Dec 272020
 

Riverside reflections on writing “Rehearsing Repetitions on the Rappahannock”

The Rappahannock River’s switchbacks cross a flattening Chesapeake basin to the sea. On the old map in front of me, the unfolding river moves with a flourish of quill-quickened calligraphy—a declaration of blackness fattening toward a monumental invisibility beyond Virginia’s rich shores….

The multifarious fantasies of river-watching reach out to jaded consciousness, fingering perhaps the sad man’s brain-sac after experiencing the the riprap ravages of tragedy….

There’s comfort and confrontation in the repetitions of ripples. Like the sighs and rhymes and glottal agonies of actors repeating their run-on lines, the ripples kiss and disperse—both welcomed and dismissed by inviting consciousness….

The waves rise and ride the rude fire of sun’s tumbling over the hill, creating green brims of their own in liquid display. Hills and waves are much alike, and the tired mind finds itself in finding out the degrees of their similitude….

Yes, there’s a lot more of lucent than lunacy in “the patient good of going nowhere” as even the most ingenious ages attest. Indeed, this sitting in the coracle of consciousness and watching the objective world and subjective mind interpenetrate is what makes us humans such superb interpreters! But interpreters of what and to what, well….

This poem is about the satisfactions of being a knot in that web. About remaining supple while the evidential pulse of existence passes through the tree of ganglia above your neck. About knowing without knowing for sure….

On the rap,
Again,

Gregg Glory
2020

Sep 022020
 

Dark Poet, your pen scratches at the heart of life.
~~Antonin Artaud

Nonsense is often the most sensible kind of sense. This is counterintuitive, but trust me for a moment as we proceed. This is no three-card monte. Nor is it like the wonderful magic of Emmett Kelley the clown sweeping his spotlights into a single circle, and then putting that circle in his pocket, patting his pocket and smiling like Einstein after he’d eureka’d light into a corner.

Nonsense reveals all of us—our self, our situation—in a single pop of recognition as we are trampolined from our usual assurances and then forced to regain our footing, to regain our meaning, on the fly. Like an old-fashioned photographer’s flash powder, we are exposed to an extreme of light, with no visible space left for secrets or lies. This is part of the odd exhilaration of nonsense. And, don’t get me wrong, nonsense isn’t some sly encyclopedia where all hidden truths are stored and we must simply discover the index—oh, no. Rather, the puzzles that nonsense reveal are genuinely unsolvable. Gregor Samsa will never come back from being a cockroach; his transformation in the story “Metamorphosis” has simply revealed the pickle he was already in, but didn’t know that he was in.

What nonsense reveals, at its best, are genuine mysteries.

And, like Gregor Samsa, the character in the poem “Nagging Question,” who wakes up with a pile of feathers at his feet after having torn his pillow apart in his sleep, all he can do with a true mystery, once it has been revealed, is to go back into the realm from which the mystery emanated. Gregor cross-examines his family situation, and the character in our poem returns to the realm of sleep and dream. But, with new, perhaps sharper, questions in mind with which to confront the mystery that has been revealed. Or, it may be, with no questions at all, simply with one’s eyes widened.

This process resembles the scientific method, except for the fact that there is no control group. What variables could nonsense ever control for? There may one day be a science of comedy, but never one for true mystery. The only control group we have in poetry is every other poem ever written. Their mysteries abide, and it is into them that we go to confront those mysteries again and again—and to find more of ourselves more truthfully (or at least more fully) revealed.

 
[With] the pillow exploded uselessly between your hands
And what looks to be a chicken carcass
Piled in an inscrutable white mound
Headless between your bare feet [...]
There’s only one place for you to find your answer.


Gregg Glory
August 28, 2017

Sep 022020
 

Once all wilderness was innocence. Later, all wilderness was sin. What does it say about wilderness, that it could be both sin and innocence—a space of condemnation and reprieve—at once? What does it say about us, limber interpreters of vastness? Every day someone takes a snapshot of themselves with the Statue of Liberty on his shoulder, or the moon upheld in her palm, the violent grandeur of the universe turned by metaphor and pixel-flash into a beachball.

Now we find our wildness in suburban glimpses: long weekends away to a campsite, the unwonted sting of a bee. Yet we were made by wildness; we were wolves before we mellowed to dogs. When observation and observance sharpen beyond the roar of words we soothe ourselves with, the tickertape of conscience and prayer unspooled to silence, we can see the action of life plain. The constant taking, the inevitable greed, camouflage, and waste inherent in all things.

The sun knows nothing but to burn. The salmon little else than to breed and feast. Our arteries are red with burning, veins blue with hunger. A paranoid, irascible eye sees many raw things civilization has regretfully gilded; an eager ear—with its vestigial muscle for turning still intact—may yet attune itself to the strangeness of what is. Listen.

Parables are everywhere is our daily doings if we listen, the ear of consciousness arranging random notes and facts into pattern, the flare of consciousness illuminating new mosaics in the old catacombs. Life itself, in all its accident and happenstance, is transformational because our consciousness is partial.

We can’t see all sides of an object at once like a cubist artist. We cannot even experience ourselves consistently across the daily divide of sleep; at best we are strips of stuttering film. We bridge these gaps with memory and imagination. And reality is the perpetual testing grounds of that self-invention—and poetry, at its finest, with its honest looks at what is—is the checklist for that reality. Words are the net we use to draw reality into us. So use that net, anxious to add meaning to your ultimately unknowable life—the omnipresent wilderness.

Gregg Glory
April 1, 2018

Aug 252020
 

Vivid Ovid. His humanizing tales of metamorphosis (if you’ll pardon the pun) in the literally alien context of the interaction of gods and people have drawn the eyes and admiration of readers for eons. How often I longed to trace with my own tongue the temptations and graces of such tales! Who wouldn’t want to be master of a matter so fantastical, so outlandish—and yet still be able to draw homey homilies from the consequences of such fables? Daphne praying to be turned into a laurel tree rather than endure a rape in the god-clutches of a “divinely maddened” Apollo; or the unfaithful Jupiter stashing his part-time squeeze, the ravishing beauty Io, not in some kept-woman’s studio apartment, but in another living form by transforming her…into a cow—albeit a beautiful cow. And Ovid’s touch of detail that makes both god and man acknowledge their wayward foibles, their vulnerability to desire. Such is our condition: half angel, half satyr. What, ultimately, could be more compelling than this poetic recognition of our limitedness adrift in the infinity of our desire?

Always it is against chaotic Nature that human success in the arts in measured. Versailles with its to-the-millimeter immaculate gardens, Jesus with his cracking of Lazarus’ catacomb—leading the experienceless child within each of us on to eternal life, the absence of Death. But Ovid’s fables transmute nature to nature, violating the continuity of life within life as it proceeds from the womb to tomb—rather than through some transvaluation of all values via a post-death resurrection, or the living-death deletion of meaning that narcissistic nihilism provides. Ovid’s metaphor is metaphor emphatic, metaphor literally embodied (were such transformations to actually occur anyplace beyond the agile chambers of the mind). This makes him a prankster in some respects, a comedian of life’s myriad deceptions and switcheroos, slips and oopses. Instead of the authority of Justice (or the inevitability of the furious Eumenides) appearing at the end of a tragedy, enforcing cosmic meaning by the rending apart of life’s tender fabric, we have instead the inescapable acknowledgement of a rueful chuckle forced from the aghast reader at the transformation’s literal unreality and too-intimate horror. To be moved at all by the pageant Ovid presents is to acknowledge our own culpability in the lusts and greeds he lampoons. Yes, I, too, would so covet, so fail of my ideals, so mangle my heavenly morality with my mortal mischief. There, lacking the grace of God, go I; every I that I can imagine being or becoming, in all my rhymes of form and story.

Existentialism is one moral response to the nothingness modern man confronts now that we’ve blown the Holy Ghost from the churches—the stained glass left colorless and drained of ecstasy. The bareness, the thisness, of place, of Everyman in every place, replaced the altar that had once signaled the savior’s triumph over the reality of Death. The very sepulcher became the resonant cross, embossed with neither promise nor stoic resignation, but instead enriched with the simple elaboration of emptiness itself. Ever more intricate become our minuets above the void. As Mallarme noted: “The beautiful, gratuitous, turns into the ornamental, repudiated.” Mallarme’s For Anatole’s Tomb is a restful counterpoint to our innate desire’s torturous wish for the infinite, desire’s tensile beauty making every moment its own gravesite, its own elaboration of the endless dust and nothingness we face. I like the moral stance emblemized in the Pagan torch-passing of praise and memory a bit better myself: an endless relay of meaning lit to life by the burn of magnificent poetry. Such a contingent arrangement must strike modern artists as too hopeful, too communal an enterprise after the wick of self-conscious Romanticism was ignited. But, don’t bet on it! Romanticism itself is a response to the stocks and manacles of Kant’s “no you can’t,” the vivisecting separation of object and subject—a spastic cast of empirical dice—and nothing more than that.

Is it any wonder that Shakespeare took up Ovid as a foil for his first funning with verse? Titus Andronicus pushes the dry coracle of black humor into the slick swamp of tragedy in an ever-modern mash-up going nowhere. Existential titters accompany the gruesome and aghast pies stuffed with human flesh as they are served up piping hot and tucked into with an ignorant will. Who does not eat of Life with the same ignorance as the rapists Shakespeare depicted at the table, pinkies up and kerchiefs to chins? I, too, like the wily Bard, love Ovid in all his miracle and mayhem. So much mayhem!

Our current crop of graphic novels and grim heroes are of Ovid’s mold. Think of today’s Batman, the caped crusader, the Dark Knight, transformed by a desire for justice into a nightwinged bat, who turns his midnight vengeance into a secular grail tipping over with blood. Catwoan, Aquaman, Doc Oc—all half-breeds wandering bewildered in landscapes of existential angst. I, too, had wanted to honor with the sweat of inspiration and the grace of rhyme of one of Ovid’s raving fables, but as I toured the crazed slop-house of the Greek gods, the Roman gnomes, as Ovid had carved and enlarged them, I was struck by the fiery violence his tales told of—and, I admit, I was afraid to retail such gory goods in my modest mall of art.

I turned the prized pages of my Ovid over once again. Even the fable of fey Salmacis, I noticed, with her “weak, enfeebling streams,” ends in a dual-sex hermaphroditic unity that is still illegal in many countries. The lovers’ tentative rapprochement has some of Absurdio’s hesitant desire in its outlines—an expression of being’s ignorant need to be, and therefore be loved. So twined together is our self and our sex. Salmacis and Hermaphroditus was almost the tale I re-told. What if Absurdio met a wet, eight-armed Venusian princess in her tidal pool of green chlorine? The denouement was still too horror-genre for me to proceed with that story, but the delicacy of Salmacis and Hemaphroditus’ meeting was a model for Absurdio’s first grope toward hope—the challenge and comfort that concupiscence provides:

The boy knew nought of love, and, touched with shame,
He strove, and blushed, but still the blush became;
In rising blushes still fresh beauties rose;
The sunny side of fruit such blushes shows,
And such the moon, when all her silver white
Turns in eclipses to a ruddy light.
The Nymph still begs, if not a nobler bliss,
A cold salute at least, a sister’s kiss;
And now prepares to take the lovely boy
Between her arms. He, innocently coy,
Replies, "Oh leave me to myself alone,
You rude, uncivil nymph, or I’ll begone."
—J. A.

I settled, perhaps a touch too reflexively, upon the pageantry of Pygmalion’s tale. After all, the story had been exampled brilliantly by Shaw, and there’s even a musical modeled from its bones—though fleshed with sexism and an elitist tone of triumphalism (to which I am not, confessedly, adverse). This story has no goopy, blood-bludgeoned ending, no comeuppance, no disastrous consequence where Nature regains the reins of Justice and executes the feckless nabob who knew well enough into whose guarded garden he had trespassed. No, here Venus stoops to conquer, and extends a merciful pity on her inspired subject. It is the love story of the artist and his object, his sculpted creation, a female mate conjured from pure desire and art’s millimeter-mania for perfection. Yes, a fine tautology to lead me down the garden path. What post-modern word-whittler could resist the inevitable levels of self-reference, the circumference of innuendo bound to grow Falstaff-fat? And, with luck and cunning, perhaps my Absurdio could be as happy a sinning creation as my fellow Ovid-fan Shakepere had managed? To what Mediterraneanesque setting would my gods and goddesses descend? What glamorous goods would press against my alluring shop window?

The main item in the inventory of Venus and Vesuvius, as you will soon plainly see, is an adolescent male I have dubbed Sir Absurdio. Absurdio is left alone on the planet Venus where he was born, the only son of two intrepid scientists appointed to explore our over-heated solar neighbor. Why he has been left so tragically alone, and at such a crucial age, our tale will unfold. I myself was so ill as a teen with an ulcerative onset conjured by the psychic injuries of my parent’s divorce, that I missed the last two years of my American high school experience. I grok some aspects of Absurdio’s puzzling solitude. No friends from our 3,000-strong clan of Marlboro Mustangs possessed the fortitude to visit a lonely, pimple-ridden writer-to-be in the forested enclosure of his one-boy farm-forest prison. The only friends who favored me with their presence were Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Ben Bova, Phillip K. Dick, J. R. R. Tolkien, Terry Brooks, Stephen R. Donaldson, and other luminaries of the imagination’s intergalactic parsecs. They are the reason I placed my Ovidian vale in outer space.

Now, if you’ll strap on your muse-provided jet-packs, let’s zoom to the moon—and beyond!

Gregg Glory, August 2013.

Aug 232020
 
Sep 042019
 
I ask: how do I make my dented self 
         beautiful 
with this old pencil? 
     ~~Daniel J. Weeks, Self-Symphonies

 

Our legs look broken when light bends them in the swimming pool. Once our heads are under, immersed in the experience of wetness, the illusion disappears. Our legs are restored to us in their wholeness, where they can be repurposed as impromptu fins to propel us elsewhere. Which of these sets of legs are our “real” legs? The broken set, the restored set, or the Aquaman set?

Entering a poem is like entering that other, underwater world. We are restored to a wholeness the pain of life and its deceptions has convinced us is missing. But, we can only hold our breaths so long before our imaginations burst! And still we go down like clockwork into the dark otherwhere of metaphor, easing past the shallow end of simile, our imaginations and lungs aching. However dangerous the journey, we will not be denied our diving, our entry into depths.

The act of writing is a way for poets to break the surface tension, to transform and explore with all of their sets of legs at the same time–water-skimmer and octopus at once. The act of, not just imagining, but creating the distortion of a written record, a pool for others to enter, is part of the mystery. This writing things down, however, is not what may be called a clarification; that’s a mistake many neopyhte divers make, arriving back at the deck of their exploration vessel with the bends.

Let me propose that both imagination and reality are equally real, equally imaginary. A grown-up Velveteen Rabbit has a smoking habit, perhaps; perhaps the dourest accountant over-charging on our tax prep is a weekend balloonist– or, more daring yet– a plummeting parachuting enthusiast.

Whether this need for othering ourselves, appropriating the ocean’s indigo, pretending a purpler sky, being winged in imagination whenever we watch a bird in flight, is the result of an evolutionary symbiosis of inner and outer selves or some kind of meshuggeneh co-dependency, I cannot tell. But I know that it cannot be otherwise. Real or unreal, one hand will always be reaching after realness–a stuffed, velvety rabbit dangling from the other hand.

Gregg Glory
July 4th, 2017
 
Mar 152017
 

Emotional suffering gives us access to the real world in a way that ideas, and even love, cannot attain

We turn death and generation into a fable of sacrifice. Plants are buried, and are honored in their going; the Crop King is executed, and from his everlastingly renewed body the spring stalks arise to be culled again. His death is willingly embraced by him, or by his stand-in chosen from among the farmers–and this freely chosen death is overcome, in the Christian story, by God’s intervention. Or the sacrifice is invested with meaning by the very act of undertaking the self-imposed burden of sacrifice. Perhaps the deadness of the death is overcome via the more pagan vehicle of the anti-wish-fulfillment of tragedy–their heroes marching off-stage with a chin-lifted “tragic gaiety.”

At a minim, in these stories of death, the dead have some future existence, some ongoing effect on the living who survive the sacrifice. They are ghosts, legacies, shapers of their children’s childhoods (and thus their later lives), fathers of countries, innovators and stage-managers of the theater of ideas in which our own living decisions seem to occur.

There is, however, a more reductive way of viewing these mechanics of life and death. A way in which immaterial ideas remain immaterial to the whole process of death and generation. In this view, death and life are entirely out of our hands, and are not even subject to some overweening concept, such as Fate. Death and generation are entirely out of our conscious control, contribution, or even comprehension. The grave is a wormy meat-locker, the womb a humid conveyer-belt on auto-pilot, churning and regurgitating material for the low grave’s open door. All the rest, all our imposition of pattern, our self-selecting and seeking of meaning, our elaborate institutions of culture, our games of play and mating, are no more than an con game that we play against ourselves–an inherently deceitful waste of time and effort.

No wonder no one has the time to read poetry books! Thin as they are, they make better coasters than guideposts; they are lies only, not metaphoric (or metamorphic) mile-markers limping off into the mists toward immanence….

There is one thing, however, that binds us to the earth in both of these scenarios. If we are meaning-making creatures who have impact and effect in our deliberate embracing of death, our use of tools, and our active management of history–or if we are simply whittled-down pegs, wooden-headed and wooden-footed as we hop the circuit and then hop off some cosmic cribbage board. And that one thing is sorrow. Grief over what is lost, or for that which is too soon to be gone, made irrecoverable by time and nature. In both cases, what is, is. And there is also that which will not always be as it is–or even always continue to be at all. The result of this fact is the unending sorrow that life presents to us. Tragedy or comedy, we cry at either when the curtain lowers, as the coffin to its silky mud, and the players disperse like invisible ink, all play-acting at an end.

Sorrow grounds us, keeps our beings seated on the earth. And it is through this special kind of on-going grief that we enter into our true understanding of life, and of the life of death. Sleep is our small daily adjustment toward incorporating unconscious revelations. When we are awake, it is sorrow that can let us break through the gates that hold the mind’s wild darkness away from day-lit acknowledgement–the gates that consciousness holds shut with our meaning-making, endless cognitions and wishes. Mary Oliver says, in her poem ‘Don’t Hesitate,’ that “Joy is not made to be a crumb.” So, too, with sorrow. We are not meant to sip the deluge. Sorrow, if it comes at all, arrives with tidal force–and the wideness of its bleak realization keeps our feet steady, blows the egomaniac mind down the staircase, and holds our elbows hard so that we must face each other in dire humility.

Poems grown from sorrow can perhaps gives us the momentary clarity to drop our pretense of control, the modern imperative that commands that we impose a single, often literal, meaning. Poems grown from sorrow let us sit abandoned among the dead leaves of grief. Poems can let us see the feather fallen from the raven’s wing, and can let us enter into the long dark tubes of mourning that flow so keenly along the detached shaft–the backbone of a feather that had once been capable of the terrors of flight.

Gregg Glory
December 25, 2015

Feb 212017
 

Slim reflections on a pilgrimage to London and Stratford-Upon-Avon, circa 2006

“No bird so wild but has its quiet nest” — P. B. Shelley

by Gregg Glory

Freshly returned from London, and I feel clotted with the creme de la creme of the experiences, sights, and histories there. I look forward to giving fictitious, but accurate, reports of my sojourn very soon. But for now, I’ll simply leave you with a quote from the BBC News caster, who turned to her colleague during the A.M. news and said “It’s official Paul, this has been the wettest May ever.”

These notes occurred in a hurry, but will be re-written in tranquility. I’m home with a negligible tally of booty, and two moleskin notebooks rather stuffed with nonsense. This is what I have to shift about and share with you. You are welcome to peruse and enjoy, just as I have felt welcomed and allowed in London, with never a shyness put in the way of my curious eyes.

What my memories are, I must decide. I have in hand an itinerary outlined by Carlo and myself on the train back from Stratford, but the subjective substance of my days away must be sorted, aborted, or saved, by myself alone. A tour guide who had lived away from England swore she had missed the rain as she dodged drops trickling into the red bus. And I don’t think I’ll have as harsh a response to the rain when it comes my way again; when the sky broods, so shall I. Some portion of my substance has always been submersible, and now my spirit has a pair of paddles as well it seems.

Accompanying photos can be found in my London Trip, 2006 photo gallery.


Baa Baa British Airways

My lungs are tight, tight–tough rubber inflated by an insistent kid; and then they loosen and ease into breathing as we dare the upward darks toward God. Goodbye Newark, goodbye New Jersey! Soon enough I am asleep, aware only of the brim of my hat pulled down over my nose–and tickling faintly as a remembered telegram a decade after the crisis that tapped it into existence has faded into fact. The cabin lights have been snuffed to dull orange orbs. Carlo is snoring voraciously next to me like a Gorgon–after she’s been decapitated.

My nodding head floats along a moonbeam. I see into myself as a goldfish looking into its own wraparound bowl. I discern, in my cooped-up container, that I have a left-handed soul, a south-paw personality. My circles of self-knowing all enlarge from a left-hand swirl in the snug bowl. They say your life-expectancy is shortened five years just be being a lefty. What does that translate into if its not just your hand, but you heart and your head as well? My creativity’s a crisscross of ifs. A plague of maybes announced in a crash of radio static. May Day! May Day! May Be!

It was this traffic snarl of farts and feathery zephyrs that I took to England. England, rich ditch and silt start of all the poets and all the poems written in the only language that has levered love out of my tacky heart. From what eddies had I issued? Into what ocean must I debouche? Was there here, in the valley of the Thames, some smoking gun to blast me back to my origin? Or, better yet, some still-wet quill I could claim as father for all my faults, my foibles, my want-wit waywardings? I aimed to live alertly as I looked around London.

At 10,000 feet there are only clouds. Clouds and the crumbled cornices of cloud-palaces. One juts out with the Queen’s profile as on a swollen coin; we dive in toward her cloud-crown. 5,000 feet and still no clearing–all is weighted with vapors. 1,000 feet, 900, 500, now, at last, a glimmer of green and a swirl of lights comes up out of the bowl of the dawn. Its 7 AM, the sunny-side-up of twilight. Heathrow grows into throbbing focus, like a lost fossil of a brontosaur washed from the moss. A pulse of the river has flooded out a skull, the airport stands out against the misty green, all hard substance exposed by a vibrant and active flow of life coursing in its jets.

The ceiling was high, and people from all over the globe were in line, giving a cluttered Calcutta impression to the place. A Sikh in a turban and blue customs-officer coat led a fast-track of handicapped passengers (which included mommies hobbled by infants) to a separate desk surrounded by lounge chairs. I stood in a twisty line of aliens on the other side of the expando-rope. At first I composed part of the tuckered tail, but eventually I became a vertebrae in the snake’s nape, and then finally I stood eye-to-eye with my first British official. I presented my passport and my paperwork, which I had filled in on the plane as we circled and lurked around Heathrow’s spaghetti-pile of grey runways. A cursory glance, a quick question.

“Business or pleasure?”

“Pleasure, please.”

“Anything to declare?”

“Only my ignorance.”


Mind the Gap

Anyone who has seen old episodes of “Dr. Who” in which the Daleks play a role will feel an eerie familiarity in the bustle of London’s Underground Tube. The Daleks, remorseless robots that looked more or less like armor-plated garbage cans with ray-cannons for noses, would intone as they went about the galaxy vaporizing any and all who opposed them: “EX – TERM – INATE!!” Similarly, a pleasant young Englishman’s voice repeats at each tube stop “Mind. The. Gap.”

This Orwellian cha-cha becomes as comforting as it can be chilling. I consider it an experiment in mass meditation. The mantra encompasses both being and nothingness. “Mind,” the source of all our deepest terrors and treats, our safe place as well as the zone of unknown dreams. It is to the mind that we look for solutions and our nightly dissolution of consciousness as well. It is the center of Zen’s non-target. “The,” a place-holder that clears the ears for the final reverberating word. “Gap,” the void where all our striving must ultimately end, and where it all takes place to begin with, according to the Bhudda, the Dalai Lama meditational cassette packet I’ve got at home, and even some of T. S. Eliot’s poetry. “Da Da Da,” the voice might as well say. But then syntax reasserts itself, as the monkey mind strives to make subjective sense of the nonsense syllables.

“Mind the gap.” The mind is a gap, a space between the thing-in-itself and us, an interlocutor, a saint saying things to us about the non-god of objects out there in the ding-an-sich, and pleading to the ever-on-going Tube our case and our causes. Or is it that we should exercise mindfulness about the gap? Make our minds at one with the void? This seems to be reflected in the attentive silence that engulfs the tube passengers, save for a loud American here and there, or some yob with his tootsies up on the seats across from him.

Barking approaches, or is it Angel by Old Street, or Cockfosters at last? The places begin to exchange their addresses as in a Matrix climax, or the last pass of some country jig. The portal doors part, producing a new proscenium for the next act. “Mind. The. Gap.” repeats fearlessly, simply, identically as at the last act. The traveler enters the play, and takes his escalator into the otherwhere’s breath-heavy ether.


Roly-Poly Shakespeare

Shakespeare’s roly-poly death effigy kept peeping in on us throughout the journey. The one where his mustache is a pair of carrots and his beard is a bit of decorative frosting. The old god looks as if he’s been converted into a bathtub float and over-inflated. This we kept seeing everywhere, in odd nooks between spine-busted books, flatly staring from an explanatory plaque next to some rough-bushed painting, in lurid 3-D leering down from some queer angle at Sir John Soane’s House, or in the too-trim perfection of some modern duplication of the figure set up as an explanation-in-the-round at the reconstituted Globe. I more than half expected to look over my shoulder and see him there above us, like a float in the Macy’s Day parade. All of these Shakespeares were dead, dead and portly as a stuffed shirt or a body nearing rigor mortis, a lame mannequin for a barber’s chair for shaving practice, or some other homely use.

But, when the time came to look up at the actual dingus, we shoved (or, rather, were shoved) off the spot without a glance at the puffy fellow, or a look at the intoning stone over his mortal remains that warns neither man nor nature to “move my bones.” High Eucharist was just beginning at Holy Trinity in Stratford-Upon-Avon, the service of life after this life, the Christian rigmarole being a death to Death itself. And so, without further ado, without a glance at the rock object itself, we departed. On to our own unrecited lines not yet said, our own deeds still in their seed-time.

Outside of the good grey church in the good grey day, Carlo pointed out the probable spot where scholars conjecture that Shakespeare’s bone do actually lay–four feet from the wall beyond the altar. It’s a green sink-pit, like the rest of England, a lush mush of life and wetness. And that too told me something of the fat everlastingness of the pudgy Shakespeare, of his words alluring or alarming on the braying stage, of this meshed-with-death existence that we giggle and piss our way through like cosmonauts circling the one thing we do know, and yet never know enough, our life-drunk Globe.

More coming.


Retrospective London Itinerary 2006

Dates Covered (Wed, May 17th through Mon, May 29)

WED    17    
THU    18
FRI    19
SAT    20
SUN    21

MON    22
TUE    23
WED    24
THU    25
FRI    26
SAT    27
SUN    28
MON    29


WED 17

6 PM Newark. Carlo gets us bumped to the front of the section where we can
stretch our legs by using a smattering of Polish on the British Airways clerk at the check-in counter. I find out my bag is too heavy for carry on an international flight.

In flight, try the lasagna dinner. Very good. Carlo uses his Italian to help the flight attendant communicate with an older Italian woman sitting behind us.

7:30 AM Arrive in London Heathrow.

Check in at the Wellington Hotel.

9:30 AM Catch hop-on hop-off double-decker tour bus. Tour tickets good for 24 hours. Tour city for 3 hours, getting our bearings. Terrific tour guide full of little stories. Sort of a blonde silly Sally type of woman in her mid 40s.

Hopped off at Piccadilly Circus, walked down Haymarket, popped into “Fancy That of London,” which sells tourist baubles. Chuckling at cut-out postcard heads of the royal princes, I resolves to send out postcards while away. Down a side-street to Tom Cribb’s Pub on the recommendation of our guide as a local spot for locals. Part of the Dick Whittington Ale Trail. Food quite good, had a bit of steak and chips. Choked while chatting and gulping food. Disoriented by jet lag and ale, puked up on the pub floor to the utter nonchalance of all around, got an instant splitting headache.

3 PM Nap and aspirin at the Wellington Hotel. Feel entirely recovered. Carlo explains my reaction as related to the sun-difference and internal “time warp” that occurs. Seems to be correct.

6 PM Go to Victoria Palace Theater at the end of the street, get a couple of tickets for that night, way up in the stratospheric seats. Dine at the Stage Door pub one entry over, where Carlo dines on lasagna and answers a questionnaire about English Pubs which a retired actor asks him to fill-in.

7:30 PM See Billy Elliot from the nose-bleed seats near a pillar with our legs squished to one side, and enjoy our first intermission ice creams. The musical is smashing, the pathos-filled tale of a miner’s son who wants to become a ballet dancer while his dad is on strike during the Thatcher regime.

12 PM Asleep at the Wellington.


THU 18

8 AM Breakfast at The Wellington, which had been converted from an old dorm belonging to the College of London, and was re-opened in 1983 by the grace the Duke of Wellington, as the brass plaque in the hallway noted. OJ, piles of toast, and a slice of ham and cheese that were so thin it appeared that they had been, as Carlo put it, “painted” on the plate.

9 AM Caught first bus tour again before our tickets timed out at 10:30 AM. We want to switch over to the “blue” tour line which covers a different part of the city than the “red” tour we rode on yesterday. We see many neighborhoods and sights, including the great city dragon guarding the financial district, which is on a large stone pedestal.

12 PM Stop at the Stock Pot, on the same street as Tom Cribb, a cheap eatery run by an Italian family. Excellent grub, and Carlo continues his lasagna tasting tour of London.

Move on to the Globe Theater tour in the afternoon. They have a first folio on site, and some interesting portraits of Shakespeare. There are dioramas of London and the Globe area in Shakespeare’s day. It reminded me of a US park. Many testimonies praising Sam Wanamaker, an American actor who pushed for the reconstruction of The Globe on the South Bank of the Thames. We get to see Titus Andronicus in rehearsal, and get psyched about seeing Coriolanus that evening.

Walk down the “Queen Victoria Walkway” to The Anchor pub, which Shakespeare frequented, have some pints and eat bits of fresh meat at The Carvery upstairs. We see drunken business men who have wandered dockside from Vinopolis laugh as one of their free “Vinopolis” T-Shirts floats into the Thames, having been taken up by a strong wind. Also, a beer glass gets thrown over and smashes. We talk to a foreign languages teacher and then move on to the evening’s theater.

7:30 PM Coriolanus at The Globe. The main part played with great dignity and conviction. Sat on the back bench and met a fellow from, you guessed it, Long Branch, NJ. Hope to take in a showing of Hamlet in New York City this summer with him.

12 PM Sleep.


FRI 19

Up and to Leichister Square. Got half price tickets for “Royal Hunt of the Sun” by Peter Schaeffer, playing at the National Theater at the TKTS booth.

Go past the Drury Lane Theater on our way to Covent garden, and stop in to see the bust of Shakespeare in the lobby. No ghosts make themselves known, and we leave knowing that we won’t come back to see “The Producers,” which is playing there.

Trafalgar Square on foot, seen but not strolled because of rainy weather. We duck into the National Portrait Gallery and see the long pale faces of the past. There is a sternness and a “fuck you” quality to the determined, active folks depicted in the paintings that reminds me of Wall Street, and of the British business men I’ve seen walking in straight lines all about the busy city. Even the women in this portrait gallery remind me of men, decked out in be-gemmed powersuits and swinging scepters. The lighting is poor, and the pictures are glare-ruined unless you get just the right angle.

We go next door and have lunch at St Martin-in-the-Fields in the crypt downstairs. At a lot of British public buildings, the life and thrub of the place all goes on in the basement. And so here, as I dines on fruit and bread over the large tombstone of a Mr. and Mrs. Brown. The florescent lighting and polite service only made it that much more eerie–a sort of bustling waiting room for the resurrection.

Down to Covent Garden, the great covered walkway, canvas stalls and street performers. A unicyclist whizzing about, a clown de-inverting from a headstand as we made our way to the main “pit” areas.

Double rows of shops left and right, like an outdoor mall. Drawn by the pure voice of an opera singer practicing in the open air, we made our way to the farther pit, Carlo narrating the specialness of the place for him. Sun peeps out. Carlo videos the singer a bit, and she salutes him.

Go down and meet a nice couple from York who are big fans of Long Branch’s own “Boccagaloupe.” The husband has a whole set of photos from their Yorktown (?) tour up on the web site. We promise to give our greetings to them when we return to America.

I get a pair of cufflinks with the mask of Comedy and Tragedy to memorialize the vacation filled with theater. Carlo shows me the “Theater Toy Shop,” dedicated to toys having to do with the theater. Giant Punch and Judys, collapsible stages, costume catalogs, and other interesting bits.

Walked on to The National, enjoying the Bankside area, having crossed the Millennium Bridge, I believe to get there. Carlo has a bite of drearily proletarian pizza in the cafeteria, and we go in to see “The Royal Hunt of the Sun.” Notes about the performance to follow; some powerful dramatic techniques used in the staging of the piece, including vast silks to represent floods of blood, and acres of golden nylon to represent rays of sunshine.


SAT 20

Walk a different route toward Victoria Station to see Westminster Cathedral, a stylized construct of different brick layers. The bells have been waking us each day at The Wellington, and we are interested to go in and see the various side chapels. This is my first serious English Cathedral.

Immediately, although the construction is early 20th century, I feel catapulted back to ancient Byzantium. The vault is full of dusty light, and the things of God lie about as if under a filter of glamour, their iridescent detail is so compact and replete. I simply can’t see everything that is showing itself to me. I’m struck by the statues and tombs of former cardinals who ran the diocese. Above one tomb, the cardinal’s red hat hangs like a Burmese umbrella, it is so large.

Prayers and candles for my naughty dead, who left the room without my say-so. We leave in a quiet mood back into a freshening fritter of rain.

We take the tube down to Blackfriars Bridge, and cross over to lunch at the Cheshire Cheese. It was at the Cheshire Cheese that Yeats met with The Rhymers Club at the turn of the last century, and I am anxious to see the place, which has been in operation since the 1600s. The place kills, and we see a full portrait of Dr. Johnson over the fireplace, and Charles Dickens’ and Dr. Johnson’s favorite chairs memorialized in the next room by screwed-in brass plaques.

Just up the street is Dr. Johnson’s house. Without his dictionary and all the subsequent ones, this memoir would never have been penned. We pass a statuette of a cat sitting next to an empty oyster shell. This is Hodge, Dr Johnson’s cat who he loved to feed oysters from the table. The cat is staring at Dr Johnson’s house, as if awaiting the great man of letters himself.

Dr. Johnson’s house is a treat. Plain wood, several stories tall, it was used in WWII as a fireman’s bunkhouse. One of the few buildings in the area to survive the Blitz, as the monolithic condo-cubes surrounding it attest. Upstairs there is some period costuming to try on, which does well in the mirror, tri-corner hat and all. Several good portraits of Johnson in the home, plus squibs and the dictionary. I look up Poetaster and Lexicographer. I retail the experience to my friend Jon Williams later in the evening after he brings up the trouble of not knowing if you are a poet or a poetaster. Carlo quips that I play the Boswell on our London tour, and he Dr. Johnson because the suit fits him.

Back to the Cheshire Cheese for innumerable good beers, all unknown to me. Carlo and I talk to our table neighbors, and I get some of the pub gossip: bartender Y slept with serving girl X by mistake (she came on to him), but they’re still friends. A retired couple comes in and shares many experiences of English life with me, only deigning to do some good-natured Bush-bashing at the end of our lovely time together.

We take the tube drunkenly out to Richmond, where Jon Williams and Sally Watson live with their little glowing Flo. Jon picks us up in a roaring, gorgeous yellow car, and we zip back to their pad, where Paris friends are visiting and the party is already well-on. I really believe I’m in England when I see them. And Jon seems just such a bloke among his mates, it cracks me up.

Jon talks about motoring to his brother’s house tomorrow at noon and the staging of a scene from my Sex Pistols play at The Labour Club in Northampton. Everything is breezy and sounds even less planned than I thought it could be. But it will take all of tomorrow, and at least most of Monday day–till 4PM or so, it sounds like. That’s a large chunk of such few precious days to spend just to let my ego holler. I think perhaps I’ll go and let Carlo off the hook for it.

Go down to the local shop on a beer-run without my coat, which had been deviously hung up in a closet behind the crowded couch.

Take the 11PM train back to Victoria, and bedazzled bed.


SUN 21

Sick as a dog from the coatless outing. I can’t do much of anything, and forego breakfast. Around noon, I call Jon and Sally and let them know that the play must be cancelled. Carlo thinks it may just be nerves and “drama” on my part; but, really, this time, it’s the bod.

Hating to waste the day, I make me and Carlo do something. We go to Tussaud’s in the afternoon, my pockets wadded with tissues. I love the wax figure of the young and old Madam Tussaud herself, graven from life in wax as soft as Icarus’ wings.

Carlo put his puss next to Madonna’s, and got it snapped. We took the ride through the history of London, which was much like Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride in Disneyland, except for the town burning down, Jack the Ripper, and the beheading of monarchs. On the way out through the Tussaud Shop, I got a 3-D portrait of myself done by laser in a block of clear plastic. It’s a good likeness, and sits like a small, facially-enhanced light-bulb on a shelf in my living room.

Ran away from the stylish “Metro” cafe, with bad smells, poor food, and worse service, to the more serviceable, pubbish “Globe,” not too far from the Sherlock Holmes statue on Baker Street. Carlo and I both have Fish and Chips with peas. Carlo had the “mushy peas,” served in a small round dish and the consistency of toothpaste.

Just went back to The Wellington, where I continued very sick and disappointed. Ordered Pizza Hut, of all things, and watched some spectacularly bad British TV–a crazy Soprano’s type soap opera called “Blackpool.” That’s the same area in Dickens’ “Hard Times” novel where the heroic worker drowns in a well.

I drift off into snotty oblivion.


MON 22

Up and at ’em at 8AM. Breakfast in the basement, with the greenery around the building squeezing in through the open grate as high as our heads.

First things first, off to the British Museum. The edifice as long and grand as a sea-monster, tricked out with glittery bits on some of the facade’s figures. Brassy points on the spears, shining helmets here and there. The long order of the building seeming to go on too long indeed, breaking the oneness of it by sheer length. As uniform in intent as a football field, but too grand in scale. There’s too much old news within!

Up the steps, we see that there’s a special exhibit of Michelangelo’s Drawings–mostly sketches for the Sistine ceiling. Fab! We get tickets as we go in, and then walk straight to the Elgin marbles, whose well-preserved metopes depicting an epic series of brawls between Centaurs and Lapiths still astonish: both for their humanity and their violence. I’m more sick and silent than Keats, who managed to warble when he first saw the Elgin marbles:

	My spirit is too weak; mortality
	Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
	And each imagined pinnacle and steep
	Of godlike hardship tells me I must die
	Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.

The drama of the Selene Horse’s head is the first thing that gets me sketching. I quickly realize that I’m too numb to number all these glories with my lame hand, but I do jot down a few to find depictions of again later.

We next wander into the great tessellated glass courtyard which surrounds the old reading room. In this room you must think of Marx, and Ezra Pound, and a hundred other reading-frenzied fellows of the past, sinking as sincerely as you into the belly button of these old leather chairs under a dome as happy and fat as a wedding cake.

We go off to spot some of Leonardo’s drawings for Carlo’s research for his play about the relationship between Michelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci called Chiaroscuro which he has been scraping at lo these many years.

We see the Rosetta stone at the southern entrance to the Egyptian Sculpture Gallery, and get some glittery postcards of the same rock. There’s a great computer explanation of the glyphs and Greek nearby, explaining and translating line-by-line. To see the thing itself is to feel what a role pure luck plays in our understanding of ourselves. This whole old civilization might have been no more than a guess to us forever.

After this exertion, we stop at a pub across the street for some lunch, perhaps the Museum Club? They are running out of all their beer taps just as we are getting done with our meal. So, off we head to. . . .

The British Library. Here is a Gutenberg Bible, and King James Bible, many hand-illustrated medieval Bibles. The Magna Carta itself. A first folio of Shakespeare’s. Hand-written lyrics by the Beatles. Pages of Mozart’s inventions. Handel. Beethoven. Some of Shelley’s manuscripts bound into a book owned by Mary Shelley, the back flap of which contains fragments recovered from his funeral pyre. There, in a small oval, lie, direct to my eye, some stirred bones and ashes of one of my real heroes, P. B. Shelley. I see Mary looking over the volume very clearly, growing old, her mind as fine-honed as when she was still kissing him. I will admit to a tear.

That night, as a break from serious theater-going, and because I am still very ill, coughing myself blue and blowing mungy glops of snot into the frail remembrance of a tissue, we get a London Time Out magazine and look up a comedy night. It’s a small place off of Leicester Square called “The Round Table,” and features a double-bill of local nobodies who’ll be hauling ass to the Edinburgh Comedy festival later in the year, and are breaking down their acts by playing at least one gig a night all over the country.

The host is Jay Sodagar (jaysodagar.com), an Indian Englishman, who has reams of material on racism and politics–very touchy stuff, and a bit brave for a nice-guy comic to try and present. He should have a harder edge and not really apologize we tell him later–fuck us if we can’t take a joke. If you’re going to be harsh and over-the-top, go all the way.

The first comedienne up, however, is a Josie Long. She takes a long wind-up, discussing how she’s not a comedienne, she doesn’t have a routine, doesn’t know any jokes or funny bits, etc. all the while dragging out more and more props for her routine. She’s an absurdist. If she can loosen up your gears, she’s golden, and anything said will have a tinge of tickle about it. I have a real enjoyment of this kind of thing, and start to smile and snort right away. By the end of the evening, she’s graced me with three teach-to-student stickers (one of her many props): “Good Boy,” with a curly-headed kid’s face on it, “Well done–you worked out the answers,” with a child clasping his hands together over a desktop among a field of approving stars, and “I helped,” which pictures a smug cat sitting in its stripes.

After her set, Carlo gives her some sound performance advice and earns a sticker himself. She tells me that I’m “lege,” which I hear as “letch,” but is instead short for “legendary.” We take the tube back to the Wellington, and I return to the fable of sleep.


TUE 23

Tower of London.

The Crown jewels. — projection of the crowning ceremony above the snake line into the jewel-viewing rooms.

Somerset House — Gilbert Collection, golden vessels and oldest hammered gold pitcher, Courtauld Institute of Art and the Fine Rooms. Courtyard with great dancing fountain.

St Paul’s Church(?) or not till coming Sunday….

Walk along the Thames. Street performers, some dressed as silver statues.

Bought two books(?) from hawkers along the Strand.

Ate at The Anchor again–heartily. Shivering with end of sickness and feeling cold.

Ascend to The Eye, snapshots of Parliament, Big Ben, Globe around the bend.

“The Globe”–Titus Andronicus. Stagehand came on during intermission to mop-up the blood! Picture taken of us by group behind us.


WED 24

Carlo got sick, probably from close contact with myself. He stays in, goes to Marks and Spencer for some fresh clothes, new sneakers, a hat, undies.

I take the day, really feeling better, to ascend St. Paul’s scary eyrie. At the Whispering Gallery, I hear the eerie voices of what you can’t help but think are the nearby dead, realizing that the voices are only the prospective dead of the other travelers, tourists, and pilgrims sharing life in mid-air along the gallery rail.

Up from the sunny crypt, where a remembrance of William Blake awaits the visitor, and the bones of a little Wren are fallen, I go on, penitential step by penitential step, to the top, and then the tippy-top. Among the graffitoes of high-altitude love and “Kilroy was here,” I spot a touching addition to the ancient and fancy memorials in the basement. Someone had penned, with indelible ink, a remembrance of others who were loved in life and much missed in death.


St Pauls Cathedral In Memory Graffiti

	In Memory
	Lola Kelley
	Lisa (Liam?) Euam
	Shirlie Lantry
	Beth Richmond (Rodricks?)
	Christian Boswell

So the names read, punctuated by a dot of anecdotal gum at the end of the honor roll.

St. Paul’s Cathedral is a church of Christ Victorious, where no shadow malingers to draw the philosopher’s syllogism of Godly faith to an alternate conclusion. From the top, I snap a photo of the Millennium Bridge, which lays like a sword connecting the banks of the Thames. From the South Bank, and especially at night, St. Paul’s is a constant reference point, a pilot light to God. And the walk along the thread-slender Millennium Bridge only solidifies the view, offering the walker a long unobstructed view of the massive dome while the void gapes beneath and the Thames goes angrily or placidly along while the wind whines. It is a conceit, this bridge pointing toward God, right out of John Bunyan’s Pilgrims’ Progress.

At the top, I met a very nice lass from Finland, traveling alone, who had me snap her photo for her to show friends back home. She provided the same service for me, and I thought of the redoubtable Mary Wagner, who traveled to Finland long ago, but brings the adventure up often in her conversation. Mary’s told me that the Finnish are thin-skinned about their reputation in the world, so I take this opportunity to mention Mary’s glossy love for the young woman’s native land. She breaks into a fierce smile, and brags a bit about how far Finland had gone in the World Cup soccer finals. She’s happy to hear Mary’s praise in this incongruous place. Then she tells me she must “get up her courage” to descend the stairs. “I am very afraid of heights.” And yet, here she is, all alone in a foreign land, scaling to the very rafters of purgatory. God save the Finns.

From St. Paul’s Cathedral, I worm my way back down, to the ground, through a shop, to the street, to the tube. I’m heading for Hampstead Heath and Keats’ Grove, the very yard where that nightingale first sang.

Ask directions, long walk through suburbia.

Arrive too early, unless I am a school group. Plead and am denied.

Bookshop in town, bruschetta at “The Bull,” a raw new Italian place where no English is spoken. I explain that I am there to see Keats’ House, the “scrivini.” My pronunciation of “poeta” didn’t pass muster. A glass of bull’s blood wine. Another.

Keats’ bedroom–a feeling of profound simplicity. Still point.

Lock of hair, aspects of Fanny’s story, pick up a button at the desk.

Rain and the painters outside, patiently smoking a fag until it blows over. All will be fine if the wind don’t huff in the wrong direction.

Hard rain keeps me from the walk along Parliament Hill to Highgate and Coleridge’s old home with the medicinal Gilberts, which has only a plaque and no entry. Forgot about Dan Weeks’ mention of a nearby pub Coleridge had haunted. I would have shoved on for that.

Back to The Wellington; Carlo still low-down, is staying in with KFC for his TLC. I go off to The Roxy, gleaned from Time Out London as a dance club.

Great time at The Roxy, fill in notes and write some postcards while the DJ spins a punky mix. Quite a chat with the manager of the joint, who’s from “up north.” Ask him his favorite thing about London, and he says, “The women.” Reminds me of Mike back home who, when I asked him what I should look up in London, replied “The Queen’s skirt?”

Get home, and Carlo has gone out. I sleep, dead tired from all the walking and cheery beers at The Roxy. Carlo has to knock twice, after not successfully getting the management to help, before I wake up enough to let him in. I can’t believe I even locked the door, let alone slept through a knock (very unusual for me). Carlo had dragged his ass to the local gay bar, The Stag, which flies a fanciful rainbow flag over its portal. Truth in advertising here in London-town.

Carlo must be feeling better. Tomorrow we head to Jon Williams’ house, and then Stratford early on Friday.


THU 25

8AM Breakfast in the basement, a good start for the long, hungry day. Pack our bags next two hours.

10AM Check out of the Wellington. They called the room to kick us out. Carlo was a bit tardy because of all his materials for going on to Elba and Florence for another two months and his still being pretty damn sick. We have the desk hold our bags while we tour the town. We will return for them before the tube out to Jon Williams’.

Tube out to Sir John Soane’s House. Central Line out to Holborn. Amazing crazy perspectives, a real collector’s treasure across from the park.

Lunch at “The Ship,” chipper and fun with a great view of the crowded alleyway–continual foot traffic pouring through the narrow intersection. The whole pub could have been very easily missed. Very different from the roadside billboards and neon highway signs that every business in the US has–frontage, as its called. Here they have a gilded “inwardness” in their advertising. Then again, this pub has been here since 1667–four-hundred forty years of word-of-mouth.

3-4PM Back to Wellington for the bags, train out to Richmond. We arrive early and decide to have a few at O’Neill’s next to the station. No half-and-halfs here, even though it is an Irish pub. Carlo and I have a broad-ranging discussion on all things theater, and rant and rate the productions we have seen. We are getting geared up for Stratford-Upon-Avon, and I for one am having some theater-withdrawal issues.

6:30 PM Call Jon, who zips by and whisks us to his abode. Jon explains that he’s “Not a host. You’ll have to fend for yourself.” Sally serves up some pork-on-a-plate, which is magically delicious, and in the course of a short interview with Carlo finds out more about his personal circumstances than I have gleaned in 10 years of talking with the guy. He works at Brookdale Community College, lives with mother and brother, etc. Amazing stuff, I guess. I preferred our dialectic aesthetics in the pub. Carlo has some witty ripostes to Jon’s wobbly sorties.

8PM Sally hauls Carlo off to the local working-man’s tranny pub after putting Flo to bed. Jon and I stay up listening to his poetry and then half of some dead American comic who’s name evades my mind (Hind?). The poetry isn’t coming, Jon claims, because he is “happy,” and there’s no need for the elusive therapy that only unreasoning rhyme can provide. I’ve heard this story before, from others less forlorn, and have my reservations about such claims. A dubity remains.

11PM I collapse on the floor, sleeping while the TV blares kick-starts of laughter. Soon enough, Jon transfers me to the top-bunk in Flo’s room, since “Carlo would hardly manage it, would he?” I sleep with my head on a fluffly stuffed duck, and my feet hanging over a whirlpool of pinkish little girl’s things. Flo fleets on in dreamland like a trooper, with nary an eyelash flutter.

1-2AM Sally returns before Carlo, having left him in the hands of chatty Andy. Carlo is let in later by Jon. Seems it is Carlo’s fate to be left knocking at the gate. Coincidentally enough, Carlo had told me that he thought he could do a smash-up Macbeth, and would assign himself the minor role of the porter while directing.


FRI 26

5 AM I am up, shaking my head. I descend the bunk bed in stocking feet for the living room to check on Carlo’s status and gather my belongings. Flo is sleeping like an angel on a cloud, all curls and whispery breath. I figure I’ll wake Carlo around 6 AM, and we’ll make the 8:54 out to Stratford-Upon-Avon. I watch Carlo snore like a formation of Boeing 747s for forty minutes, and then give him a poke. His eyes are the Red Sea; he levitates into a sitting position. He makes some witty denial of consciousness, and I adjust my expectations to catching the 10:54. I sit awake in a chair fit for the set of The Brady Bunch for another hour.

Sally makes her way down, yanked along by a lively and lovely Flo. “Good Morning, would you like some tea?” she says. “Yes, indeed,” I concur redundantly. Sally, Flo, and I go into the narrow kitchen, strung at one end with a breezy detail of Xmas lights that looks on to a lush lot of backyard greenery. Sally busies herself with the tea, and some toast for Flo. “We Brits like our tea, don’t we Flo?” “Yaa!” says Flo, dangling her padded feet off the end of the kitchen counter.

“Carlo and I had quite a time last night.” Sally fills me in on how Carlo took the gay bar by storm. I get a more nuanced portrait of the evening later on from Carlo. It always makes me smile to consider Carlo in a social circumstance–his wit rolodex pulls out a winner almost every time. One of the best revelations on this trip, in addition to the metric tonnes of culture I have been exposed to, has been gaining a deeper appreciation of Carlo’s artist’s attitude toward life. Always a poise beyond the pose, a snap of wit that reconfigures the flop of circumstance. The fellow really is a sort of well-padded Napoleon. No wonder he’s on his way to Elba after London!

As Sally pops the toast, and I sip my tea under the straggly twinkle of the Xmas lights, she gives some motherly instruction to young Flo.

“Flo, would you like butter or honey on your toast?”

“Or Marmite!” I interject, remembering Sally and Jon’s tricking me into eating a piece of toast with a big glob of Marmite on it in San Diego. Stuff tastes like axle grease soaked for a year in salt porridge.

“Hun-neee!” answers Flo.

“Honey it is. Where does honey come from, Flo?”

“Pigs!”

“Pigs?” Sally is smiling. “Are you sure? Mightn’t it be from….”

“Pigs!”

Before Sally can say “bees,” I fill in with a fanciful tale about the “bumble-pigs” that visit the flowers, sucking up nectar with their snouts, and making honey back at the hive. Sally seems to enjoy the story, but Flo comes in at last and corrects me: “It’s not pigs, it’s bees.” Seems that Flo was just busting Sally’s chops–a time-honored family tradition everywhere.

10:54 AM Carlo and I eventually make the 10:54 from Marleybone Station back in the hub of London. But not without Jon declaring my concern about being on time or a little early to be “anal.” I guess he’s surly when early. The Marleybone Station itself is very nice, with a vaulted glass ceiling, and a large departures and arrivals board blinking in front of where Carlo and I have alighted. On the train, Carlo’s throat gets much worse as increasing levels of green go bounding by outside the compartment window. A young American student is taking the train out to Stratford for the day to poke around.

1 PM Arrive in Stratford and check-in at The Sequoia Hotel. The eponymous sequoia behind the building is a towering quiet presence, and reminds me again of San Diego. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the tree is visiting England just as Carlo and I are visiting. It sways with a sort of buoyant, vowel-rounded American accent. Carlo takes a bath and a nap. I stroll around Stratford, almost all the way down to Holy Trinity. I come back to the garden behind our hotel and begin taking some serious travel-notes. The garden itself is a terrific wild-things hodge-podge leading on to the white gate through the hedge. I half-expect a giant bunny winding a pocket-watch to bounce by.

Stop by Cox’s Yard, meet two yobs who make a brilliant jest about what a good writer “William Shatner” is.

6-7:30 PM Carlo and I dine at an old pub (which one?) and go on to see “Romeo and Juliet” at the RSC Theater across the way. Our seats are up in the balcony, royal red plush seats, but narrow for all that. The staging is spare and modernist, with a post-modern “framing device” that a Greek village is putting on “Romeo and Juliet” to help two warring factions in the village keep the peace. Renewing a pledge of non-violence by a ritualistic repetition of this play as a cautionary tale (which is how the play, in didactic terms, presents itself).

The acting itself is spot-on for the most part. Juliet is superbly wonderful, full of youth and openness. The Nurse steals every scene she’s in. Romeo is honest and intent, better in love than when “in love with love.” Capulet is crashing great, and Tybalt is all edge and no depth–an extremely effective bit of black magic. The only off-note is Mecrucio! Hard to believe, but his flights of imagination come off cold, under-cooked somehow. He’s not particularly sympathetic and is more clown than wit one way, and more hammer than rapier the other.

12 PM Sleep in the frilly sheets.


SAT 27

8AM Breakfast in the well-lighted dining area. Table service for the selections. Carlo is happy to be getting a “real” English breakfast. Pouring rain all day long.

9:30 AM First Stratford touring bus. Takes us out to Anne Hathaway’s cottage, Mary’s parent’s place (?), and all around town. On the second time around we get off at Nash’s New Place to see a fancy house of Shakespeare’s time, and then again at Shakespeare’s Birthplace, and last at the Anne Hathaway’s Cottage–an amazing treat!

1:30 PM We make the curtain rising on Julius Caesar just in the very nick of time. Terrific opening stuff with drums and colors–a parade in the everglades. Bang on performances by all.

3:30 PM Carlo gets some McDonald’s, goes back to take a nap. Rain continues steady. We agree to meet at The Black Swan and then cross the street together to the “Swan Theater,” built in Victorian times, to see “Much Ado About Nothing.”

I drink and eat at The Black Swan, which WWII servicemen stationed in Stratford had called The Dirty Duck, and which now has a drunken duck on one side of the sign, and an elegant charcoal swan on the other. Carlo doesn’t show, and I’m mis-informed about the time by an Eastern European worker who perhaps didn’t know how to read a clock. I rush out late and jump across the street. Luckily, I had handed Carlo his own ticket earlier.

7:30 PM “Much Ado About Nothing.” I’m ten minutes late, sneak in through a quiet curtain, and am shown my “standing rail.” A mother and her grown daughter are sharing the rail, which has a step-up platform. I pass Carlo in the dark on the way to my railing. This turns out to be one of the best performances of all, with many of the actors from that afternoon’s Julius Caesar and last night’s Romeo and Juliet in the cast. The comic effects never fall flat or fail–not even once. There is zero loss of meaning. The cast and director have strategized this piece into a comic opera buffe ballet.

12 PM. Sleep.


SUN 28

Last day in Stratford. Weather clearing today.

8 AM Real English Breakfast with a double helping of bacon instead of bacon and sausage, scrambled eggs, OJ, tea, and lots of toast. We gather up our stuff, check out, and leave our bags at the front office as we prepare for a final look around, and a visit to Holy Trinity, where Shakespeare is buried.

9 AM Long sunny stroll to Holy Trinity, reviewing the sights along the way, which include the prominent vestiges of “canal culture” in Stratford. Sometime in the early 1800s, the canal locks came through and Stratford became one of the largest central points on the canal lines through the middle of the country. Many distribution “yards” were set up, and now only “Cox’s Yard,” converted to a tourist pub-stop, survives as a reminder. Stratfordians, having catered to visitors since the 1700s intent on seeing Shakespeare’s birthplace, knew how to hold onto the vestiges of the early 1800s canal boom. A Disneyfied waterpark sports old barges converted to ice cream stands and mini-restaurants; some are even B&Bs, where you can snooze on the placid flatness of the old canal. There are a few private barges mixed in where retirees have perennial access to the safe beauties of a cute tourist town. I’d love to see the barges in winter when the pond is frozen over.

We cross over a surviving lock on our walk to church, and take advantage of the good light to take some snaps of the Shakespeare monument in the park. Carlo poses convincingly with his doubled-double Falstaff in merry manner, and broods with a playwright’s forlorn longing at the eyes-aghast statue of Hamlet. I find the bronzen figures a mite overdone, with their gazes big as thumb-holes in the shaped clay of their characters. Only the Shakespeare, seated and staring at the top of the stack retains a static human dimension and mysteriousness; he is plain, compact, and inward. Like most of the English I’ve passed between on my visit to this land, he’s said nothing but what he has meant to say. The rest is conjecture.

10 AM We enter the grounds of Holy Trinity, having gone along the Avon slowly as mendicant monks dawdling toward the corrective lash. The church bells sound the town to order and call the faithful to prayer. There is a long, large graveyard that we pass through to get to the low doorway of the church, a small hole, but not yet the eye of a needle for we overfed moderns. Well-dressed citizens of Stratford roll along the pathway with us, before us, and after us–we are but two in the trembling flow. We duck in, and Carlo begins negotiations to get us the last fifty feet to the wall-monument and the tombstone set in the floor. Carlo lets it be known that we are on a “pilgrimage of sorts,” but resists the offer to let us sit at the front on the side as the High Eucharist is performed in a few minutes. The door warder recommends our case to the warden, who turns us over to the priest as worshippers repeat polite “excuse mes” past the bumptious Americans.

	Good frend for Jesus sake forebeare, 
	to digg the dust encloased heare,
	Bleste be ye man yt spares thes stones,
	And curst be he yt moves my bones.

I recall the words on the tombstone as we wait. I think Carlo is hoping for a profane miracle which it seems will not come to pass. He lets them know that we have a train to catch back to London. Even here in Stratford-Upon-Avon, Christ can out-arm-wrestle the Bard. The Holy Ghost is more to the point than the Ghost of hamlet’s father, etc. The priest protests that the time is too near, and the tombstone too close to the altar to have us wade by and exit just now. I see some dim spot of color mid-height on the wall down by the altar, and know it must be that roly-poly depiction of Shakespeare we have already seen some half-dozen times in our travels. Carlo turns to me and asks, with anxious mien, what I would like to do. “Let’s just leave,” I say, with a “Thank you very much” to the priest and warders, and smilingly retreat from hallowed halls to hallowed ground.

12 PM Train back to Marleybone Station, London. The plan is to hook up with Jon Williams this evening for a tour of “authentic” surviving punk clubs. Monday is Whitsun Bank Holiday in the UK, and Memorial Day in the US. Looking forward to experiencing this strata of contemporary London from a “native who knows.” The green landscape unrolls in reverse, getting brighter as we roll. This may be the best day we have experienced weather-wise.

2 PM Check in to The Wellington, give Jon a ring. Carlo and I walk toward the Cheshire Cheese for a final London meal; it is officially our favorite place. We are walking from Vincent Square, all the way down to Fleet Street since the weather is fine, and we’ll hit a few over-looked sights along the way.

The first is Buckingham Palace, which I keep calling Buckington for some reason. I give Jon a call from near the gates, and Carlo tries and connect with his mom back in the states. Carlo’s worried, me much less so. There’s a ring of snapping flags around a generous rotunda outside the gilded gates of the palace, which itself looks to be about two city blocks in size. The flags are hung in an ingenious way like draperies, and do not flap about so much and droop decorously. The colors are the blue background, white Vs, and big red X of the British flag. We spot some palace guards marching to their post within the gated courtyard. In the middle in the Queen Victoria Memorial, with a golden Victory at the top, her wings in full-flight.

Through the Mall, St. James’ Park to the right, St. James’ Palace to the left, down toward Admiralty Arch. And the pillar to the Duke of York, who “when he was up, he was up, and when he was down, he was down.” Now he is forever up, grandly looking over the marvelous mall and the cool expanse of the park–which was mobbed after weeks of horrendous rain. On to Trafalgar Square, where we met our old friends again, Admiral Nelson, the barefoot and pregnant Alison Lapper, champion of human rights, George IV, Henry Havelock, and Sir James Napier. Some good views of St Martin-in-the-Fields before strolling on toward The City area, where the Royal Courts of Justice shone strongly in the afternoon light. The black clock stuck out from the side of building seems, as odd as it is, to go well with the many-faced complex. The Royal Courts seem to be busy, even when closed, simply by the intricacy of the facade and the adjoining buildings. Here’s the Old Bailey, famed in terror and story.

We pass Twinnings tea store, the narrowest shop in London, with a pair of painted Chinamen leaning against a tiny Greek triangle arch at the top. It is closed, as is everything this late Sunday afternoon. I know some tea enthusiasts who will be pleased to see the icon back home. Just down the Strand, which will turn into Fleet St, is one of my favorite City Dragons, high on a two-storey pedestal and isolated on a traffic island. Its ears seem pinned back like an angry cat’s, and its paw up like a kitty rampant. The beast is in black iron, and seems prepared to strike former colonists for lack of other meat. There’s a pair of crosses on the wings, and it hold a shield up with one clawed arm. On the street’s another pair of red telephone booths. Carlo calls his mom, and I Jon, both to no effect.

We reach the Cheshire Cheese, which is closed. “Shut,” as the fellow says who is locking up. “Open Tuesday,” he explains because of Monday’s bank holiday. Carlo and I finally break down and take the tube back up to SoHo. As Carlo explains, gay club culture never takes a holiday–or, more properly, never ceases from taking a holiday. This is great, I wanted to get to the bohemian side of London, and look forward to the change.

Out at Tottenham Court Road station, and up the gritty nickering steps and out. The place was busy! Lots of talking as cafes had people pushed out onto the sidewalks in hunky bunches. After a few turns down the street, we come to official SoHo, and right away there’s a change of feel to the place. It’s like being back in New York City. A bit more nitty, a bit more gritty. The cafes and pubs seem really worn at the edges, even if they are not 400 years old. But first things first; we’re fairly aching for calories after all the walking. We meander in to “The Dog and the Duck,” which has a sign all green and golden. This was George Orwell’s favorite slurp-spot, we find out. We also find out that SoHo was once the King’s hunting preserve (hence the dog and the duck), where the old hunting cry was heard: “sooo-hooo!”

We began our obligatory tour of the SoHo sex shops, famous throughout the world for their staunch raunch. The couple we fingered our way through, palpating the merchandise, as it were, seemed about the same as such shops in the US, just a tad cleaner, better lit, and more freshly stocked. Maybe its all the rain, maybe it’s the rate of sale of items. I didn’t get to know any Brits well enough to find out for myself. (Sigh.) Down an alley or two, which honeycomb the notable area, and there were a series of Eastern European girls who made catcalls at us, trying to drum up some trade for their rip-off joints. They were attractive and stackable, but Carlo had the best line “Even if you had a more attractive brother, I’d have to say no. And I’m sure, if you had a brother, he’d be attractive.” Carlo had read in Frommer’s that these places were sort of sexual shanghai shops, where you walked in for 5 pounds, but couldn’t get out without the total pilfering of your purse. And all you got for it was that you creamed in your jeans. Not a notable bargain, however whipped-up my quickened prick kicked.

Carlo and I stopped by the venerable Admiral Duncan, bombed for being a gay club in 1998. We had a drink in solidarity with the huffing oppressed, and then parted company. Carlo wanted to prowl the wanton town, and I wanted to find a place with some good punk vibes. The place I found was “The Intrepid Fox,” which totally reminded me of the defunct punk Melody back in New Brunswick, NJ. They had a glued-on gallery of they patron from Halloweens past up over the bar, which was tended by a vest-no-shirt dude in a snakeskin cowboy hat.

9PM-12AM Had 4 Stella Artois at the bar, my first time drinking the same drink since I got to England. These really got me hammered somehow. I wandered home blunderingly disoriented (florescent fragments of tube stops come to mind), but made it to the haven of The Wellington all the same. Soaked my head in the sink and plowed myself under the sheets. Carlo came in even later.


MON 29

5:30 AM Ransack Carlo’s “pharmacy” bag for aspirin and blink out again.

8 AM At breakfast, Carlo fills me in on his adventures, getting chatted up by a tranny at “The Stag,” which was just a block from our hotel, and had a rainbow pointedly painted over its horny portal. We post our last postcards as I then go on to Heathrow, throwing “daddy a hug.” The train out is packed like a peanut jar. Everyone is using the bank holiday to escape London, eiher to the country or just back to their home countries.

Victoria to Green Park to Hatton Cross to Bus Service to Terminal 4.

Feb 022017
 

A belated report from a seer of being

Living with the sea and surf is every New Jerseyan’s native inheritance. There’s a scrim of winning, of life triumphant, that inheres to such wild and wetted borderlands between the ocean and the dunes that no temporary imposition of boardwalk, beach badge, or scootered police force can ever fully erase. Last year one of the big movies was The Martian, based on a sappy book and executed with boku budget and zero imagination. Their Martian was a man stranded on the red planet, its only inhabitant. Do you want to visit aliens? See a consciousness estranged from our fingers and lungs? Look no farther than under salt water. Here are animals and plants endowed with an elemental difference from our landbound neighbors.

And there, of course, under the sea, we began our evolution to becoming the landlords of dry earth–prince of predators and queens of the eating regime of life. At least, of life on land. Is there another us still swallowed by the sea, still wrapped in a tube of fishy muscle and zooming through the blue? Some watery mirrory reflection of the zest to know all and to impose ourselves on all that we humans have?

When I watch a fish twitch at the end of my hook, its face all made at angles to reduce drag and be an engine in service of its Shopenhaur-like will-to-live, I see my own eye going from glassy to arid as it expends its final minutes on the grass. We are efficient in our environment, and strangers elsewhere. When we succeed in life or business beyond the home, after the lame dorm, strong in our suits and boardrooms, or ably outfitted with a plumber’s wrench and toolkit, it is the old world of going home for the holidays where we feel the most estranged from our daily selves. It is there, among the cranberry sauces and filleted turkeys, that we gasp after the mastery the aquarium of work and our married lives provide.

But still we go home. Still we outfit ourselves with our juvenile social graces, or a newfound awkward silence that puts parsecs between us and our siblings at the dinner table–the green skirts of the christmas tree feeling as alien now as once they were the epitome of comfort and safety.

And so, as a species, we are divers and explorers of our personal pasts, of our nations and tribes, of our civilizations, and even of our previous incarnations as beings zinging along under the sea. It is to that cold water we return equipped with diving gear and lights brighter than sunshine, recording new home movies of the old kelp patch, weighted at the belt to keep us on our visit, the old family, finned and eely, nearly unrecognizable.

I am an anemone–as good an underwater emblem for a writer as anything–a colorful eater of facts and dreams, a living sitter waving prayerful tentacles before this mixed magnificence given again and again until, finally, we start learning to see.

And to see, of course, we must first outfit our minds and hearts with open curiosity. Not to know the answer that will be divulged. Life is no simpering SAT test, but a real engagement with what is. And whatever is, is us.

For this voyage, let us be in love with fins and sinuous things; with the starkly sharp urchins, the deep sulfur inhabitants of poisoned vents, the wild things that neither roar nor fly. Let us be baptized in salt water, and raise our heads again from that furious, wet source of being that first broke us out of dim nothingness into suffering and ecstasy.

Gregg Glory
Feburary 14th, 2016

Mar 082016
 

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Purchase from Amazon

The Burning Anvil

Prose aesthetic and malefic.

Occasional essays and digressions surging up from the source I’m tempted to say that this retrospective collection of thoughts and scribbles will veer from the ridiculous to the more ridiculous. But that would be a slur on the creator, and so I shall refrain from such malignity. Often, very often, I’ve been told that I over-introduce my tropical topics with a blizzard of disguising digressions. I’m informed variously that this is helpful, too helpful, not helpful at all, and by Jacko Monahan to “just shut up and read da po-EM.”

Inexplicably, I’m collecting these various thought-episodes into a prose collection of essays and introductions (and, here and there, a stray letter let loose in the direction of an attentive ear). One feels that these tidbits and tiddlywinks must fare better on their own than when attached like an irreverent dingy to the magisterial ship of a book of verse. Many of the vagrant flares can already be spotted skimming the skies of my website (gregglory.com), or falling among the reeds of my various collections of poems.

I’ve dusted them off and re-written them for the sake of coherency and tang. What was only hinted at before in the emergent wood of a metaphor has now been hunted down and turned into trophies. And yet, in spite of this effort at editing, the writings here, like poetry still immanent in the poet, may have kept a twinge or two of their raw, unfinished feelings about them. A wary air of maybe remains. However foggy this may be for my readers, it retains an inner rightness for me.

I may be all wet, but I always feel a sea of possibilities within me. A flotilla of rowboats that randomly explores this sea both day and night—under storm or star. Only when I pour myself onto one of the tipping decks, a watery sailor with an icicle hook and a plastic eyepatch, and start to chart a course does my rowboat grow from slip to sloop. Then the seas part for me and the drama of time and circumstance take on a willful weight as one arctic or another hoves into view. Tahitis and Rios unroll around the scrolled deck-rails and purpose deliberates itself into arrows. Then I am in danger of being defined, caught and corralled by my momentary manifestation on a tilting Earth. Then I may flounder when the ship’s staved in, and the arrow under my feet is emancipated back to static. Then I must remember in a minute that I am water and wind as well as pilot and perceiver or I risk the timid end of dying on the spot. I’m not the little engine that could. I’m the little sailboat that swiffered.

Inspiration is my only soul. Without that sacred puff at my back—howsoever briefly—I may not move my inch, nor endure at my dirty task for forlorn years. But, once that shift in the winds has hit, I am well able to sail and survive; able to see the Tahitian shores that inspiration whispered about in my bellying ears. This afflatus never afflicts but brings its simmering divinity to every ache and wail. Poetry is my obsession. My mantra, my mania, and my manna all-in-one. Many of the essays that follow have to do with the various supposes and suppositions of poetry. The quixotic shifts and subtle intonations of how what happens in the world and in the poet combine to combust into the vari-colored flames of verse. Poetry is more of a symptom than a system. The essays here partake of that same secondary nature.

They are sparks thrown off from a hammer’s blow, and not the central fire incensed by a bellows. If I were to clip my quill in the light of one such errant flare, I might write: Poetry is never an exemplar of some organized method of thought—or at least is rarely that. Poetry participates in the ding an sich, the thing in itself, the welter and wildness of this world. It is as unconquerable and crazed as an edelweiss, forever fluttering among the Alpine steeps. The greater a poem is, the harder it is to whittle into a system. A great poem will subvert its own premises just to jaunt to the dark side of the moon for a line or two.

You could say poetry has a willful fascination with freedom, but its chains of rhymes would gainsay you. You could say poetry is an irrational response to an irrational world, and it would be harder to find contradiction in that, but its very truth would be a rational nugget in that chaotic onslaught, and so overthrow the assertion that the world is irrational indeed. You could say… why you could say any of a million things, like a child feeling out the holes in his parents’ arguments to find an excuse to do just as he pleases. And, I suppose, none of the things you said would be wrong exactly, and yet they would not find a bottle to keep this breeze in. But they might, whiffing and puffing frenetically enough, just might, participate in the thing in itself that poetry is, the forever Zephyr and viceless edelweiss.

Gregg Glory November, 2012

The Burning Anvil 

My breast is a burning anvil 
Cannot hammer a likely shoe 
Stern enough to trace unglued 
A racing lifetime through and through.  

My breast is a burning anvil 
Full of causal smokes and coughs, 
More than youth at times had thought, 
Between hammer and anvil caught.  

My breast is a burning anvil 
That sparks with the loss of heat 
When edge and edge, hard and hard, compete 
To shape each and each to mate.  

My breast is a burning anvil 
Cannot cease to pause or cool— 
As industrious, dedicate a tool 
As any I’d forgot I forged.  

My breast is a burning anvil 
Full of tragic din and error 
As any beating thing that mirrors 
The hotness of my terror.  

My breast is a burning anvil 
Cannot pound out a likely star 
As real as evening’s first clear 
At whose clarity I stare.
Aug 262015
 

Dear Reader:

Let me elaborate (without belaboring) my point in print. Let’s say one questions the status quo: Hey Quo, what’s up with that, yo? The question, by its very nature, throws doubt upon the validity and durance of the status quo, or things as they are. Maybe things should be arranged otherwise, maybe other arrangements or interpretations would be more penetrating and correct, or would open avenues of action that would be grander or more satisfying. Questions, in this respect, are like headlights that can help us sketch out the dimensions and “give” in the fog that surrounds us.

What questions, in and of themselves, cannot do in these circumstances is prove anything about the validity of the status quo one way or another. Because one can formulate a question about the status quo does not, in itself, undermine things as they are in any way. Hey Quo, are you sure that the ground is under my feet? This question does nothing to remove the ground from under your feet–it is simply a question–a question that can start a process of discovery that itself should be questioned and not simply assented to because it undermines current understanding. This is what I meant about “questioning the questions.”

A question is simply the first step on a path that may eventually lead to the heady heights, and vast new perspectives, of disproof of the status quo; but the question is not the map, the donkey, the traveler, the sweat and the path all in one. The ground under your feet is solid until physics comes to eventually prove–through assertions and demonstrations (the sweat and donkey, etc.)–that in fact the ground is mostly made up of empty space between those tiny head-spinners, atoms.

Questions start the discovery, but the doubts are only worth paying attention to when evidence begins to solidify their guesswork with a bridge to a new reality, a new solidity. This goes on forever and ever, and even our views of bridges past begin to be swallowed up in the present fog and our next new journey can be to re-tread the paths of discoveries “past.”

But then, what is Time, really?

—Gregg Glory

Jun 042015
 

There is a magic to poetry; it cannot be all puzzle boxes and puns. The big-browed scholar of Finnegan’s Wake must finally be frustrated. And, as important, the child in Joyce’s choices, and the kid in ourselves, must feel like we are genuinely playing. Billy’s roar behind the bushes must be the Snark’s flabbergasting cry. The bread and wine must be the blood and body. Let all the magic happen, or no poetry really is.

Poetry explores the world without and the door within. It raises the hackles on the beast in your soul, and sends you out with the naturalist’s net and bottle to catalog the thousand mysteries of the backyard. Objective experience, and the subjective registering of that experience, and the transformed re-voicing of craftily chosen, artfully deployed, mosaic bits of that experience is a process common to all art. We discern subtle connections (Eliot’s “objective correlative” perhaps) by walking this worn path with fresh eyes; connections assert themselves in our flesh and consciousness, connections hang from the flowering tree like butterflies.

These connections, discerned, touched and exploited in creative expression, are never fully understood. They are not a blueprint, a thesis, or a theorem. But, they are closer to our living consciousness and our daring dreaming sleep, than any other sort of ordering that humans do. They participate in the gift of inspiration, and play in the new fields discovered there. One reason they remain so open is because of the interrelated nature of imagination and invitation.

Imagination fluoresces at borders. Like auras or fronds, its edges are fuzzy. The inspiration that leads (or is followed to) a new invention or a new formulation of scientific principle is different from poetry only in degree. In many ways, Dante even followed poetic inspiration far down this path–but his material was religion, the divine, which is essentially poetic in its ability to seek expression (as distinct from science, which seeks manifestation and demonstration); making the invisible world visible is an endless search for correspondences. Poetry stays in the tidal pools of an ocean of possibilities; it opens the door. This is how it maintains a true connection with the human on-looker, with human desire, with the all-too-apparent limited nature of our existences. Even Dante was not his own guide; his great poem needed Virgil’s invitation so that we could experience Dante’s wonder and awe as God’s design was increasingly revealed canto by canto, Purgatorio to Paradiso.

The more stretched we are, the more connected we feel; that is one secret. The stretch increases contact in both directions–through the door of the self, and out into wider experience. Whitman stretches with his lists and variation–his emphatic empathy declaring that “thou art that.” Tat tvam tasi. Emily Dickinson stretched by the wild length of her rocket flares–making one thread of image encompass the earth and on into the afterlife, yet still be pulled from her own worn, homely shawl; the robin was her auditor, the buttercup her confessor. My own, more formal (and more manic), declaration of this principle might be: “Oceans in acorns my strumming mermaids are.”

Every break of a line is a border; every rhyme is a border; every deliberate ambiguity. And poetry, like the noble intestine, like the manifold folds of the brain, maximizes the numbers and unencumbered extent of those borders–so that the subjective feeling of crossing borders, of inspiration, is maximized. The monsters in the mist must be real; the saints must be accessible to our human appeals.

Gregg Glory
May 20, 2014


A DISCARDED LYRE

     
	Below a T'ang moon hanging,
     On double dragon smoke
     I take fleet flight to Wales

To the tut-tutters among my myriad readers, I say–yes, there’s a bit too much strutting, too many bones, too many graves yawning gravely in the poems here. Luminous moons number in the millions, and ghosts gather at the dinner table in a feast more featly attended than Banquo’s banquet. But, so what? There are whole necropoleis of vampire literature illuminated from where Stoker’s lightning struck. I much prefer the “rage for order” and the orderly rage of accreting the viable language of our day–rather than continuing to execute in blind rote the wilding attacks after “the new” that distorted so much of the early modernists’ efforts. As Browning puts it in the underrated Balaustion’s Adventure (which is itself an example of historical imagination, and the value of transmitting (via memorization) the words and virtue-values of earlier artists), where Sophokles is described as contemplating re-telling the story of Admetos and his wife Alcestis, which subject had been famously treated by Euripides in his play Alcestis,

     They say, my poet failed to get the prize : 
     Sophokles got the prize,--great name!  They say, 
     Sophokles also means to make a piece. 
     Model a new Admetos, a new wife : 
     Success to him!  One thing has many sides. 
     The great name!  But no good supplants a good, 
     Nor beauty undoes beauty.  

Here we see an instance of editing to improvement rather than dismembering to impairment. “No beauty undoes beauty.” Have humans changed in 20K years? Not much. The “farmshed’s [still] full of wisdom.” The latest diet fad has its adherents eating as all people did back in the paleolithic era. Perhaps I’ll have to eat my words, but at least my words carry the old nutritional value they had when we sang in caves, hopping in firelit gratitude around a broken bear’s skull.

Gregg Glory
May 5, 2014

Oct 182014
 
...of lovers and friends
 	I still can recall

Neuro-science and linguistics have found, more and more, that the portion of ourselves that we recognize as uniquely our own, that we carry with us as the turtle his horn-bone home borne upon his back, is the story of our life that we continually create and edit. It is this most portable portmanteau companion, this kitchen gadget of enlightenment and self-definition, this word in our own ear, that is us to us. In Shakespeare, the most vile Iago gets in-between the naive Othello and his perception of what his love is, what his love means; Iago takes the place of Othello’s own consciousness by his whispered innuendo. If Othello had been more mature in love, as he was in war, he would not have been so malleable to another’s voice, another’s vindictive agenda. He would have recognized Iago’s stratagem for what it was–Iago’s implanted concept of love was simply war by another means. And so we are all vulnerable to the virus of other voices, other selves. Indeed, we change ourselves through the same methods that Iago infects Othello, but usually with less ulteriority in our motives. (As an aside, a situation in which this is not the case, in which we self-consciously adopt a new posture towards our current reality, is when one voluntarily submits to the re-programming of a twelve-step, diet, or other self-help or self-improvement campaign.)

We live in a mist of continual whispers. And these whispers bring us news of the world, and arm us, Galileo-like, with telescopes to view our inner landscapes: our pasts, our nattering presents, our dreams and desires–all at once, or in a movie-montage series that takes on the serried wheels of the kaleidoscope for its deployment and re-deployment of pattern in the search for meaning. Childhood faces, lovers breathing intensely close, the lick of an insistent pet, all compete for their place in the panorama, their time in our arms at the square-dance of selfhood. What fiddler calls the tune? Will we always respond, stomping in time to the quibbling ifs that life presents? This is all process, the creation of context from which our daily self emerges: the hourly display of faces from which Shakespeare chose his masks, and where Dickens lived amid Pickwickian semi-visionary laughter.

Layer on layer of this-was and what-ifs bring us the twists of our private narratives–not the blatant debasement of power-narratives and privileged perspectives and voice that Derrida derived, but the rich exploration of ears of the self, the continual God-slog of “the examined life” that Socrates instilled into the DNA memes of the curious West.

The parable of the parable teller is simply this: that our attention, our focus changes, and the parable-teller, like Chaucer chuckling gently from on-high, remains aware that the change is occurring. Coleridge in “Frost at Midnight” demonstrates well the process of place and inner space. First he is alone in a frosty midnight; then, looking at the fire, he recalls other scenes, and in one of those recalled scenes, he remembers wishing for yet another presence, another context. In “The Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” Coleridge imagines the walk his friends are taking and describes that walk. Similarly, Stanley Kunitz imagined the first moonwalk–and when hearing and seeing reports of that walk in actuality, Kunitz claimed he didn’t need to change a syllable of his poem since he had “already walked on the moon” in his imagination. In this same way, we invent the self we are and the details of our lives that stand out for us and become incorporated into the currently active self we are always oh-so-busy experiencing. In poems that follow here, there are usually at least two stories told side-by-side–a current context of speech in which the narrator is speaking or being caused to write, the context of the person being addressed as imagined by the narrator, and the remembered details of events experienced in the past by the narrator (often a past memory of being with the addressee). And all this symphony of whizzing whispering brings the speaker to new views of the self he could be, the creature he is creating in his lab of solitude.

One of the ablest spaces for this refreshing and re-experiencing of the self is in our nests, our tidy homes, with the latch shut and the world feeling far-off and safe. Here there is no imperiling snap and swap of swordplay, no train bearing down on our vulnerable colony of cells. Home means comfort, and ease, and feet up on the couch as we break out the stereoscope and review what wisdom is given to us as our portion of the greater mystery. There’s a warmth in the hearth, a harvest in the home, that no other domicile can quite capture or match, whatever its majesty may be. Niagara Falls or zip-line volcano tours will have to stand beside and wait in memory when the yellow light of a suburban home beckons the leg-tired jet-lagged traveler home. Home to zoning-out, home to the spatter of expected talk, home to regular rounds of coffee, the simple fellowship of your nearby hand, denizens of ease in winter’s sparkling twilight.

And so the parable perpetuates itself in an onslaught of ontologies, tabulations, diaries, vivid minuscule distinction upon distinction without end. Frame within frame, story within story, the multiple perspectives switching with an effortless turn of the tongue, the change of metaphor made flesh, the story made bone and standing up, a stacked skeleton that had been rummaging the veldt on all fours. Do we remember the perspective of the lungfish, the metaphor that had us leap to land, grow hand and hoof, still carrying the seas within us?

Gregg Glory
March, 2014

Sep 192014
 

An essay on revising “The Willow-Switch” from epic to acerbic

The Willow-Switch

He spat the words. "Go get it." 

I approached tree-fringe and felt
The willow, green and supple,
Lay knots across my knuckles,
My throat a knot of guilt.

I've forgotten what misdeed
Left me standing blank,
My father at my back,
His breath as loud as bees.

I returned in tears and dread.
The willow-wand I held
Waved more fishing-rod than flail
Passing hand to hand.

I determined not to flinch, 
Not to give my Dad an inch. 
I thought only of the flensing switch, 
How it would lay into my fear 

And tear. And tear.



This is a good example of revising down to detail to create the meat of feeling in the reader. The original draft of the poem presented here is the result of a lot of its own revisions, but the sense of a story told only from the child’s point of view, out his fear and resentment, is all over the poem. The story is a bit oversold, with the father playing the villain’s part, his teeth black with tobacco. Who wouldn’t hate this beast?

In the revision, the father is a main actor, but is not held as exclusively blameworthy of the event transcribed by the poem. In the revision, the speaker remembers feeling a “knot of guilt,” even if the reason for the punishment has faded. In the original, the reason for the memory loss is part accidental, and part active repression. The child, now grown, doesn’t want to revisit what seems to be some horrific event–and there is no real blame attached to the speaker; he’s innocent as daisies. While fine enough, the reader disengages with every loss of emotional complexity. Details allow the readers to bring their own response to any given scenario. If the author is able to hang back, yet be deeply re-engaged with the experience the poem relates, he can have some of the perspective of a director of a play sitting in the back row of the theater, waving his arms at the scene, the ultimate spectator.

On rereading the original version of the poem out loud, I found myself getting miffed at the whiny sense of victimhood that the speaker was demonstrating. Now, I don’t like to be mean to kids any more than the next guy, but this kid was both bawling and blameless; too much protestation left a whiff of suspicion in me as a reader. So, since I liked the poem–and love being done with things–I hesitated to start a wholesale revision. Instead, my editor’s eye began to look for details that just didn’t add up. And, instead of glossing over them with a friendly “eh, so what, it’ll do” attitude, I let the inconsistencies prickle. The editorial itch began to build. Well, goddamnit, what was that business about the Dad undoing his belt? This is a poem about getting switched on the backside, not being spanked with a belt. I had had doubts about it before, and let concision win the decision, leaving the final detail as agnostically simple as I could manage with the bland line “Belt unhitched.” But now, simmering with my editor’s misanthropy, that compromise wasn’t enough. I’d have to deal with that detail if I wanted to lazily continue letting the poem wallow in its welts. I unhitched my editor’s belt, and got down to work.
As it turned out, one of the last things I was able to usefully address was the first thing that had prompted me to edit the thing: the belt detail. It was late in shrinking this poem down that I came up with the “knot of guilt,” like a scarf tied too-tight, as the rip-rhyme for the simple “felt” and as the replacement for that dangling “belt.”

The first detail I excised, to bring the poem back into the main relationship of the moment it creates, and away from a cozy sense of joining in the reader’s condemnation of the punishing father, was each of the “tobaccoy teeth.” The kid in the poem would be well-used to his father’s tobacco use, and probably thinks blackened teeth look cool. The sense of menace in this detail is completely adult, imposed retrospectively by the speaker. So, snip-snip went the editing shears. In a trice I was left with a single line in place of an entire stanza:

He spat the words. "Go get it."

Being bit of an inveterate formalist, I thought I should balance out any singleness at the start of the poem with a one-line stanza at the end. I took a look, and it seemed that luck was on my side–the last stanza was already a single line. With the poem losing space for excursions and digressions (after all, I’m no high-flown Dickinson with her cochineal wheels and zipping trips to Tunisia “an easy morning’s ride”), I saw that the whole retrospective stuff about the photobook, which I had been at such pains to embellish with savory verbal details like “Kept bald by fresh erasures” just had to get deleted. Down came the red pen, and washed the spider out! I still had “What had prompted censure / Has faded to a blank” which itself had been an edit of moving from an abstraction of “pain” toward some more specific, though still unnamed, occasion for punishment via willow-switch.

I played with eliminating the whole idea of not remembering the reason for the punishment. Just stay in the moment; let that be enough. That’s the thought that had me finally untangle the second stanza from its belt-nightmare. That belt had grown as troublesome as a wig-fitting for Rapunzel. I imagined approaching the willow tree as a child about to be punished. I clipped “hair” out of the description as too fanciful and romantic for a kid whose main experience of hair is smelling the barber’s aftershave, and threw the lifeline to the waves as too literary for the slim poem to save. This second stanza felt great now–forthright–but it was only three, maybe two, lines long! Perhaps I could trim the periwigs of the other stanzas down to three, or maybe four, lines apiece. That way, if I had to, I could reabsorb that harsh first one-line stanza into the body of the poem.

The third stanza was already down to two lines, and hung on only because it added a mystery to the reason for the punishment. And that’s how things long ago recalled as an adult often feel–significant, sharply etched in memory, but with the reason for it all faded grey, a dead appendage. I decided to shut the father up, take away his petty advice to “stop crying.” After all, most dads aren’t “The Great Santini,” and his speech made the poem too much about him.

Now I had the bones of a good poem.

ORIGINAL POEM WITH INITIAL EDITS:

The Willow Switch [DRAFT]

He spat the words.  "Get it."
His blue-black chaw a seethe
Between tobaccoy teeth.
Dad repeated, "Get it.
Or you'll get the belt."

Like hair the willow switches
Hung, laying their supple
Knots along lifeline and knuckle;
While, lightly, his leather-stitched
Belt unhitched.

What had prompted censure
Has faded to a blank
In my life's photobook--
A dead spot bored in circumstance,
Kept bald by fresh erasures.

I walked back in tears and dread,
The willow-switch flailing
Limber as a monkey's tail
That I handed to his hand.
"Get over now, son," he said.

"And stop crying."  Then and there,
I determined not to flinch,
Not to give my fear an inch.
I thought only of the flensing switch,
How it would lay into my fear

And tear.  And tear.


Nov 252013
 

Intro and Endnote to an afternoon of “Dueling Sonnets” conducted between Chris Bogart and Gregg G. Brown in the Late Spring of 2013.

Intro

This “duel-to-the-deaf,” cooked-up at Chris’ instigation, is a good moment to reflect on the combative nature of poetic friendship. There is the dare, the challenge, of two eagles sparking each other to higher cloud-cliffs, or the raucous oboe-music of two bullfrogs boisterously bellowing out their over-proud self-renown in the echo chamber of a mud pond. Always there’s a glance at “what the other guy is doing” when writing, when flirting with Fame. The current crop of rappers and “slam” poetry contests takes this energy for what it is–an evolutionary imperative. Be we bullfrogs or banded eagles, we expand or soar to what loudnesses and heights our time of trial allows.

May 22, 2013
Gregg Glory
[Gregg G. Brown]

Secrets of the Sonnet

Anguish gives us that to call our own–our littleness in the immensity. And it is this littleness that we, still reasoning with fate, sing. And it is in the sonnet that this “anguish of reason,” of needing to need reasons, finds its singing voice. So congenial is the sonnet for the purpose of striking off an attitude of thought, and then briefly turning it around for consideration, that it is itself an essay-in-little, a quantum of human sensibility, a unit of our vast humanity.

A sonnet holds a pillow’s-worth of dreams, a santa’s-sack of infinity. How could it be otherwise? Like Dr. Berhen’s execrable x-rays, the sonnet shows a lump of heart amidst a ghost of bones.

The sonnet is an able instrument. At times, it seems a wispy lyre, no more than an adolescent’s inaugural mustache. At other times, as with Milton, it seems a pocket cannon, Dirty Harry’s .357 magnum blasting out Justice. Often the form seems to encourage the play of quickened wit, thrusts and parries, both of image and of sound, with much more variety and activity than so small a string quartet seems like it should be able to provide.

The sonnet has been the library of such scintillating variation and is, I think, the closest that English verse has come to a jazz form–open to all subjects and moods. The very fact that it drips with unstated implications (because of its enforced brevity) and, at the same time, demands careful development of a theme (because of its long history of use, and not just in english), no sonnet sings in a vacuum. Even Robert Lowell’s unusual fourteeners of blank verse play out their game in the context of sonnetry, so wrestler-wiry is the tradition.

Sometimes a sonnet is a plain pocket of worsted poesies, a very dry handful of desiccated violets. Like a compact mirror, it is portable enough to show any face; a pocket kaleidoscope of Lon Chaney faces. In argument, the sonnet has “a sting to do his foes offense.” In loving, no tool but the lover’s native virility is more efficacious in making fruitful the demurest vale. It is a Caliban of enmity, and an Ariel of loveliness. It cannot be sung, properly speaking, but is best composed as a sort of talking-song, often with a very specific, even singular, audience in mind. In Wordsworth’s hands, it has amplified private meditation and carried out loud that part of public discourse.

One secret of the sonnet that I know, is its approachability. No writer fears the sonnet, and almost all writers try their hand at taming or maiming it. A mistake is more easily forgotten than forgiven–and especially so with the sonnet; the bad ones die off without a murmur, and the good ones maintain a freshness unique to the form. Look at Millay’s triumph; her voice in the sonnet is out of tune with her time, but the goodness she put in her sonnets is still seen as good. A counter-example are Robert Frost’s lengthy Horatian declarations–quite good, really, (and perhaps, of their type, present-day exemplars) but unforgivably out of key with the times, and so they lack a sympathetic audience beyond a few ruminative souls.

Another good secret is how a sonnet, with all its twists, can be held in a single contemplation or experience of it as a performance in such a way that the content and form are balanced in the reader’s mind. It is small enough and open enough to invite your own further speculations; in fact, its success depends upon your participation. And so, when a sonnet catches you, it is like an answered prayer; you remember the deity of your own percipience. A sonnet can draw a picture, or snip a snapshot, but you supply the vital memory that brings the thing to life. The sonnet demands this of you, talks you into dreamy collaboration with its therapeutic life-process; it is the “talking cure” writ small.

2013
Gregg Glory
[Gregg G. Brown]

Oct 302013
 

This poem was written on the occasion of my friend’s completion of his doctoral dissertation at Rutgers. The dissertation, far from being brief, is many hundreds of pages long, and it deals with matters many hundreds of years old. I had no gift to bring to the gathering, and in the process of stopping along the Garden State Parkway to versify myself out of my embarrassment, I was able to give some poor blighter a can of motor oil so that he could tool on home with his toddler. The man was relieved, and my friend was gracious in his acceptance of my scribbled gift. May every verse in this volume find such welcome receipt in the breasts of my readers.

Oct 302013
 

The basic intention of this book is laid out in its headnote, but reaching those headwaters from which all else flowed itself required a journey. I had spent much time in meditation of my approach, which was to find clear touchstones of the “American character” in fact and myth, folktale and dream. We have no long-winded epic, no vast leaves spilling from a forest of folklore; our gods are Greek, and cribbed lessons from the Bible, some Appalachian ballads that owe more to the Scottish Highlands than the American Heartland, and certain Roman stoics who were the fad among our founders. Somewhere in the middle of the ninetieth century, our literary desire to find heroes and define our inchoate longings turned decidedly humorist. No Dante would spring fully-formed from the misadventures of Pecos Bill, the silly hillbilly feuds of the Hatfields and McCoys. I had to sit and think awhile, and so I went to where the wind and water form and everlasting mist along the Jersey Shore. In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, I had seen the landscape of my childhood transformed by the indifferent violence of nature; many of these shore communities will never reconstitute themselves again, and their local tales have been washed away, their common history scattered to the tearing wind. I knew that other forces were tearing at the fabric of our common memory, and that a similar devastation may already have worked its will. No epic would do, nothing comprehensive could be found for our diversely voiced nation and its multiplicity of circumstance. I recalled W.B Yeats’ maxim “You can refute Heigl, but not the Song of Six Pence,” and toyed with the idea of writing a volume of nursery rhymes, as I had done when I was sixteen. I put this notion aside, but allowed my dreaming eyes to rest on a similar prospect; I had wanted to write something “irrefutable” in terms such as Yeats had suggested, something “beyond cold right or wrong,” and such bedrock can be found only in universal dream and man’s endless desires.

Oct 302013
 

References Longfellow’s narrative poem, “Evangeline,” which tells of the British expulsion of the French Acadians from Canada. Many of these Acadians settled as a group in Louisiana and are the ancestors of the Cajuns. Longfellow’s story tells of two lovers who are parted by the British attack, and find each other only by accident many decades later when the man is hospitalized, and the woman has become a nurse in a religious order. Their last moment of life is one of recognition, where they feel their love has stayed true, and then the man dies. The eternal search for desire, the quest for what our heart as seen, as if in a vision, and fidelity to that quest: what else can create a trajectory of meaning in our transient lives, but this manifestation of the immaterial? The man burdens himself with recriminations that he could have kept them from being separated in the disaster, and spends his days wandering throughout the country seeking his sweet Evangeline. The world itself begins to fade, or become an opposing force, as his desire grows ever brighter, ever stronger, ever more real. Either love or faith by themselves are mighty centers of action, drawing meaning after them in their cometlike wake; together, the comet must make landfall and crater hearts.

Oct 302013
 

A prominent merchant in St. Paul, Minnesota, Joseph Forepaugh, built an elaborate Victorian mansion for his family; but success begat more misery than happiness. Forepaugh had a tryst with their Irish housemaid, Molly, making her great with child. When confronted with his infidelity by his wife, he swore off the affair and he moved the family to Europe to avoid a scandal. Molly, distraught and alone, hung herself before her good name could become ruined by her indiscretion. Joseph Forepaugh moved the family back to the St. Paul area after a few years away and built his loyal wife another mansion. But, he was so haunted by the sad death of his young lover Molly, he developed insomnia and eventually took his own life in the darkest hours of the night. The poem takes place on one of these endless nights of his heartbroken vigil. Joseph and Molly’s ghosts are often seen haunting the mansion, drifting disconsolately through the walls.

Oct 302013
 

Another difficulty of the project on which I have embarked, is that of finding folktale and exemplar full enough of life in the twentieth century. Who are our heroes, the ones that say something of universal value, or that touch a root nerve so deep the great oak must shiver? Who, from our last century, do we, as Americans, carry within us? The process is made more difficult yet with the resignation of writer and artist from the hero-making business. Now, I hate jingoism and smarmy claptrap as deeply as any man (except when singing patriotic songs on the Fourth of July); but, the forging of national identity–even the search for that identity–is a frowned upon activity, scoffed at in intellectual journals, and dismissed by the popular press. The mass media prefer to have heroes as disposable as fashions, and for the same reason: to increase sales. The moral curiosity of a Hawthorne, seeking the expiation of sins, or the commemorative wish of a Francis Scott Key to recall battle-sacrifice with a song are not the norm anymore. Our bibles are printed on toilet paper, our national ideals become ephemeral. In any case, the guilty self-exploration of Holden Caulfield seems to have stuck for some fifty years, and I am claiming his adolescent angst as one of our defining visions of ourselves to have emerged and added itself to the roll call of American heroes. Holden is a bit symbolist and fin-de-si