Impression....and a cat!

I'm writing this little thing to distract me from something else.


I arrived, after an eight-hour drive, in Blue Springs, Missouri, on Sunday around 5 PM.

A little later, I drove through the old downtown residential area of this medium-sized city 10 miles east of Kansas City. The sunset light was darkening to twilight. Driving south down 15th Street, I focused on the houses on my right: older, smallish houses.

My impression was not stimulated by any thoughts of evil or good that might be transpiring behind the walls of those houses. It was a vaguer impression, a neutral inspiration for thinking as I drove past.

The sense of things was that those houses exuded an insular, dream-like spirit. Tiny front yards. Neat clutter on front porches. Curtains open, revealing lighted living rooms. No one visible inside. Do people live in those houses? What are they doing inside? What are they thinking about? Or are they more like dream-people, who don't actually ponder and reflect, but who only move around stealthily, performing certain banal-arcane rituals?

In a word, those houses are surreal. Of course, all of life is blended into weirdness. But those houses are a more compact, more concentrated weirdness. You can “see” it vibrating inside – through those windows. In those empty lit living rooms, with the other rooms dark. Insular houses in an old residential area.

Those houses felt like they were built along a tree-lined street on Jupiter. And it's as if reality itself was being held at arm's length. As if cosmic gravity was being repulsed by those exterior walls. Retreats. Caves. Cells where familial pathologies – mild or intense – simmer and slowly froth. Beyond good and evil. Just odd. While the twilight darkens into night. Halloween night. No one on the street. All the ghosts are inside those old smallish houses.

Strange little worlds in America.


* * *


The next morning, I was standing on my mother's deck. A clear cold autumn morning. I was listening to the breeze swish through the tall oak tree, just off the deck. The trunk on this tree is so straight it could be used as a reference plumb.

A beautiful light-gray cat scampered into the backyard. A medium-sized, well-fed cat. Without a moment's hesitation, it bounded up the deck steps, looked at me, and then rolled over on its back. The expression on its face seemed to say: “Hey, Tim....what the fuck are you doing here? Cool, man!”

I bent down and stroked its back and behind its ear. This cat was a happy cat. A social cat. A cool cat.

And did I mention that this cat was a beautiful light-gray cat? Black bands ran around the tail. The eyes were a teeming yellow-gold. What a marvelous critter!

Then!....social graces can wait. A movement out in the middle of the yard. All cat senses on alert. And...zoom! – my new friend was off to investigate. To see what might be out there that could be gobbled up for breakfast. Or just played with.

“Goodbye, Smokey [I'll call that cat 'Smokey']. It was so nice to meet you. Hope I see you around some other time.”

a certain blue

Nature offers us many instances of beauty. Some of these encounters impress themselves deeply into memory. Sometimes, nature becomes mixed up with something else, and memory is not only impressed; it is sacralized.

When I was nine or ten years old, the family was on a short vacation trip from El Dorado, Arkansas to Lake Greeson (near Murfreesboro in southwest Arkansas). I had fallen asleep in the backseat of our Olds 98 and was roused from slumber by Daddy's announcement: “There's the lake.”

I raised up and peered out the window. The road was about a hundred feet up from the lake, with tall dark pines plunging steeply down to the water and forming a forested screen. The tree canopy was such that the lake's extent was blocked; only what appeared between those trunks was visible. Censorship always breeds fascination. Yes, between those trunks, I spied that water. I fell into its strange color. I have never seen that shade of blue since then. It was not a bright, pale turquoise, but that's the closest approximation I can offer. It was strikingly different from any bright, pale turquoise one might associate with Key West or the Caribbean or Bermuda...or some South Sea atoll. It was unique.

I'm not convinced it was a purely natural color. I had just awakened from dreams (surely I had...I always dream when asleep), and I was disoriented. I didn't know how we had gotten to the lake, didn't know where it was in relation to my hometown, didn't even know why we had come to the lake – at a certain age or with a certain daydreaming character, family events just materialize and one gets swept up in the unexplained, unprocessed momentum.

Reflecting now on that memory, I do believe something else was mixed into that strangely beautiful lake water glimpsed through pine trees. In those few seconds before the road curved away from the lake, some residual dreamstuff blended into that sun-dazzled water color. It seemed an unearthly hue. Maybe a mystic-plasma-blue, showing itself only once in that magic space between nature and uncertain consciousness.

Where is she now?

That girl who struck us out?

I was about 12 or 13 and played 2nd base (occasionally SS and RF) on our Little League baseball team. One evening, a game took us out of El Dorado, Arkansas. To a little town ("town" is pushing things) 10 miles dead-East. I can't remember the name of that place, but I remember that game.

I recall warming up beforehand, playing catch with Randy Bourne. He had blond hair, was slim and a year younger than me. Boy, he sure could fling a ball straight at you. My tosses had a 10 to 15% chance of being wild.

Game starts. Lo and behold, the other team brings out a GIRL to pitch. Ha! This is going to be sweet! We're gonna annihilate em.

She was compact and rather attractive. Had short-cropped blond hair. She wasn't wearing a cap.

Our first batter didn't know what hit him. She fired three strikes in a row, and he didn't even think about swinging. He was worried about physical survival.

If my memory isn't too vague or tricky, she struck out nearly every one of us all night long. She never looked cocky out there on the mound, just confident. Simply enjoying what she was doing.

I got three at-bats and, like the others, just went through the paces. I mean, you couldn't even see the damn ball, much less try to hit it.


So...I do wonder where she is now. How her life went. Did she get to play more coed-style ball? Or did she become a great softball pitcher? I hope she had and is still having a wonderful life.

She was just so heroic-looking to me out there on the mound. Whizzing those scorchers past us and right over the plate.


Female people are neat.


[I just remembered the name of that little place: Old Union.]

an open rebuttal

I wish to thank Stacey Mangiaracina for steering me to this article:

The Problem with American Poetry



Instead of writing a protracted, boring summary of the article, I'll just paste some quotes from it here:


● This vital drive for the destruction of the old and the creation of the new is absent.

● ...even our best poetic imaginations don't have what is needed to imagine and invent what's next.

● ...contribute nothing whatsoever to the general progress of the human endeavor.

● ...but that they inhibit the necessary radical imagination for poets to make the new world.

● By teaching us how to spot surprising juxtapositions, how to discover sublimated implications in the juxtapositions, and how to separate the images, poetry provides skills we need to figure out which politicians actually support our beliefs and what products actually meet our needs and wants.

● In general, poetry has the potential to change society. I refuse to ask any less of it.

● Our poets are not tearing down the fetters of our imaginations so we can dream and then create the next American society. Nor are they inventing the lexicon that will define how the next generation of Americans will think, believe, and feel.


Well...this article is something I can sink my sharpened fangs into. It will be fun sucking the juice out of it. Of course, the author will never read my opinion, so no feelings will be hurt. I would not wish to hurt anyone's feelings. So, I'll just do it behind his back.

Did the Romantic poets improve the next generation of society? Did the Modernists? Should our contemporary poets be working toward a betterment of humankind for the future?

Human beings as a whole are now duller and more uncouth than at almost any time in the past. You'd probably have to go back to the Dark Ages to find an appropriate analog. Supposedly, the invention of the book reduced dullness and suppressed uncouthness. But all it did was permit the wholesale broadcast of obtuseness and lack of couth to a vast public arena. There have been rare exceptions -- Thomas Mann wrote The Magic Mountain. Yes, a lot of fancy-pants technical, science-y stuff continues to push back frontiers. Pain killers and air-conditioning are swell things. But are we any more refined or even more interesting than in previous times? I think our perpetual pushing into time is mostly coarse and preposterous. We can see more stars and old light out there in space, while we continue to lie, cheat, and murder with abandon.

People say that Neanderthals were dull and uncouth. And that is why they went extinct. But not us homo sapiens! We have poets. And if our poets will just shape up and do right, we'll keep on doing better than those old shambling failures at culture. But I've always suspected that Neanderthals survived. They are still living in secluded log cabins deep in the jungly woods around south Arkansas (how they got here is anyone's guess). No one knows for sure, but it's possible. They probably congregate in Neanderthal lodges on Friday nights. Serve beet-juice wine, debate the situation in a sophisticated manner, and have poetry readings. Poems that, owing to introspective refinement and collective moodiness, put our best efforts to shame. Not just a few of them. Every Neanderthal writes and reads poetry. My possible Neanderthals are beyond us homo sapiens, as far as having got our consciousnesses progressed. We only think we are an improving specie.

(I'm not sure the above is even relevant, but I just had to work in some Neanderthals.)

So...no, I don't think the collective consciousness is getting notched-up as the zeitgeist skips into tomorrow. And neither is poetry going to un-warp our societal shape.

Here's the deal: poetry is an aesthetic art form, not an instrumental one. Maybe a few Soviet-era poets got the masses revved up and frothing for change. But really, how good were those poems as poems?

Now...earlier in the article, the author mentions some problems with American poetry that I agree with. But not his main theme -- juicing the social ethos with verse. There is no there there. His unbridled romping into original thinking is worse than some of my own attempts.

* * *

Who am I to say what a poem should or should not do? Well, I'm the guy who loves Wordsworth, Keats, Emily Dickinson, Dylan Thomas, and Ezra Pound, that's who. And on rare occasions when writing a poem of my own, I've slipped into a state of consciousness that is far from ordinary.

The only contribution to posterity that a poem might make is a bequeathing of beauty. Not just formal beauty, but also a kind of spiritual beauty. And that latter thing can, on the surface, seem not beautiful at all. It can even appear ugly. It can disconcert. Even some of my darkest, most tragic, and confusing dreams at night leave me with a sense of beautiful misery....or confrontation with a significant and moving psychological work of art. The atmosphere of dreams and some poems is a self-contained world, sufficient-to-itself in aesthetic power and ramification.

Beneath the surface, a good poem reveals or expresses human depths, either focused on self or as a response to nature. A good poem accomplishes that by talent, craft, and severe self-criticism. And the writing of such poems should never be a conscious effort to please posterity. The future is not ours. Right now is where it's at. Right now is when the aesthetic magic happens. Writing as a gesture to propel an avant-garde or to ennoble the next generation is a ridiculous notion. Writing a poem is, for me, an act of existential reconnaissance, not a strategy for some brave new world.

Yes, we want to share our poems. We want to make an impression of some kind. Or at least most of us do, I think. But that does not translate into a poets'-collective for molding society. It's more like "Look what I wrote. I felt something very deeply. I tried my best to put it in words and in rhythm that will communicate to you how I have experienced something." To me, that's it in a nutshell. Anyone who, to the contrary says "Okay, today I'm going to write a poem that will assist in destroying the old world and making a new one" might be someone who needs a long vacation.

I enjoyed the article. It was food for thought. I must confess that it inspired some flashes of condescension in me: the author Josh Cook seems to be (I might be wrong) a very young man, frothing over with idealistic gusto. But that's a good thing.

Sofiya, Borodin, & Bukowski

I borrowed the following from Sofiya Yuzefpolskaya , whose friendship pleases me, enlightens me:

Charles Bukowski
1920-1994

"the life of Borodin"

the next time you listen to Borodin
remember he was just a chemist
who wrote music to relax;
his house was jammed with people:
students, artists, drunkards, bums,
and he never knew how to say: no.
the next time you listen to Borodin
remember his wife used his compositions
to line the cat boxes with
or to cover jars of sour milk;
she had asthma and insomnia
and fed him soft-boiled eggs
and when he wanted to cover his head
to shut out the sounds of the house
she only allowed him to use the sheet;
besides there was usually somebody
in his bed
(they slept separately when they slept
at all)
and since all the chairswere usually taken
he often slept on the stairway
wrapped in an old shawl;
she told him when to cut his nails,
not to sing or whistle
or put too much lemon in his tea
or press it with a spoon;
Symphony #2, in B Minor
Prince Igor
On the Steppes of Central Asia
he could sleep only by putting a piece
of dark cloth over his eyes
in 1887 he attended a dance
at the Medical Academy
dressed in a merrymaking national costume;
at last he seemed exceptionally gay
and when he fell to the floor,
they thought he was clowning.
the next time you listen to Borodin,
remember...


Borodin's Symphony No. 2 (second movement)

things that ooze back in

I'm thinking about Ronnie Bannister and his family. Back in 1962. Mrs. Bannister was my 5th-grade teacher. In class, she would read us a chapter a day from A Wrinkle in Time (which had come out that year). After school, she would secretly slip me books on Communism. Mr. Bannister was an acerbic, taciturn atheist, a pipe fitter at the refinery who also read strange foreign literature. Mr. Bannister did not like me for some reason. They were socialists or something in our south Arkansas reactionary town. Very odd situation.

And Ronnie himself -- odd. Neighborhood kids picked on him. When we played Army, he always wanted to be the medic. Unheard of! Ronnie was into science stuff, strange theories about outer space and electrons and what-not.

They lived two houses to the east. The east, where I lived, always had something unusual about it. I'll not veer off here and tell you about the east of our town. Except to say that it moved toward and into a slightly different dimension, different from the one in which our west, north, and south existed. The terrain sloped down from our house to the Bannister's. Their yard always filled up with water when it rained. I was enthralled by the rain back then. It rained existentially or spiritually. The rainfall came down like shredded pieces from a sad old abyss.

One late afternoon in my backyard with Ronnie. I was swinging like a monkey on the tire-rope swing, which was suspended from the branch of a large hickory tree. I'll never forget it. Out of the blue, Ronnie announced: "One day you are going to be an important man." He said it with such an oracular tone that I was nonplussed. Every now and then, it pops back into my head. He seemed so certain, like he was seeing into the future. But he was wrong. I never became important. I think he jinxed me. If he hadn't said that, who knows? If he had just kept it to himself, I might have actually turned into someone important. Like Churchill or a professor.

Going over Ronnie's house to play and hang out.

Mr. Bannister was usually unseen but always a brooding, threatening presence. Like some kind of coiled-spring, erudite psychopath. I imagined him in another room and with his nose buried in some god-knows-what book of European literature. The kind of book that if put in the hands of all the other dads in our rather coarse neighborhood would have made them quiver and spazz until they almost exploded with perplexity.

I loved Mrs. Bannister. But lets shift away from that before I get moody.

Ronnie's bedroom. It felt funny. Had a strange atmosphere. Like all the atoms in it were from an alien universe. I'm not kidding. It felt like I had entered the ambiance of one of those reruns from the TV show "Science Fiction Theatre," which aired early on Saturday mornings and which made me feel very uncomfortable, put me on edge.
[Science Fiction Theatre]


By all appearances, it was a normal, well-lit bedroom. The odds-and-ends and toys and books weren't that bizarre. But from a very early age, I've had a sense about the uncanny. I knew what was normal, what was not normal, and how even normal stuff was moving through an unsuspected-by-others haze of weirdness. I was an expert in detecting changes in barometric pressure between this world and the possible oozings from other dimensions.

While in his bedroom especially, Ronnie would talk a lot about science and theories and things no one would expect from the brain of a boy. Maybe his room wasn't really weird. Maybe it was something the room absorbed from Ronnie's soul that made it seem not-quite-right. I really liked Ronnie.

I think the Bannisters might have been genuine aliens. From far, far away. And what better place to go mostly undetected than El Dorado, Arkansas?

Years later, they moved to somewhere in Louisiana. Mr. Bannister died of a stroke or heart attack. I've tried to look Ronnie and his mother up on Google, but no luck. I hope they are okay.

a typical dream

A woman with three musician guys walked right in to my house at night. Made themselves at home. Soon I announced: "For this to be a proper party, I must go buy some non-ginger ale alcohol."

So I went outside and got in my old pick-up truck. Went searching for a non-ginger ale alcohol store. I topped a hill and started down it. Then I realized this was a long hill tilting almost straight down. I stomped on the brakes as my truck went speeding down toward certain doom. Somehow, I slowed down enough and coasted to the bottom. But the next hill was also very long and also nearly straight up. I didn't have enough momentum or power to make it up this new hill.

So I got out of my vehicle and stood there pondering. Some indistinct person walked up behind me and said: "You better get going. Now! Small violent hogs are coming to get you. Run!"

I started quickly up the new hill on foot, and the hill turned into an institutional staircase. Indeed, small violent hogs were coming up behind me. I ran.

I made it upstairs to an indistinct hallway. I darted inside a room and closed the door. There were about 15 other hog refugees in this medium-sized room, which was like a classroom without desks. We mingled for a while, discussing in low tones our predicament.

The door flew open and in walked two blue-uniformed official people. Like prison guards or street police. They looked us up and down with derision, with arrogance. It was known without saying that we were somehow illegal and now under the tyranny of these two uniformed officials.

Then about six small violent hogs burst in through the open door and went after us. They snapped at our ankles viciously. Total chaos ensued. All of us, including the two Stasi guys, ran around in panicked circles or bounced off one another like pin balls.

I think I somehow escaped and survived. I can't remember if I made it back to my house with non-ginger ale alcohol.