Month: June 2021

6.9.2021 – it was a dawn to

it was a dawn to
remember on your deathbed
life lived within life

Adapted from Sundog by Jim Harrison, 1985.

It was a dawn to remember with a smile on your deathbed.

The sky was a vivid red as if the forest had caught fire. I drove through clumps of pink fog, re-crossing the river of the day before which lividly reflected the sky.

The roadside and small clearings in the forest were covered with a white blooming dogwood, around which misted coiled and released like unraveling white satin.

I stopped the car and shivered, imagining that I might HAVE died and this was some sort of afterlife designed by H. Bosch and Magritte, much less vulgar that Dali; or it was life lived within a brilliantly colored seashell for which one might not emerge.

I added emphasis to HAVE.

‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’ by Hieronymus Bosch.

I would give $199.25 to find out if Mr. Harrison couldn’t spell Hieronymus and in those innocent days before the google, had no easy way to look it up.

6.8.2021 – began trying to

began trying to
nourish outrage as a screen
for apprehension

It might be called road rage.

I talk to other drivers while I drive.

I know they can’t hear but that doesn’t stop.

Think Stupid, I say as I watch other cars at intersections.

I do not suffer fools gladly.

I feel if someone is going to share my road, they share in the responsibility to preserve my life,

I wish other drivers took that responsibility a tiny teeny bit more seriously.

So I remind them.

I talk to them.

I talk then yell.

Thin Stupid, Come on!

I also expect that if someone is going to share my road, the can share in the responsibility to keep traffic moving.

And they can help themselves out a lot if only they studied up just a little before leaving on where they were going.

I talk to them.

I yell at them.

Soon I am screaming at them.

Full of outrage.

Only recently am I understanding that my outrage is a just a screen.

A screen of my own apprehension.

My apprehension over not taking my role in preserving the lives of other drivers seriously.

My apprehension over where I am going.

My apprehension that other drivers are talking to me.

My apprehension that other drivers are yelling at me.

My apprehension that other drivers at outraged.

A hero is someone who backs their car out of the driveaway know all this, and drives a car to work anyway.

*Adapted from the line, “He forced his attention away on to Welch’s habits as a car-driver, and began trying to nourish outrage as a screen for the apprehension, tapping his long brown shoe loudly on the floor and whistling It worked for five seconds or less.” from Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, London, 1956

6.7.2021 – distorting filter

distorting filter
debilitating levels
of fear, anxiety

Adapted from the book, A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary (2009, Vintage Books) by Alain de Botton, and the passage:

As David lifted a suitcase onto the conveyor belt, he came to an unexpected and troubling realisation: that he was bringing himself with him on his holiday. Whatever the qualities of the Dimitra Residence, they were going to be critically undermined by the fact that he would be in the villa as well. He had booked the trip in the expectation of being able to enjoy his children, his wife, the Mediterranean, some spanakopita and the Attic skies, but it was evident that he would be forced to apprehend all of these through the distorting filter of his own being, with its debilitating levels of fear, anxiety and wayward desire.

Part of the series of Haiku inspired by from A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary (2009, Vintage Books) by Alain de Botton. I discovered this book entirely by accident. When searching for books online, I will use the term ‘collections’ and see what turns up. I figure that someone who has taken the time to gather together the etexts of any one author to create a collected works folder is enough for me to see what this author might be all about.

In this case I came across the writing of Alain de Botton. I enjoyed his use of language very much. Much of the words he strings together lend themselves to what I do.

As for his book, I recommend it very much though written in 2009, it misses the added layer of travel under covid but still the picture of the modern airport is worth the read.

6.6.2021 – tragic vanity

tragic vanity
immense indifference of
things, of blind groping

Part of the Mencken Project.

From A Book of Prefaces, by H. L. Mencken., 1917

Adapted from the line:

.. forever fascinated by the “immense indifference of things,”

the tragic vanity of the blind groping that we call aspiration,

the profound meaninglessness of life — fascinated, and left wondering.‘

This the complete quote:

Like Dreiser, Conrad is forever fascinated by the “immense indifference of things,” the tragic vanity of the blind groping that we call aspiration, the profound meaninglessness of life—fascinated, and left wondering. One looks in vain for an attempt at a solution of the riddle in the whole canon of his work. Dreiser, more than once, seems ready to take refuge behind an indeterminate sort of mysticism, even a facile supernaturalism, but Conrad, from first to last, faces squarely the massive and intolerable fact.