some way forward.

Is the writer a political force? Does he beckon us to the vital source of existence like unto the Beatitudes, from whence thereupon a direction for public minds might come?

A present age is always ruled by skeptics and faultfinders, by nay-sayers and special interest pessimists mired in the topical arguments of the day. One’s only claim against such force is the benevolence within we all can claim, as the good tree bringeth forth the good fruit.

The good fruit will seem a fiction at first, to be of too low and common and obvious a birth, tainted by humble appearance and humility, as it always will. A candle, held so as to read by.