Meditation: On Meditation as a Public Act (Montaigne, Kathleen Stewart, Ta-Nahisi Coates)

And the only things I treat of adequately are nothing, the only knowledge I deal with is no-knowledge.

--Montaigne

Nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is.

--Wallace Stevens

At once abstract and concrete, ordinary affects are more directly compelling than ideologies, as well as more fractious, multiplicitous, and unpredictable than symbolic meanings.

--Kathleen Stewart



I'm thinking of a problem. It goes like this: the tradition of meditative writing that I participate in as poet and essayist seems ill-equipped to our era. The meditative writer, from Montaigne to Stevens, takes himself as subject. While Montaigne asserts that, "Every man carries in himself the complete pattern of human nature," very few of these men [sic] have the luxury to mine that pattern in themselves. When I teach meditative poetry in my classes, I often meet resistance. It's white-guy writing. It comes of privilege. Only they have the time and the means. It's individualistic. It erases history.  The meditative tradition is that of individuals who hope that their experiences might be significant to other individuals, though in some ways it doesn't matter. It's not a communal politics. I both agree and disagree with this diagnosis, hence this meditation.

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Meditation moves on a transom from detail to meaning and then back. This is not to say that these meanings are symbolic; rather, they move and float and dissipate, refusing to fix themselves. Meditation is an activity, not the means to an end. In that sense, it follows the same graph as our emotions, gathering and then evaporating, but leaving behind clues to their having happened.

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Can there be such a thing as a public meditation? Can meditation cross from the "I" to the "We" without simply asserting that it has? Is there a place for meditative writing now, when our needs are so immediately political: economic injustice, racism, a degraded environment? You know the list. And, if so, how might a meditative practice create community, without enforcing its boundaries, like the Oath-Keepers "protecting the Constitution" with semi-automatic weapons? What might be the loose parameters of these meditations?

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First, what are the strengths of this tradition? Aside from the joys of introspection, I mean. Aside from the fascination to be found in chance relations: "I have no other drill-sergeant but chance to put order in my writings," notes Montaigne. Aside from permission to know less, and feel and think more? To craft an education that has less to do with test-taking than with making a self to meet the world? And a death that is the full expression of our life, an idea Montaigne keeps returning to? To pursue a spiritual practice that releases us from the most intense of what Kathleen Stewart would call our "surges": anger, violence, self-destruction. "Life," writes Montaigne, "should contain its own aim, its own purposes; its proper study is to regulate itself, guide itself, endure itself." The joys are also aesthetic: writing that meanders, that takes the long route home, that improvises, those are the ones I want to follow. Not those that offer a package to take home and put on the shelf. I want Emily Dickinson's shelf (the one where her life is) to fall, and I want to be its witness.

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But the primary strength, in the context of my problem, is that meditative writing cannot be ideological. Or, perhaps more to the point, meditative writing--at its best--is non-judgmental. It forces the question of complicity, or mirroring. "A hundred times a day, when laughing at our neighbours, we are laughing at ourselves," Montaigne notes. Or, as Tacitus taught him: "All general judgements are weak and imperfect." For Montaigne and other writers in this tradition, the incident is more significant than any rule according to which the incident occurred. Detail is more valuable than the law. "We are all wind. . . It does not desire stability or solidity, qualities that do not belong to it."  Or, as Kathleen Stewart writes in Ordinary Affects: "The closure of 'the self' or 'community' or some kind of 'meaning' is something dreamy that happens in a moment of hope or hindsight. But it's not just ideology or irrelevant fancy, but rather an actual fold or texture in the composition of things."

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Even "self" is an ideology: "It's a dream, hovering, not-quite-there thing." But if the self is evanescent, then how can we connect it to other selves in community? Stewart does this by moving her meditation from self to others; she even calls herself "she," rather than "I." Mostly letting drop the vocabulary she uses as a scholar, she writes vignettes about ordinary persons' lives. She doesn't write much about people in her own socio-economic class (academics) but about less well-educated and -heeled people in West Virginia, Texas, Nevada, like the man she goes to a diner with who confesses that he doesn't know what a "D" looks like (and wants to marry her). There are a lot of trailer park stories here, and over-heard diner conversations, and travel narratives gone bad. There is a lot of suffering here, even when ironies are registered. Many of these ironies have to do with Stewart's position as participant-observer: "The 'we' incites participation and takes on a life of its own, even reflecting its own presence." The reflection isn't always pretty.

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Nor is the world she observes. It's a sad and pained world of under-employed, over-reactive, and put-upon people. It's a community, but one that is relentlessly falling apart. It's telling that one of her finest meditations on community has to do with self-wounding. She's quoting Alphonso Lingis, who describes the workers in a mine at the Arctic Circle. The first miner he sees puts out a cigarette on his own hand, which is covered with scar tissue. Then Lingis sees that other miners carry scar tissue on their hands. Lingis refers to this scarring as "'the fraternity signaled by the burning cigarettes.'" Stewart notes this sign of "collective identity" as "an extreme trajectory." And then notes a leap from the observer as solitary to something larger: "Ordinary affects highlight the question of the intimate impacts of forces in circultation. They're not exactly 'personal' but they sure can pull the subject into places it didn't exactly 'intend' to go." The "not exactly personal" involves, if not a community formed between observer and observed, then at least a moment of recognition and empathy.

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Is this yet a politics? Stewart thinks so, but in typically halting fashion. "There's a politics to being/feeling connected (or not), to impacts that are shared (or not), to energies spent worrying or scheming (or not), to affective contagion, and to all the forms of attunement and attachment. There's a politics to ways of watching and waiting for something to happen and to forms of agency" [.] This is not a politics for miners, but for writers. While that is not the politics one might wish for, one that joins intellectuals with workers, it still has import. It acknowledges what we cannot do, even as it suggests there's a role for us to play. As a recent tweet on my feed (more or less) reads, "we don't want white people to act black, but we want them to support us." Part of the meditation's contingency is this awareness that you can see something without trying to make it your own. Meditative practice does not appropriate.

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The problem with this politics is its virtue. It's rooted in the present, in presence, rather than in a possible future. Stewart's vignettes are more symptom than promise. She knows that. Toward the end of her book she writes: "This is no utopia. Not a challenge to be achieved or an ideal to be realized, but a mode of attunement, a continuous responding to something not quite already given and yet somehow happening." When I sent a recent small book of my poems, many of them about the homeless I see on O`ahu, to a friend, she suggested I make them into a public project. To the extent that I sometimes wave signs (HOUSING NOW) or testify before the City Council, my practice is public. But the writing is what Stewart calls "attunement." It represents a self-fashioning such as that Montaigne describes: "The conduct of our lives is the true reflection of our thoughts." May that be so.

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"But you cannot arrange your life around them and the small chance of the Dreamers coming in consciousness," writes  Ta-Nehisi Coates to his son (and to us) in Between the World and Me. "Our moment is too brief. Our bodies are too precious. And you are here now, and you must live--and there is so much out there to live for, not just in someone else's country, but in your own home." He meditates on the life and the awful death (at the hands of police) of his college friend, Prince Jones: "That was the love power that drew Prince Jones. The power is not divinity but a deep knowledge of how fragile everything--even the Dream, especially the Dream--really is." Coates's sense that life's fragility is part of what makes it beautiful is one that I want to hold to. That doesn't mean we don't try to make the world better, but it does mean that we (yes, the collective pronoun) can't afford to give up. But we also need to give in to the world. "Pay attention!" as Stewart writes (doubtingly, as always). The cat's rummaging in the closet; I need to shoo her out.


Notes:

Ta-Nahisi Coates, Between the World and Me. NY: Spiegel & Grau, 2015.

Michel de Montaigne, Essays. Trans. J.M. Cohen. London: Penguin Books, 1958.

Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects. Durham: Duke UP, 2007.

Lacramae rerum: one year on

A year ago today I wrote two posts.  The first announced my mother's death. The second was not so much marker as an unfolding, tissue paper to the chiseled number that comes after the hyphen denoting her life's time: 10/25/1917 - 6/14/2011.

In recent weeks I've been editing many of the blog posts about her final years, constructing a second volume to follow Dementia Blog.  Like any editing project, it involves a lot of machete work, cutting out unnecessary words, adding in poems, taking out entire entries, trying to create a work.  In other words, taking that tissue paper and trying to render it into a sturdier material.  The work is about her life, but the editing process is about the work.  So hard to prise them apart.  The grieving gets mixed up in the process of re-making her life not as life, but as book.

This book, like the previous volume, is grief work.  But the grieving, like the editing, has been different this time.  Grieving is a kind of editing.  Moments of re-collection, re-vision, re-membering alternate with those of letting go, cutting, accounting for the poverty of there being no more time in which to construct a story.  The future will be all memory now.  The finality of her death is different from the finality of her Alzheimer's. The end of metaphor is different from the end of fact. Her body of thought went first, but the actual body's loss is like a deed, the title to which are these words about her. The words themselves feel more final. 

Because I was an only child, and because I did not know family outside my parents until much later in my life, and because my mother's friends fell away during her long illness, there is no one with whom to share stories about her.  It's an odd chamber, this.  No one to sit around a big table talking Martha with. (Some sentences need to end on prepositions.) To start now seems impertinent; no one wants to hear them out, because they no longer signify her, but her death.  Discomfort attends death, and death blocks memory's passages, even when the stories were damn funny.  This elegy has since been revised, too, but folds in many of her old tales, the ones she told before her memory was taken away, apart.

Literature requires necessity, even if life only becomes necessary by way of memory, its collection and redistribution along lines of meaning.  Life writing is so very different from life, even when its origin is writing in the present.  The blog form offered me permission to write now, as things happened, without a sense of there being something truer later on, if I only waited.  (I wanted to write about my experiences after time had passed, so I could understand them better is not a sentence I believe in any more, if I ever did.)  Wisdom has a present tense, too, but it's embedded in what happens, more even than what is thought.  It's what Katie Stewart calls "ordinary affects."

Editing, more than writing, requires a vantage, a scenic overlook. Faced with the death of a parent, one can't be assured of there ever being such a point. The editing is a kind of trail-breaking that might get me there, or closer to there.  And when I think back, I realize that life has its own editions. Alzheimer's revised our lives together, and a lot of what it cut out was weeds. Editing, like writing, has no end that we can imagine. It's the not-imagining that obliges us to keep going.  I can't, I will. Recollection sometimes reconciles; its loss is sometimes gain.

My son just came in the room, carrying his PSP loaded with a Major League Baseball Game. He and his dad will be customizing a cover for the game with his photo in it.  He wanted to show me a play he'd just made.  I said no, I'm writing.  I'd better undo that edit.  The ongoing is all.

Note:

The photograph was taken in January, 2011.

Losing It and other Midwestern Adventures, November 2011

The man in the hotel told me to get on the subway at Clark and Lake, so I walked west along the Chicago River. As I crossed a street under the El, I saw a homeless African-American man (one of so many) sitting on an overturned barrel across the street from me. He was wearing a red St. Louis Cardinals cap. He saw me. "I like your cap," he yelled. "And I like yours!" I responded. I kept going. I got lost. I went back to him and asked for directions. Slipped him a bill, which he hadn't asked for. You're in the wrong place, he said. His directions proved true.

When I left Chicago, I walked by him again. We chatted briefly. I said, "I'm going home today," then felt a pang.

The Cardinals cap I wear on trips is a sign. It usually nets me very little except the right ride at the airport or the bus stop. On this trip, it got me a snide remark, but mainly thumbs ups, and good conversations about the Series. "I turned the game [six] off," said one flight attendant, making a sad face. Lauren Berlant said of Susan Lepselter's essay on a man who talked UFOs at her until she entered his world for a time, that her work is about "staying in a conversation." Baseball caps are oddly like UFOs in this. They create the chance for conversation. One usually stays in it for a while.

My conversations these days are mostly about Alzheimer's and dementia. This conversation, which occurs over and over, covering much of the same ground (yet never losing its blunt force) is like talking about a team. Except that all the plays seem to be errors. The Alzheimer's parent speaks in error, and we children act in error, because what else can we do. We are our own scorekeepers, and the score is not good. Error rhymes with terror, which is also part of the conversation.

At the University of Chicago we talked about "Losing It," which was the name of the symposium, organized by Lauren Berlant. Jennifer Montgomery ended up distressed by this phrase. She thought all of life was "losing it"--what's to distinguish one from the other instance of it? But in our panels and conversations the central sign of losing it involved the breakdown of time: cause and effect falter, then fall apart; appointments aren't kept, or are kept at the wrong time; memory escapes (though it comes to us adult children before it disappears completely). And space breaks down, too. People fall, break bones. This is not humility, but humiliation, though there might be a way back to humility through the work of writing and filming. Or do I mean "dignity," that over-used word?

I framed, or failed to frame, my paper at the U of C with a mention of ethics. My failure was in opening with that term, and then leaving it on the stoop, in the foyer, at the threshold, like a foundling. Lauren did not think I was talking about an ethical issue. But what if that move from humiliation to humility, or from trying to absorb the Alzheimer's patient into one's own I, is an ethical issue? Lauren also quoted Juliana Spahr's defense of the I to me, an argument against arguments against the lyric poem. Again, point taken. But if the I is to represent the world, it needs still to acknowledge that other somehow. My axe to grind is that the I in the memoir or poem about Alzheimer's, if it does not belong to the person with Alzheimer's, needs to keep a distance (dare I say "polite" or "ethical"--that sounds funny?) from the person who suffers it. I tried to explain using the Objectivists; my mother, while she was not a tree (in a Williams poem) deserves the same respect as he showed the tree. Just as the tree is not the poet's to possess, my mother is not mine to own. Lauren asked a question about questions: when are they out of curiosity, and when are they aggressive? I recognized a keen irony in this. My mother's questions were more often intrusive than curious. Her I tried to drown mine out too often. I was she, which was a continuity in her dementia, not a break. My work on her last years tries hard not to intrude, although it does leave so much of her earlier life out.

But we're not there yet. The symposium began with Lauren Berlant's opening remarks. The Worlding Writing Project brings together experiment with theory, induces comparison, tries to incorporate detail and situation. (She noted that Dementia Blog is about "staying in a situation.") If theory is a generalizing principle, then the Worlding writers want to experiment with un-generalizing. I take Kathleen Stewart's work as a primary example of this. Her Ordinary Affects largely ignores the theory that propels it (though some of my students wished it never intruded at all), that theory being that situations are worth exploring on their own terms. Lauren spoke about our time being one of ADHD, that the Occupy (or Honolulu's de-Occupy) movement is about attending to the world, slowing down attention. Somewhere in there bobble heads from groupon appeared on the screen. The pigeon then appeared, for its flocking, its aggregation, and she told us that the word "gregarious" comes from sheep. Relationality is a priori for pigeon and sheep, as it has not been for "us." MLK and Spinoza spoke of love as politics. This involves relation, transformation, what I wrote down as "social therapy," but intended as "social theory." (Just as Radhika this morning was trying to figure out what "adding fuel to the fire" meant and kept saying "adding fuel to the feather"--I did NOT say that, she said, but her dad and I said, oh YES you did!) And so collaborative work in theory, and an interest in the commons, and discussion of citizenship--Lauren's remarks, while clear, seemed to gather steam at this point. Institutions are still objects; infrastructure is a moving form. (Which made me think of the difference between the Alzheimer's home as building and as a life, or as many parallel lives. So much Gertrude Stein running beside us.) The Losing It conference, then, was about how the family is a scene for being out of control, for thinking about relations of care--such relations are enigmatic. What interests Lauren is how caregiving can be presented as solidarity and as a relation that is not sentimental.

There was more, but this is what "stuck" with me, "stuck" being one of those keywords of the conference for me, just as "register," uttered by Katie Stewart in response to my work of transcribing Alzheimer's voices became a key word for Carl Bogner (who gave a beautiful, generous talk on Jennifer Montgomery's The Agonal Phase later on). "Stuckness" like "attachment" went a couple of ways for this Buddhist-inflected writer. Truths to try to let drop, and then remember, and then let go as memory. "Forgetting is crucial to learning," said Lauren. Forgetting is crucial to poetry, said Ann Lauterbach in an essay. Memory Cards arrives today in the mail, and I read that book-to-com as evidence of moments lived through and then forgotten, and then remembered as writing.

Katie Stewart and Susan Lepselter performed discrete essays in interwoven pieces, moving back and forth to create conversation. Their essays were very different. Katie's was about losing her mother; Susan's was about researching UFOs in the west. Susan is fascinated by the uncanny; Katie in the canny, if that word can be used as a mere reversal on un-canny. But the gaps between their pieces were themselves somewhat uncanny. I kept wondering what Susan's essay about encountering such a completely absorbing subject had to do with Katie's narrative about her mother, her absorption in her mother's dying. Like a long poem, this one requires some time to ponder. There's a leap there, but I can't say just what it is. (And this was one of the leaps that made me want to talk about the relationship of the spirit to this subject matter. The UFO belief system is one spiritual practice, as it were, and Katie's attending to her mother's passing is another.) Tony Trigilio, a Buddhist, and I agreed we would talk about spirituality and the academy the next time we talk. This talk we had at Heartland Cafe, was about John F. Kennedy's death (a conspiracy-talk, in other words, oddly and ill-related to the Buddhist conception of the world as utterly connected) and about poetry and more mundane institutional matters (like trying to preserve a graduate program, perhaps not so mundane, after all).

Some fragments:

Writing is not catharsis.

Hoarding cats.

Gertrude Stein / Stain.

We made lists of losing its. (Is there an apostrophe there, of any kind?)

They had a wonderful life. She led the life of Riley.

Their work included broken roofs. (Is there a "v" there, of any kind?)

The man in black was not Johnny Cash. He met her at the airport. She knew not to tell. She is telling us now.

Now you know how I feel.

The word "sensorium." The word "energetics." The word "abject." This is not my discourse community, but it is my emotional one in many ways.

I've blogged on The Agonal Phase already. I made so many mistakes of fact I had to go in and expunge large sections of what I had written. I had thought, for example, that Jennifer Montgomery's mother Ruth was in the film, that she was the baggy pantsed person on the trampoline, the person in the chair with glasses. That she was Jennifer's father, in other words, the man who spoke in the film. (Think about voice-overs, Lauren advised us, but I'd gone to face-overs.) I assumed her illness, her age, had made her androgynous. But it was her father who was becoming a woman, instead. Carl Bogner spoke on the film and everyone wished there was a tape of it. There was! A graduate student had recorded it, but whenever Carl got good, the student would type madly and there would be loud clacking noises. So when you listened to the video, the best parts included lots of noises. "Mental scratch pad." Faster versions of Jennifer's father/mother on the trampoline. Some of Carl's references:

Peter Handke's memoir, Sorrow Beyond Dreams.
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida.
Grueber's still life of 1661. Was that called Vanitas?
Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary. (My response here.)
Guy Davenport's reading of Joyce's story, "Clay."

The practice of attention is a caesura.

Day One: rumination: sadness.
Day Two: two pairs of glasses in harmony. Transitions, leave-taking, moving on: "Ah!" says Mr. Montgomery.

There is an enigma to its clarity.

Workspaces: composer & editor.

Sequence: dog, Jennifer, father. [This is the sequence that made someone cry. It's about faces, the face that wants a response from you, the face that cries, the face that is impassive.]

What is the capacity of the camera?

Jennifer took two photos of her mother after she died. She erased one and then the other of them. She misses these photos, regrets their erasure. But she remembers her mother and the photographs, the photographs of her mother.

Jennifer's short video on squid, from a work in progress. On the cutting apart of a squid, the milking it for ink, the use of that ink to draw a squid.

"Part of my face is missing" as a phrase about grieving.

"Shakespeare is crafting this death"--I remember thinking that my father was dying into poetry, as everything he said was metaphorical, more Dickinson than dad.

"Where's that fucking photo?"

On Annie Liebovitz's photographs of Susan Sontag: "That's HER hell."

Sea change. Purcell's The Tempest. Ruckfigur is either seeing the world as the other does, or entering from behind. A comment that haunted us after. Do we show faces or not? Or parts of faces? (Reference back to a discussion of my transcriptions: to whom do they belong? do we shows them entire, or in pieces?)

Fast forward:

Full Court / Small Press event in the Red Rover Series. This series is curated by Laura Goldstein and Jennifer Karmin. As you'll see if you click that second link, they organize readings that are more than readings, but provocations. Patrick Durgin, Caroline Picard, Johannes Gorannson (umlaut to taste) and I each read pieces by ourselves and others, then convened for a panel, in which we asked one another questions. Patrick and I had agreed on our questions, and delivered them with a lack of spontaneity that was astounding. We should have been penalized for staying in the paint too long. My question for him had to do with his decision to publish his own work through Kenning Editions; his for me was about Tinfish as argument, rather than press. Caroline talked about design work and the production of books (silkscreen covers and Bookmobile innards). Johannes talked about Action Books as a translation press that was not one. Not exclusively one. Other poets we read: Johannes read from Kim Hyesoon's new Action Books volume, edited by Don Mee Choi. Patrick read a poem by Andrew Levy. I read "What We Get" from Gizelle Gajelonia's Tinfish chapbook, 13 Ways of Looking at TheBus. It's in pidgin (not to be confused with Lauren Berlant's pigeons); I did my best.

Fast backward:

In Madison, I spent time with Steel Wagstaff, a Ph.D. student, before and after my FELIX series reading. A waitress, not knowing why an older woman and younger man might be dining together, assumed. "So nice of you to come from Hawai`i to visit your son," she said. He gave me a Brewers Central Division Champion teeshirt at my reading. Said it had been on close-out. Duh.




And there was much else that was lovely.

Word Magic, or Vowels To Live By

I spilled my banana, our three year old visitor kept telling me. When I parse this wonderful mistake, I find that "spill" shares its consonants with the expected word, "peel." From "peel" to "spill" is not far to go in vowel sounds, even if it represents a huge conceptual leap, one that liquifies the banana in question. For more on such errors, please go back to this post from February.

We spent last night with family, which now includes a teenager from Lebanon, he who yelled the word "AWESOME" several dozen times during the evening of pops and bangs and celebratory explosions. When I asked him and his friend from Yemen--a young man who asked to be called Braddah Eez, after Braddah Iz (short, one notes with irony, for Israel)--to explain Arabic poetic forms, he wrote a verse for me. Then, underneath it, he made a pattern of zeros and short slashes to denote the vowels. He told me that each verse that followed had to contain the same vowel pattern. Hence, each line after the one in which little Jonathan "spilled his banana" would require the same pattern of vowels: i i a a a (with two different sounds for "a"). In that way, the mistake involved in transposing spilled for peeled might itself become a form.

I just finished David Abram's The Spell of the Sensuous, a book whose argument I don't always "buy" (in that awful way consumerist language applies to ideas), but admire greatly for its persistence, its insistence that we attend to the world before us, its "ordinary affects," as Kathleen Stewart calls them. But, while Stewart looks for her affects in diners and stores, Abram looks for his in the natural world. He argues that the move from oral indigenous cultures to western literate ones, a move characterized by a shift from sound to picture to alphabet, has removed us from the magic that resides in nature, and created a space of utter abstraction. Call that space-that-is-not-a-space heaven, or idea, or technology, it comes out of the letters that we write, marks that have no relationship to the world they attempt to describe, let alone breathe within. (It's to Abram's credit, I think, that he looks for a way back through the very tradition he's critiquing, using phenomenology as his guide to a more sensuous perception of the world as present, not removed into past or future tenses.) Part of his story is about how vowels appeared in writing. For Abram, Hebrew/Semitic writing, which is all consonants until the reader supplies the vowels, is closer to the oral tradition than are those languages (like the one I'm using now) where vowels are pre-installed for easy reader access. I don't have to use my imagination to re-read my words here, nor employ my breath as a part of my imagining.

So there we sat last night, our friend carefully charting the vowels below his verse, explaining that the key to this Arabic poetic form was in the reproduction of these vowels. It goes like this, the verse first and then the vowel sounds below (as I gather):

فوددت تقبيل السيوف لأنها لمعت كبــارق ثغرك المتبسم

o//o/// o//o/// o//o/// o//o/// o//o/o/ o//o///
متفاعلن مستفعلن متفاعل متفاعلن متفاعلن متفاعلن

البحر: الكامل


عنترة بن شداد


With Aardvark wishes,
BILAL N.

To reproduce vowels is not to reproduce meaning, only the possibility of it. Jonathan's "spill" could migrate into "pill" or "till" or any other word with the short i sound. Christian Bok's Eunoia comes to mind as a place where such wordplay occurs outside this ancient form, or what our friend in his second language English called "what old people use." (His compulsive declarations of "awesomeness" in everything mark the extent to which he has become local in his language use, however.) And there's hiphop, where lyrics are written, but then performed orally, in a kind of DMZ between the oral and literate traditions. Or there's Wordsworth, reputed to have composed his very literate poetry orally on long walks through the countryside. Perhaps that rural dream is just an urban legend, don't know.

Meaning's creation, then, often depends on the transposition of vowels, on those letters that Abram points out are breathed, rather than on those that seem more fixed. Projective verse may be written down, but it aspires to orality. The mind turns to poetry, which thrives on transposition, where there are no mistakes because something inevitably come of and from them. Abram, too, thinks of poetry in these terms. In a recent interview he notes that he chose not to write The Spell of the Sensuous in poetry, because poetry is not taken seriously in our culture. (It's just that important!) Abram:

Well, it was very important to me to write a book that would speak to the so-called "experts," to write a book that couldn't be shrugged off as fiction, or as "mere" poetry. Not that I believe there is anything "mere" about poetry, but so many people in our culture do — they tend to think of poetry as a kind of secondary use of language. We don't realize that language originates in poetry and in poetics, and ends up there.

In this way, poetry is like magic; where Abram locates magic in the ordinary lives of indigenous people (in their medicine, for example), he finds western magic only in places like Las Vegas, where it becomes entertainment. The extra-ordinary is less interesting to him than is the ordinary. One of many ironies is that in order to communicate with a larger community--he sees this community as one of scholars, which I find lovely and odd--Abram uses the languages of philosophy and memoir. Their languages are less creative than is poetry's lingo franca (sic); any of the mistakes I've mentioned above would be considered typos by his editors. So, even though he tells his interviewer that he "wanted to do an animistic analysis of rationality and the Western intellect, and to show that our Western, civilized ways of thinking are themselves a form of magic," his book de-creates the magic that he wants us to return to. Audiences, in his view, are not magical, but must be told to look for magic in ways that lack its sleight of hand. See me fooling you, he seems to say, and only then can you find the real magic in the natural world, a magic that does not fool, but sustains you.

Slight of hand.
Sleigh of hand.
Slay of hand.
Slew of hand.
Slow hand.

And so on.

But:

I suggested to our Lebanese friend that he read poetry in English; he shook his head no.

Another member of our party (one of whom I am especially fond) said, "thank goodness not all poetry is like yours, Susan."

Years ago, I would have minded these moments horribly, nursed them over many days. I used to internalize others' fear of poetry as an aggression against me. I see poetry fear now as a fear of magic, terror that meaning will be thrown up in the air, juggled, and then spilled on the floor like balls, or like bananas. Code orange for the poetry terror level. But last night ended with a happy alphabetic romp, one that assures me there was poetry at play, even if none called it that. I suggested that our friend replace his "awesome" tic with another word, like "aardvark," adding that aardvark was a word famous less for representing an odd animal than for coming first in the dictionary.

I return to the notion that Jonathan's spilled banana could generate a new pattern, were it introduced into the Arabic verse form our friend explained to me. For at that point, as awesome morphed into aardvark, the alphabet itself became magical. The old year was becoming new, history turning back to myth.

Happy new year! Hope it's incredibly aardvark!