balanced on the edge

The frozen socks have been a big hit with Red and Duffy. They chew on the knotted socks until the socks thaw, and then they play tug-of-war with them.

This morning they ran in circles through the kitchen, living room, and dining room, and now they’ve gone to their separate corners to chew on fresh, frozen socks.

With the house now quiet and the world calm, I’ll return to reading Eliot’s 1920 Poems. Randy Malamud’s critical introduction to The Wasteland and Other Poems has been big help in my understanding of the collection. There are so many seemingly random allusions that I was scratching my head in bewilderment.

I’m thinking of writing my research paper about this question: does the anti-semitism in Eliot’s poems contradict his application of Buddhist philosophy?

What would Red and Duffy say? They’d probably tell me to stop running in circles, chew on a frozen sock, and then take a nap.

My office looks out onto rat’s alley. Yes, I’m alluding to The Waste Land, but there really are rats down there. They must like the vat of discarded fast-food grease next to the parking deck.

But there’s a view, with natural light. And the air conditioning works. A huge improvement on last year’s basement office.

I visited the Dalí exhibit again, this time with a poet friend who hosts the radio show melodically challenged on WRAS. Her program broadcasts on Sundays from 2:00-4:00 in the afternoon, and features poets reading their own works, along with music that enhances the show’s theme. One of the more recent playlists highlighted poems about birds, or poems that include birds. I intend to tune in this Sunday.

It was fun to walk through the exhibit a second time. At my friend’s suggestion, we used the audio tour as we progressed through the halls, and we ended up finding out a lot that would have gone unnoticed had we merely meandered along on our own. One interesting aspect the curators brought out was how Dalí experimented with how he applied his medium to the surface–he used a loaf of bread, his mustache, a rhinoceros horn (which he equated with the unicorn, a symbol of virginity), and an octopus. He also shot paint pellets out of a gun, a technique he dubbed “bulletism.”

I also found out why he was kicked out of the Surrealist movement: with Marcel Duchamp’s blessing he included a painting  with religious iconography in a Surrealist exhibit, a theme the surrealists rejected. So he was ousted. The title of this exhibit is Dalí, The Later Works, a time period that until recently has not been admired by art critics, maybe because of the religious nature of the pieces. I did read, however, that Dalí declared himself a “Catholic without faith,” and that he did not believe in miracles.

I’ve already written two drafts of poems in response to his paintings. This summer has been very contemplative for me. I’ve been reading After by Jane Hirschfield and studying Buddhism, meditation, yoga. All the mind work, plus lap swimming, to calm my inner waters.

Even though I want to be at peace, I’m very drawn to the zany world of Da Da, Surrealism, and dreams. I keep thinking that if I remember my dreams and explore the images the meaning of everything will fall into place. A pretty illusion.

We have a new puppy at our house named Red. My sons brought him home from the animal shelter a week and a half ago, and we’re still working on finding a suitable routine. It’s summertime for me, which meant, until Red came, that I could read poetry, practice yoga, and meditate, in addition to housework and cooking meals, but all that free time has evaporated in my efforts to train the pup.

The boys said he was six months old, but I’m not so sure. He chews on anything made of plastic, rubber, paper, or wood. One night he started chewing my toes under the blanket, not understanding the lumps were a part of me!

Freeboarder has started back to school already–they’re moving to a year-round school year where we live–so today I walked Red and Duffy for two miles after he left for school. Red rolled in the creek to cool off, so now we’re on the back porch with the ceiling fans blowing until he dries off. It’s cool out here now, perfect for my morning reading and writing practices.

I’ve been reading about dog behavior, a first for me. When I was a kid my dad paper trained our puppy, and scolded him for bad behavior with a rolled up newspaper he would slap on his hand behind our beagle’s back. But training techniques have changed in the last forty years. Dogs, like people, thrive from constant praise. When I taught school one of our adages was to “catch the children being good.” The same holds true for animals. There’s a lot to be said for B.F. Skinner and positive reinforcement.

Positive reinforcement requires lots of attention and patience. I have to look Red in the eye and praise him when he’s behaving the way I want him to, like when he chews on his toys and not on the furniture. All this attention has shortened the time I can spend meditating, so I’m trying to think about my moments with him as my practice.

I’m mindful of him, I praise him, and I give him affection. When he pees in the wrong spot, I clean it up and take him outside. Rather than getting angry, I practice patient acceptance. There’s a remedy to the situation–a gate, a crate, lots of trips to the backyard, and a few long walks a day.

Freeboarder, back from the beach, has resumed painting on the porch. Right now he’s listening to the Flaming Lips while rendering an image from a dream he had about “the great god of nature.”

I’ve spent the morning reading and shopping online for a used canoe. We didn’t join a community pool this year, so I’m thinking about taking advantage of the nearby river and lake for some outdoor fun.

Today is our last full day at Folly Beach in South Carolina. The wind is strong, and the waves are breaking at a perpendicular angle to the shore.

I saw two guys wind surfing on boards that looked like snowboards. They were riding the waves all the way down miles of beach, at times shooting up twenty feet in the air. The upper body strenghth it must have taken to hold onto that parachute sail… .

My son and his friend walked out into the surf, and the current took them down about five hundred feet. They kept getting out of the water and walking up the beach and swimming down current, as if it were a river.

On Friday I finished grading the last of my freshmen compositions for this school year, earlier than most instructors because I had only one section. But because of the grading, I wasn’t able to write a circus-related poem for Big Tent Poetry, although I did generate a few ideas.

What came to my mind as I thought about the circus was the Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Florida. I went there once about eight years ago, and still remember the mansion John and Mable Ringling had built on the edge of the Gulf. We toured the house, filled to the brim with objects of art–paintings, sculptures, fine furniture, silverware, etc… . The house has a name, Cà d’Zan, which means “House of John” in Venetian Italian. What does it mean when you name your house after yourself, besides that you’re filthy rich? According to the website, Mable collected postcards of their travels throughout Italy and showed them to the architect who designed Cà d’Zan.

The circus museum next to the house didn’t interest me too much, but I do remember the replicas of  both serious and comedic whitefaced clowns. I had never thought too much about clowns until I visited that museum, which is where I learned about the different types.

Once when I was teaching high school Spanish I put a picture of a clown on the board and asked the students, “What makes you laugh?” It was a generic teacher assignment I had found in a writing prompt book.  Many of the kids ignored the question, and focused on how clowns scared them.

What I dislike are paintings of clowns. They don’t scare me, but a difficult to articulate nausea passes over me when I see one. Maybe this feeling is what I need to write about. I think it’s more than an aesthetic aversion to the paintings.

Andre the Giant Sticker

It was one of those times when you learn a new word, or rediscover an old one, and then it pops up everywhere. For example, one night you might use an astringent to tone facial tissue, and then you read the word astringent applied to a character in a poem.

While reading It Is Daylight by Arda Collins I came across the word philtrum. Maybe I had learned it when I was studying Spanish. I know a lot of words like that in Spanish, ones you use  twice in a lifetime. But no, that must have been las corvas, the word for the backs of the knees. We don’t have a word for the backs of the knees in English, and Spanish has no specific word for the hollow between the septum and the upper lip.  Even my spellchecker doesn’t recognize philtrum. Of course philtrum comes to English from Latin. Spanish could borrow it too.

Here’s a story I found Wikipedia:

According to the Jewish Talmud (Niddah 30b), God sends an angel to each womb and teaches a baby all the wisdom that can be obtained. Just before the unborn baby comes out, the angel touches it between the upper lip and the nose and all that it has taught the baby is forgotten.

That event, learning the word philtrum, was a few days ago. Today I went to a day spa for a massage and to have my upper lip and eyebrows waxed. (How gauche of me to reveal my tawdry attempts at beauty or to admit to the social injustice that I can afford a trip to a day spa when there are people in the world who don’t even have a cardboard box to call home.)

So maybe it served me right when the esthetician ripped a patch of skin from my philtrum as she was waxing the peach fuzz from my face. Why did I submit myself to such torture? I don’t really even have a mustache.

Bloody philtrum, crease on cheek from massage table

She didn’t mean to. She said my skin was probably dry. I bled profusely, and she seemed worried I would sue her. But she’s probably right. It was my fault. My skin needs hydrating. In the US we like to blame people. We expect others to take responsibility. The esthetician had a creamy complexion. She asked me if I used Retin A. I said “no, just soap and water.”

My dreams have been highly charged with symbolic images lately, more than likely due to my reading of Man and His Symbols, by Jung et al. I’ve scribbled a few haphazard images down in my journal, but there’s been little free time to think about what the dreams might mean. Instead, I’ve been reading poetry, attending readings, grading papers, planning for classes, cooking a few dinners here and there, and trying to revise a few poems.

I qualify any interpretations of dreams with a big question mark, because it takes a long time to see the patterns in dream symbols. What does it mean if I see a horse lying on its side in a ditch? The only way to know is to take a wait and see attitude.

I let the image simmer for a while, and if it stays with me, I’ll free-write about it. I’ve come up with some rollicking prose poems that way. They’re self-indulgent, but very fun to write. My current project is about miniature foxes.

One of my favorite fiction writers is Kelly Link. She writes about zombies, mysterious rabbits, and homunculi, among other topics. Her stories lend themselves to anyone who enjoys dream imagery, postmodern fantasy, or magic. You can download portions of Magic for Beginners from her website.

We’re just finishing Pathways to Bliss in my poetry course, and then we’re going to read the first two essays from Man and His Symbols, a collection of essays edited by Carl Jung for the everyday person. I’m ready to take on Jung after Campbell’s excellent recap  of modern psychology in Pathways to Bliss, from Freud to Adler, and from Jung to Maslow.

In Jung’s introduction he says the basic function of dreams is to restore psychic balance in our lives. We tend to evade the truth in our waking life, and dreams try to open us up to modes of behavior we might not be ready to admit to ourselves. Dreams can also reveal our hidden potentials to us. As an example of the former, Jung says,

“It explains why people who have unrealistic ideas or too high an opinion of themselves, or who make grandiose plans out of proportion to their real capacities, have dreams of flying or falling.”

I love to have flying dreams. Even the ones where I just bounce around. When I wake up I feel exhilarated, ready to take on any challenge, especially artistic challenges. But after reading this passage, I began doubt myself again. I started wondering if I’m like some of the poor schmucks on American Idol, self-delusional with little chance of a public reception of my work. I don’t want to be someone who says, Well, the world just isn’t ready for me yet.

On the other hand, I also ask myself if I would continue to write poetry and short stories if no one else read them. I think I would. I would be my own reader, which is basically my current situation anyway. And since I prefer to continue writing no matter matter what, I interpret my flying dreams as meaning I need to embrace my hidden potential that I didn’t have the confidence to see until I flew.