Surf

 The one who has the most... What word next? Money, followers, awards, toys, connections, keys to locked boxes? Is life a contest that we win?

Watching The Social Network, I'm mystified. Facebook has the most... or Twitter has the most...or whomever...and, yes, contact and communication is being facilitated, but...

This blog has just about the least...and I wonder, would it matter more  to me if it had more readers? Perhaps, but probably not if just readers, and not respondents. Very many might, I fear, interfere with alertness to the kind of 2nd person encounters the blog explores. You're displaying your ambivalence here, Peter, or perhaps just your profound self-centeredness.

I think I'm missing something. The human race on Facebook has something it didn't know it wanted before, but now can't live without. It's not really about 'most' of anything. It's about a directed network, each one linked to, aimed toward, several, and those to several more until the planet is like a balloon in a string bag. Who I am is a node with a name and an address, a presence. What I do radiates out along the edges; how others respond reflects back, the patterns of interference, crest and trough, representing the shadow play of identity. Some nodes are hubs, some dead ends, so each makes more or less contribution to the state at any point of the whole graph.

I still don't have it. This blog is public, not a notebook tucked in a pocket. I've got one of those, indeed shoe-boxes of them. Public means potent in a way that dusty boxes of old thoughts are not. Publishing  is like the lottery tickets one of my students sometimes presses on me, saying that the 180 million is still there for somebody, and why not the teacher? The You is the realm of unsuspected possibilities lurking in the world.

Perhaps the better way to think of it is as something like the cells of a tissue touching each other, exchanging chemicals and electrical impulses, never alone, immersed in a matrix, sensitive, declarative, sharing a common weather.  Reinforcing feedback is not long odds, but regular, constant. We're stroking, poking, jostling, and generating the haptic energy of a bustling Us.

Similes won't do it. Social media is the realization of a latent desire. That groundswell desire is palpable in the 2010 picture, and actually all around me when Facebook took off in the early OOs. It offers the chance for fluent frequent contact with those we know and ready accessibility (and access) to those we don't is what we've always wanted. Or what you all, a significant portion of humankind, wants.

I know people who use it sparingly, and others who are into it and out of it more frequently than a kid and a backyard tent. Some use it to embellish the circle of family or friends, others to explore (or target) the wider human world, all adding up to a number that makes this media, or that, this owner or that, the winner. To have created and developed something that has proved so compelling and useful to so many people so quickly is indeed an impressive achievement.

It's still hard for me to grasp the appeal of it all. Digital presence? I'm thoroughly occupied managing and reporting on my analog one. A blind spot in my motivational retina? You all just keep on splashing in the Facebook surf;  I'll watch and maybe put a toe in later.

Spring already

The class of twelve was enough for six pairs. I had put them to work ranking things and writing in a few sentences what and why, then trading what they'd written with a partner and discussing each other's thoughts. So, for instance, restaurants: formal, family or fast, which do you prefer and why?

As I walked around the room, stopping to talk with individual writers and then with pairs, I enjoyed the buzz of conversation around me. We wrapped up the class; our work was to be the basis of short essay. I passed out something for reading as people bundled up to leave--then spring happened.

It's been a tough start of term. There was the two successive Tuesday classes canceled because of the storms. In the first classes, I was still logy and coughing persistently as I slowly recovered from the bug that had floored me in mid-January. A mix-up with room assignments meant that some students missed the first couple of classes because in the wrong place. One sat in for a few weeks on a psychology class before realizing his mistake. Several called in sick.

I'm teaching a new  higher level so I thought I'd change my normal practice and work with the prescribed books, but they turned out to be awkward at best, stupid at worst, and expensive to boot. Still I had committed to using them and students had invested. Some of the students were ones I'd taught the term before at the previous level, and I was anxious not to repeat anything.

The first couple of classes of any term are get-to-know-you sessions. These, interrupted and irregularly attended, were a bit haphazard. The lessons were unbalanced. I was tense, and so were the students. One student told me as we walked together to the class how hard it was for her to write in English, how only her husband's encouragement kept her coming.

And yet, we've persisted. I've gotten a better handle on what I want to do with both the speaking & listening class early in the evening and the reading & writing classes afterwards, and how I can make use of the books and not vice versa. We've started to get some momentum: some oral presentations, a first essay. The students are starting to feel comfortable with each other, learning each others names, and they're more familiar with me, and I with them.

So, after class, a good class, while I was busily assembling my papers, I thought when a student came up that perhaps she wanted to get clarification on the homework or to say she would be absent. Instead she said she wanted to tell me how she appreciated the class. 'It's working. I'm getting new thoughts. New words are coming.' Her feeling was reinforced, she implied, by watching her partner busily writing. Thank you, she said.

Wow! I had no idea she had been thinking these things. It's a happy class, but usually nobody says anything about the classes or the teaching generally. Still, this term has been so beset and I've felt so beleaguered that these words were like crocuses thrusting their flowers up through the snow--balm to my winter-wounded soul.

Thank you for your words so thoughtfully spoken, and thank you, students, for sticking with the project, giving it your all, and beginning to make progress. You are each special and together special. We're going to have a good term.

Story

Here in the midst of Georges Perec's Life: A User's Guide (and not quite clear where that means I am), I'm struck by the endless succession of stories that well up from any reference the author makes: a painting, a room, an elevator or set of stairs, the skeleton of a pig, and there's a story. Italo Calvino's If On A Winter's Night A Traveler had something of the same somewhat alarming fecundity of narrative invention. These minds!

Perec's stories contribute to a larger narrative very carefully plotted and only gradually revealing itself as I move through the chapters to the 99th and final. At almost exactly the half-way point he lists first lines of stories that he's actually already told or may, indeed probably will, tell:

A young trapeze artist refusing to climb down from his perch...
The lovelorn coachman who thought he'd heard a rodent mewing...
A famous old soldier killed by a loose Venetian chandelier...
The Swedish diplomat trying madly to avenge his son and wife...
Woodworms' hollow honeycombs solidified by an Italian artist...
The pranking student putting beef stock in vegetarians' soup...
The druggist spending his fortune on the Holy Vase of Joseph...
The anthropologist, failing to locate the ever-evasive tribe...

174 in all, self-contained, many quirky, most memorable (at least with the first-line prompt.) Once inside a story--one can find oneself at any moment in that situation--the characters develop, complications arise, time passes, a stopping point appears like a sign at an intersection, and Perec switches back to whatever he was doing before (about which,  again, I'm still largely in the dark.)

What intrigues me as I contemplate this dragon's hoard of tales is, first, the strange allure of stories that keeps us reading, and second, the irrelevance of the kind of ending--triumphant or tragic, nailed-down or unresolved--to a story's ability to hang significant as a star against the backdrop of our thoughts. Perhaps, as Milan Kundera said in The Unbearable Lightness of Being: 'Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of great distress.' Perhaps what we look for in stories are intimations of that beauty.

There are those who swig stories literary or cinematic as I drink coffee--pretty continuously. I enjoy but am not 'addicted' to narrative. Arguments, interviews, news reports, presentations of issues are equally interesting, but reading Perec (and listening to yet another story dramatized in the next room), I wonder makes narrative intrinsically worthwhile, apart from whatever excitement it stimulates or  'lessons' it teaches. There's a reason for this inquiry: I'd like to write stories (and they don't just pop into my mind; I have to deliberately seek or construct them) and want a better reason for doing so. (This sounds so pretentious, I cringe just writing it.) Apart from writing, I want a better takeaway from the stories I read.

Why authors write the stories they do, I don't fully understand. Some imagine compelling scenes and create a narrative context in which to embed them. Others conceive of characters they yearn to know better. Some love constructing plots like Rube Goldberg mechanisms and watching them spool out. Others see some event emblematic of a significant theme which they feel challenged to dramatize. All of these and other enticements motivate writers, bless them. I want to know what I am looking for.

This blog has been exploring the idea of 2nd person encounter as a fundamental unit of value. Is it useful to think of stories as histories of encounters? Vicissitude stories, confrontation stories, slice-of-life stories, lesson learning stories, huh? stories: may I not search them for indications or suggestions (in first or third person costume) of those occasions or episodes where one actually addressed another as You, or could have and didn't. May I not structure the stories I could write around such scouting?

Indeed, all this last year I've been looking for direct encounter opportunities in my rather unexciting life--and found them day after day. What about reported or imagined or contrived encounters? In what I read or may write, indeed in art generally, may I not find indirect encounters explicit or implied, which can extend the reach of my experience, expand what I conceive as possible? Not a substitute for the risking that direct encounters demand of me, may not reflection (even through writing) on encounters and the dynamics of encounter in the lives of historical and fictional characters be the deeper justification I'm interested in in narrative?

After dinner this evening, we talked about Rembrandt's versions of the sacrifice of Isaac, based on the story taken from the Jewish scriptures. We pulled up the images (or images--there seem to have been several versions) from the internet, commented on the design, and considered the interactions of the characters in the dramatic tableaux. The startled, old,  bearded man, the unclothed, unresistant young man with bared throat, the urgent angel, the baffled ram represent a complex of encounters worth contemplating in terms of the existence (or not) of hospitalities, friendships and explorations; in terms of potentialities, energies, powers; in terms of agents and patients; in terms of histories of richness, and so on.

Maybe new things can be learned about living a life of presence, adventure and lastingness. Kundera also said, 'A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.' Maybe through what I turn up, you may informed and enriched, God-in-love.

Orb

Oh sun; oh tight, pullulating ball mottled ember-like by upwellings and down-swirlings of glowing plasma; oh foundation of great arches of incandescence gas erupting, twisting in response to immense magnetic forces, and falling headlong into the maelstrom of the photosphere; oh bombardier of the solar system, spurting thick gouts of fire-foam, in turn emitting death ray burst of ions out toward any planet in the way; oh sphere of magnetic storms, with twisting lines of force writhing like tornadoes or burning martyrs; oh pin cushion of spicules prickling the chromosphere like a sea urchin of fire; oh wracked and restless star boiling ceaselessly on its plasmic surface, roiled tumultuously by internal fusioning where density and temperature writhe like an immovable object meeting an irresistible force: how placid you seem, beaming down on us, anchoring our annual loop, blessing this fertile planet with the wherewithal of life itself.

With this post, number 365, a year's worth of reflections, if not of risks, and, by the way, the fifth anniversary of NASA's Solar Dynamic Observatory project of continuous solar photography, I recognize you as the reference point for the all the passages of time. Stately and serene, you set up and scythe down the minutes and millennia. 'As long as the sun endures,' but like any closed dynamic system, your days are numbered. Profligate and prodigious, you seethe with a thermonuclear rage restrained only by your massive, burnable bulk.

Attenuated as your energy is when it reaches us, it can still dazzle and dismay. But in these 365 days, I've been shone upon from every degree of your longitude. A full body encounter of sun and son. Recognize you? You've bored holes in my eyes, raised rebellions on my skin. Your undivided attention would crisp me, would all of us. Your benevolence seems like a kind of sufferance.

Still to be is to be cosmic. All cosy nooks have a backdoor open to immensity. Huge is our difference in scale, yet we co-exist, and endure the burdens of that. Brother Sun, Francis called you. Big Brother.

Hawk in winter

A small brown handful of feathers hopping down the road mid-afternoon dragging its right wing. My wife lost sight of it as she sat in her car making the first of a half-dozen calls to find a bird rescue person. Out of the car, she saw the hawk had climbed up the snow drift heaped against my fence. It sat impassive, eyes shut, making soft chirring noises.

Oh, no. One of the neighborhood's black feral cats came padding by. My wife prepared for battle but the cat didn't see the injured bird. A man and girl walking by did see it and loudly pointed it out, prompting the bird to jump over the fence, hop down the snow and then up to my porch.

Call after call to centers that were closed, had no facilities, or advised that the bird be left along to die in nature's way without our making it worse. Meanwhile,  the bird hopped up onto our railing, down onto the snow pile beneath and under some forsythia bushes.

Some time later, at dusk, a woman in a red parka from a Boston animal rescue league arrived equipped with a net. She searched under the bushes. Would the bird still be there, my wife wondered. Yes, it was. Gently rescue woman picked up the quiescent bird in two gloved hands and carried him away for evaluation and care.

It's wing is broken, she said. It may heal and, if not, we'll put it to sleep gently.

You, hawk, so commanding in the air, so greedy of mice and voles (3 or 4 a day in the winter, it's said, though I wonder how), so intimidating of eye and voice, are our patient now, submitting to our ministrations. Was it fatigue or fatalism that let you submit to our handling?

But where, I wonder, were you hopping when my wife saw you? What trek were you on, so little, so alone, so uncomplaining? Our street gets a good deal of two legged and four legged traffic, but you're the first monopod bird, little darling.

There's been a good feeling in our house this evening thinking about hawks, you rescued, and the kind hands that came to fetch and care for you. We've given you names and felt affection warm within us, but you're not a pet or a prize. You're a wild animal in a harsh environment, ever playing the odds, which now have turned against you.

You showed yourself so game through the whole episode, with a kind of indomitable resignation.  Whatever befalls, the end or a new beginning, I salute you.

Connection

What's it like to be 95? I don't know but my uncle's birthday is today and... Born in Glasgow in 1920, he's lived in Canada since just after the Second World War to work as an engineer, and is now in Halifax.

I'm lazy about keeping in touch, in part because, while he's a generous and warm-hearted person, I find him a little bossy and judgmental. I'd never known his birthday, but when Mum mentioned it, well... No, still lazy, my wife found the number and called. And there he was, sounding as hearty (the word he applied to me) as ever, his accent still clearly Scottish.

How are  you doing, Peter, you ask, and get news of storms and work and children (and grandchildren) and health, but the real news is you, Uncle, and your health. Still driving? Still getting out and socializing? Sounds like it.

When my family emigrated, we stayed with you near Toronto. Your children, our playmates. Dinners, vacations together. But our lives have separated; had separated before today's call. Can we send you pictures with text messages?  Can we skype?  No? but let's see what we can do to continue or expand the contact. Suddenly a new person in my constellation of contacts.

It used to be that 95 was as close to the end of life as anyone could reasonable expect--with all the diminution of powers and personality that number suggests. Closer to it, I can see farther beyond it, but still it's impressive. Yet a day in one's 96th year is still a day, characterized as any of ours is with pleasures and prospects of all kinds. Every day is an opportunity to be human and for encounter. You expressed delight at my call, but really I'm the one blessed.

Capped

The snow is deep. I sink half way up my legs. I pad the trails broken by me and my litter-mate out and back to our shelter tucked under the fence at the top of the slope. Out in that direction across the hill, a cut-through and maybe some trash; through the fence there's the path to a porch on a house(underneath less snow and, maybe, warmth coming from the dryer through the window.) No food there; a person looks out sometimes through a window. Cleared paths to street of houses where I forage.

Down the hill, the fast food outlet and scraps, and special fool left on plates there. Down and back, out and back. The snow is so very white. I squint. Only the trees and bushes and my black litter-mate visible. The air is cold like a pair of hands pressing me from either side.

Rain, then cold. Snow in the beaten trails is hard, sharp on my pads. Unbroken snow crust holds me. I step gingerly. Seeds scattered in an open area; birds busy.I move toward them behind a mound of snow. Suddenly, the surface disappears from under me. I fall down a slope of white powder into a hollow place. A glass table above. A wall of white all around.

I climb but the snow is too soft to hold me, my paws sink deep into it. The lip of the table hits my head; I can't see out. The light under the table is white darkness. I meow. All I hear is myself. The snow absorbs my sound.

I throw myself at the snow, scrabbling wildly. It falls on me, suffocating. My black fur covered, My pink mouth filled. My whiskers crushed. I meow again. Into the snow again in a new direction, feet flailing.

Space under the table filling. The green-white glass is sky. Darker and darker now. I yowl. The snow eats my voice.

Fully fulfilling?

Some soul searching days. As I hit 360 in this blog, a full circle of posts, I have to ask: is the project working? By this I mean not whether I can find encounters every day, the sheer succession of posts suggests I can (and if I can, anyone can), but whether a life of encounters is satisfying enough, whether I'm fully...what? If not, what's missing.

Perhaps I'm just a little stir-crazy. The snow doesn't keep me home but it does make parking problematic, and trudging through the woods a real challenge (no snow shoes, yet). Still, I'm antsy. Just writing this blog used to justify each day, but now it doesn't. I feel there's more in me that is ready to respond to encounter than I've accessed in the writing of this blog. Last night, I felt antsy. So many books, so much music, so many movies at my fingertips and I couldn't figure out which to dip into, what to do. So many puzzles to do and sketches to make, and I couldn't decide (with one exception) which to tackle. Did I want to sample and be stimulated or did I want immersion and to be engrossed?

All of this is apart from the God-in-love framework, which provides the broad context and a perspective. Rather, it's about the idea of a presence/adventure/lastingness way of life. Am I living it yet? Do I know where to go? I feel I need a plan, but even before that, some understanding.

What came to me this morning grew out of yesterday's blog on copying and emulating. Let's see if I can articulate it, even for myself. Perhaps the way to find the answer is to consider the issues of otherness and address.

When I study something deeply, trying to penetrate it, trying to assimilate it, the other is a model for me, whether person, book, story, work of art; the vector of address arrows from me to it: I chose to attend, to watch, to inquire, and then to honor it by reduplication or re-presentation. The constraint of the other imposes is its character or structure or special quiddity.

Moving on, there's a second kind of otherness, a situation or fact, that imposes a kind of strictness, eliciting response. We are addressed, a demand for acknowledgement enforced by its sheer urgency or undeniable presence: a, say, a journey or some kind of problem. The other is a unique set of givens to be navigated, so that a task is solved or accomplished.

Then I thought: what about those situations of mutuality, where one addresses an other. Here the dynamics of encounter are fluid, dependent on the sallies and replies of the parties. Here the constraints are the actions of the other in response to us, and so more or less strict.

So three kinds of Others: those I choose to honor with attention and emulation, others that require me to respond and perhaps solve, and those that invite me to interact in a hurly-burly of conversation. Not iron-clad categories, these may point me toward the idea of a mixed menu of encounters that will put me at rest.

The practices appropriate to each kind of encounter can also be hybrid, though the first seems generally more about friendship, the second, exploration, and the third, hospitality.

Does invention and design represent a fourth category? I'm inclined to think not, but rather to include invention in the first and design in the second. But, heck, all these distinctions are really only for helping me think how to make the encounter-stream of my life richer and more engaging.

What might this mean in terms of a 'diet?' In first category: more sketching, paraphrasing and precis-ing, score reading, etc. In the second, more visiting, more experimenting, etc. In the third, more meeting and engaging with people, perhaps especially strangers. Okay, I have a rough idea to work with. The goal is to be ever encountering Otherness. Let's see.

Copycat

The first rendition was awful. Read aloud for the first time and without prep, the reading of the transcript was peppered with gnarled, misspoken words, off-target accents, chopped phrases, irregular rhythms: lurchings forward, sudden brakings. I winced inwardly. As recorded and compared against the original, the gap seemed huge.

Then work on the text, marking off the natural units, finding the right syllable for the accent, deciding where to speed up and when to slow down, where the tones need to rise and where fall, in short, making the words into a script, all the while listening closely to the original for pace, pronunciation and expression.

Second time, the charm--at least a significant improvement. Still a bit clunky, this rendition was recognizably a form of natural speech.  I was surprised at how much and how quickly the upgrade in performance had occurred.

How powerful analysis and imitation working together can be. It's the principle of apprenticeship: emulation and reflection, iteratively--not a strong point in my teaching style, though essential, I think, in attaining real mastery.

This close attention to audible or visual detail, and sensitivity to the inferrable intention of the model, often comes close to encounter. My student heard more, read more into, the communication, and so experienced it as a presence which could be readily copied.

With particular vividness, this class we had highlighted for me how naturally apt we are at imitation. Witness my grandson learning to speak better and better listening to and copying his parents and other adults.

So who am I paying attention to? What texts am I studying, voices am I listening to? What presence am I evoking, conjuring up. Who is the you I am trying to become more like? Not a kid anymore, I still find models to look up to. Can I make you part of who I am?

Magnifier

The concept is simple: things that seem immobile and inert may actually move or change color, but so very slightly that we can't see it. Record the motion on an ordinary video camera, however, analyze the images pixel by pixel and amplify minute changes in color or tiny movements using special image processing software developed recently at MIT, and you can produce a new video that makes the invisible visible. The process is called Eulerian video magnification.

What had been motionless can now be seen as actually moving, changing. A baby's stillness can be converted into visible breathing. A man's face can be seen as changing color with each pulse of blood. People looking into the camera but not moving are seen to actually exhibit a variety of tic-like movements, individual to each. Engines and structures can visibly reveal their patterns of vibration or sway. Videotaping the motion of ordinary inanimate objects like empty potato chip bags, what had been spoken nearby can be recovered and (roughly) recreated.

It's not that pulses aren't already taken, blood perfusion already measured, torques and vibrations already monitored, sound already recorded, but that these patterns of change can be magnified and so transformed into imagination-stimulating visibility.

What struck me was how the stillness of living things is, in fact, incessant dynamic movement, and the stillness of inanimate things masks a throbbing imparted by whatever is active nearby. The classic and obvious division of things into what moves or changes and what doesn't, breaks down. Everything either produces change or is changed; nothing is fixed or isolated, and not just on the micro or atomic scale but the macro or structural.

It makes my head reel. The scope of the notion of address and addressability is expanded. What cannot be second-person to us? Once upon a time clear water was just water, but it has since been colonized with microbes; or the dark spaces of the sky were empty but since been filled with galaxies and nebulae. It's not so much the fullness on every scale that strikes me, as the interconnection--limited perhaps only by the speed of light. The cosmos is readable on every scale of space or time. Messages may be damped or attenuated, but everything speaks and responds.

There's an obvious artifice in this as there is in false color representations of, say, thermoclines, but like the artificial voices which speak for those with disabilities, it's still a true channel for communication that wasn't open before.

Of course, all kinds of new monitoring are possible, for good or ill, but the significance I feel bursting over me like a wave is the extended potential for encounter. Oh, God-in-love, how much the medium of messaging has be multiplied in density. I feel giddy.

Diary

Here's the story: 1966, one of the northern provinces of then South Vietnam, an ambush, many dead Marines, an all-day firefight, reinforcements, air support, a young, dead NVA soldier manning a machine gun covering the retreat of his comrades, a diary resting on his body.

Many years later, the tiny diary in the possession of the veteran who picked it up off the corpse but who now doesn't want to own it but doesn't know what to do with it.

An investigation: confirmation of the details of the fight, the units involved, both North Vietnamese and American, the enhancement of the pages of the diary to maximum legibility, the inventory of other paper--a photo of  two girls, an ID document--tucked into the pages, the translation of the texts.

Then, the identification of the soldier, his home village, the account in the diary of his mustering and movement down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, his travails, his battles, his hopes for the future after the war.

Finally, the contact with the surviving children of the soldier, identification of the girls, now old women, who were home militiamen giving the picture of themselves as encouragement, an unexpected portrait of the soldier himself painted from a photo along with other photos of him, a boyish young father, and his wife and three children, a video-taped interview with his surviving son.

Ceremonial diplomatic delivery to the diary to the Vietnamese government and plans to display the it in a local museum.

Here's the point that hits me: a living veteran, albeit old and on oxygen, and a dead combatant 40 years gone. One gets to understand the person he would have killed or been killed by in that terrible war, and the other has a chance to speak from beyond the grave. The terrible losses, the aching lack of resolution, brought to the point of forgiveness: 'You [who return the diary] are a moral  man.'

How is it that terror and rage and grief and resentment can end in a recognition of the other as also human with a story understandable and recognizable? A tiny, slim, leather-bound diary as the door way of each into the life of the other. How is it that vast networks of relationship and implication meet and become accessible at a single point, an potential encounter sleeping these many years? How many more are there in our possession, in our vicinity, waiting?   

Poet

The question was 'If you could change anything about the way you were raised, what would it be?'  I was rather surprised by my answer: 'I wish there had been more poetry.' Did I mean art generally or poetic sentiment? I'm not sure, but...

The other day I pulled a slim volume of poetry out of my bookcase (only 'Collected Works of...' are thick), this one by John Ciardi, Person to Person, published in 1964, right about when my poetic sensibility was formed. I've always had a soft spot for Ciardi as Boston born, translator of Dante, author of the classic school text 'How Does A Poem Mean?, a question I've asked myself over and over.

There's lots of information online about the man and his career: he knew how to criticize and be criticized; he wrote lewd limericks with, of all people, Isaac Asimov; he ran a writers colony and was fired from same, he gave popular broadcasts (still available) on word origins...the standard.

But where I need to find you is in these poems in this book, and not just the man but the poet, the experience or thought capturer, the word-net maker, the singer.

There's a formality in your poetry that I appeals to me, rhyme schemes overt or covert, metrical patterns even if fragmentary, references recognizable as landmarks, a flow, a trackable logic of heart/mind, a pleasure in reading aloud, an incentive to read a second time, a voice: these are perhaps old-fashioned tastes, satisfied not just by old-fashioned poetry.

You've got some memorable lines, Mr C.:

'Because I am given to working, I work./Because words find me, I go to find/words, the food of my kind. I walk/by nowheres to the luck of a word, its found/wild honey. A good night is a forest/in which bee-trees are, the sweetness and the blackrust/ of dead wood bled together...' 

'There is some danger in anything. Generally, however,/courage is superfluous to eternity and fear irrelevant.'

'...And thought is not/fact, nor measurable. It is simply there./ An enclosing condition. A dimension taught/the sourceless light. An aspect of air.'

No, these aren't actually the ones I want, but as I look, I find myself getting drawn into poem after poem, finding that this line leads to that and so toward a completion that rings in my head after I've reached it.

You wrote elsewhere, 'One sees a wizard of a poet tossing his words in the air and catching them and tossing them again--what a grand stunt! Then suddenly one may be astonished to find that the poet is not simply juggling cups, saucer, roses, rhymes and other random objects, but the very stuff of life. And discovering that, one discovers that seeing the poet's ideas flash so in the air, seeing them performed under such control, is not only a reward in itself, but a living experience that deepens every man's sense of life. One finds himself more, alert to life, surer of his own emotions, wiser that he would have been without the experience. And he thought he was just watching a show.'

Here's one I like:

From Adam's Diary

In the planetarium of an apple tree
I shook some spiral nebulae
and sent some systems reeling, just to see
how that might be. Just between time and me,
to see how it might be
to shake a universe--or an apple tree--
and see what fell, and think how it would be
if any of what fell was me. 
None of it was--that day. But I could see
it all would be. Some day. Whatever tree.

The rhyme's a tad obsessive but the last two lines have all I love in poetry--a lilt, a quick step, a flip, ah!

I like your company, seeing what games you get up to, your turns of phrase, your wry insights, the way you twist things and turn them inside out, but which make a kind of better sense when you do. Reading a poem, or working my way through it, I'm not sure where you're taking me or what you have up your sleeve, but I know I'll be introduced to something in a new way.

This looking at things aslant is perhaps what I wish I could have been introduced to by my family growing up. What different it would have made I can hardly guess, perhaps it doesn't matter--there's so much in you and others to sing along with.

Leaders

Commendable, reprehensible: two things I've just learned about the Father of the Country and its Savior of the Union, that is George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.

This is the Presidents Day holiday which gives me time to shovel my way out to the street and free my cars. The wind has dropped; the fantastic polished drift shapes--ridges, pinnacles, overhanging lips, layers, mounds, veritable alps--are pretty stable now and waiting to be broken down and relocated or else heaped with debris from other snow structures. Preparatory to the mayhem I intend to inflict, I admire the subtle shapes, the fantastic shadows of the much snow you left behind, Storm Neptune.

You're on every dollar bill I spend, George, tight-lipped and formal, the epitome of the paterfamilias. In your biographies and the histories, you're admired as steadfast champion of the Republic and republican values, or as a stuffed shirt, a cipher the many factions of the nascent nation could agree to let lead, but not, as they say, the sharpest knife in the drawer. Your equestrian statue in the Public Garden, periodically clad in championship team jerseys, remembers your key role in the Revolution, but what did you do after that?

You, Abe, conveniently dead at the end of the effort that stapled the South onto the rest of the nation for once and for all, are the author of great words that ring in the nation's memory, words articulating the mission  of the nation hereafter: '...that this nation, of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.' But how was this sausage actually made?

It's not that what I know about these, one has to admit, remarkable men is in error but that from time to time my sense of them as tasked expands and deepens; public service, done conscientiously, is hard and morally fraught work. At the end there'll be reason for pride and shame.

Reading recently an old book from the twenties and listening to another, written just a few years ago, on the early days of the new nation, I learn that you, George, pursued a vision for the development of the interior spaces of the continent. Rather than creating new colonies in the vast land beyond the Alleghenies to just serve the original thirteen colonies, now states, of the coast, you envisioned the space organized into sovereign, self-administered states equal to all that had come before, trading freely east to the Atlantic and southwest to the Gulf, a nation of independent units knit by commerce and shared responsibility for the health of the whole. A surveyor by training, and land speculator by business, you saw the development of the west as funded by the sales of federal land in the west. To this end, you got the states to give up their claims to land beyond the mountains, and their rights to negotiate treaties with European nations and Indian tribes, and to cede all that potential to the shared pool from which new peer states would, from time to time, arise.

I hadn't thought about any of that. The history books merely report events and transactions, never the range of options confronting the actors in their situations. Of course, it had to happen as it did because, well, that's the way it's done: a circular argument that explains nothing but serves to satisfy our shallow curiosity. Still, in those early days when ambitious men were planning to set up their own little empires, and the established states sought to exploit for their own benefit the booty of their war of independence, you, George, had to navigate a challenging course of push and fall back and push again to bring about what you wanted for us. I'm newly impressed.

I understand, Abe, that to win the war, you had to coerce and buy off politicians from the border states, but did you have to override again and again the well-documented malfeasances of the corrupt Reuben Hatch just because he was the younger brother of a strategic political friend from Kentucky. As a result, in 1865, thirteen days after your assassination, the steamboat SS Sultana, was loaded--and overloaded--with over 1,800 freed but frail Union prisoners of war leaving Vicksburg on the Mississippi, which may had led to instability which caused the boilers to explode, resulting i the destruction of the boat and the horrible death of over 1,700 people.

You were aware of Hatch's record. Why did you reinstate and promote him time and again over objectsions to a place where he could peculate on the head count of soldiers on the boat. How often did you do favors for your political friends in your pursuit of the war? You were not uninformed about the prior derelictions and embezzlements of Hatch, but perhaps you had to deal all the day with larcenous profiteers, and Hatch was just one more, support for whom could be turned to political benefit.

Still, the worst maritime in American history, and so many men and women, many of them invalids just trying to get home, blown to pieces in the blast, horribly burned, or drowned in the cold, black water as their boat blazed in the night: can this be laid at your feet? Perhaps you would say, add this to all the other deaths and sorrows I've occasioned and for which I am to blame.

The good, the bad are often forgotten in place of the convenient and compelling image: the man on the horse or behind the podium. Still, in the moment, you made your choices and accepted the consequences, for better or worse. So with us--on much smaller scale. Only those apart from the tumult of human affairs can stay pure or avoid risk. We make promises, we do deeds, we seek forgiveness, we act again, encounter after encounter, to the end, even perhaps with resonance beyond.

Make love!

Perhaps she didn't know how good a joke it was but when Anna Netrebko in high spirits just off stage from playing Tchaikovsky's Iolanta, shout to the HD audience: 'What are you doiing here? It's Valentine's Day. Why aren't you home, making love?' she was talking to a semi-geriatric audience, many wheel-chair confined, and unlikely to have been ripping off shirts or bodices as tumbling headlong into the sack, rather than watching opera.

I loved that large gesture and grand exhortation coming from one who'd just spent the last hour gaining the use of her eyes and falling in love for the first time (both dizzying). It's wonderful for stars to feel the passion they portray.

Anonymous amour, inexplicable attraction, overwhelming desire, well, we're well past that disorientation, so cozy on the couch, we snuggled and watched a movie about the camaraderie of shared loss. Before checking out the window on the progress of the storm and so off to bed, however, we went a few questions further down the list of  '36 Questions That Lead to Love,' published in January in the NYTimes.

After 40 years (and that just of marriage) you'd think there'd be nothing new to say. We're not meeting for the first time in that space that seems richer second by second in romantic possibilities. We're  not learning about each other's histories, or families, or vulnerabilities, or quirks. We've talked through our pasts, and increasingly we are each other's pasts. The families from which we came are being supplemented by those which come from us. We've had our breakdowns, and comforted each other, exasperated each other, disappointed each other, surprised each other. Quirks have become irritating or lovably familiar. Our questions have been answered by our lives.

Still, it's a good thing to ask old questions again. We can give each other more time to answer, compare today's answers with those we've given before, ask for clarification and exemplification. It's surprising and interesting to hear how self-aware the other is; we forget how much we watch and think about ourselves.

The list is long and the evening is well-advanced. We don't have to rush falling in love. The climax of the process comes when, after the questions, we spend four minutes just looking each other in the eye without looking away. We've done it before of course but this time will be deliberated, and after so many years, will it work as asserted? It's not a scary questions but it is somewhat exciting.

Even so, there's lots of shoveling to do tomorrow and it's time to turn out the light. G'night, love.

Making good

Fifty years to the day after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the two people most responsible for the drafting of the document died, one after another. The political project, at that time, was very much alive and remains so, contentious, communal and common as ever: can we make good on the words?

One part of a fiftieth anniversary I attended recently of a successful commercial enterprise was a day of talks by people famous locally or globally, to employees and guests on the theme the company extols: education. I kept my ear open for the 'You' I could address, the Other that was addressing me.

The word was repeated over and over, but only some of the speakers touched me, and then not primarily as cheerleaders for 'education', a good thing only controversial in the details, but as providing useful tips for living.

Two of them spoke about young people they'd met ambitious about their future, and what they wanted to do to help.  One spoke about the joy of tinkering with machines and mathematics, and how good he was at it. One spoke about the opportunities and risks of living between two powerful, neighbors contending with each other, and was sanguine about the possibilities of Pacific peace. One, via video, recounted the background of his world-changing decisions. One just said congratulations and goodbye.

One spoke about the heuristics he uses to make judgments about the world's affairs and prospects, interspersed with comments on pressing current issues and examples of bright ideas being generated to address them. Rambling but structured, his speech was a stroll through the mind of a very intelligent, highly knowledgeable person. His seemingly casual manner made me, one of an audience of thousands, feel personally taken into his confidence. He gave me enough to think about that I felt that in conversation I could reply intelligently, and privately continue to think interestingly.

Another spoke about his life experiences learning to understand other people, other situation and challenges. He nailed the idea that had been floating around all day: the process, the moment, of actual learning what's going on and how to respond effectively, authentically, with kindness and understanding to each other. Almost a sermon, his speech ended on a note that articulated for me the essential challenge of  'education,' of my education as a human being.


All the rest of the event seemed full of self-congratulation and chat between far-flung workers brought together for the occasion. There were also dinners and dances which I didn't care to attend.

'Education' can be a platitude but you two brought home to me what it looks like to be educated, as well as the moral imperative to be educated. The slogan word took on intriguing and impressive overtones However far the anniverserand makes good on it, I felt myself clearer-headed on the subject, and motivated, to boot. A good day.

Wimp

Slender, in windproof shell and running tights and knit cap, looking the age I want to feel, the guy was loping through the roadside glop this morning, and I envied him.

This latest bout of 'whatever it is that's going around that makes us feel like roadkill' plus the recent pattern of snow storms every 3 or 4 days have conspired to put my running on hold. Yet I'm missing my miles.

I was a tad nervous this morning about driving in to work, seeing that snow of some significance may be falling when I finish my evening classes. But there he was, unfazed, carrying on with his training program (the Marathon in April?) making me feel wimpy.

Okay, I hate running with wet cold feet, and I saw enough other people slip-sliding on under-cleared or slushy sidewalks to know that I could feel uncomfortable if I went out, and I might very well fall--the very last thing I want. But these sound like excuses for hedonistic reluctance. but you whom I saw this morning made no use of them.

Still what's the point of bravado? What am I trying to prove and to whom? That I'm tougher than the weather, tougher yet on myself? Still I admired the self-contained you whom I saw just hustled ahead. It could have been me but wasn't.

The final point is how well I feel after running. It's an exercise, not an exhibition., not a test of willpower.

Since then, I've had an emergency and had to run to get a train. Anxious about time, I nonetheless appreciated the cold dry air, the crisp snow underfoot, my lungs and legs in motion. Ahhh. I'm right behind you, fella.

Carrying on

Monday morning, in the middle of the most recent storm, travel to work was quick and uncomplicated. Wednesday, after the T is back in service again, the very opposite. The streets are filled with traffic, and transit police are monitoring the road approaches to each station.

The trains are full, overfull, crammed. At the Ruggles station, a cry came from down the car, 'Help me,' and a collapsed woman had to be dragged out onto the platform. 'Call the driver,' shouted one person. 'Call 911,' said another, and 'I'm doing that now,' said a third. 'A seizure, ' explained someone; 'Yes, a seizure,' agreed some others 'I'm a nurse,' said a woman pushing through from way down at the other end of the train to join the group on the platform clustered around the prone woman, who gradually got up and made her way back onto the train and into a seat vacated for her. A few minutes and the train moved again.

At Back Bay, a high spirited black man called out to passengers trying to get on: 'Nobody's getting off, so there's no room for you.' 'That's my job,' said the T person on the platform with the day glow green vest. 'You can't tell people what to do.' 'I'm just saying...' said the man with a laugh. 'Just don't interfere with my work,' as she then bawled for the doors to close and the train to go.

So it was going in, and later coming home. Stoically grim or slaphappy, bundled up in our black jackets and overcoats, we, my fellow commuters and I, endure the jamming together, the delays and inexplicable reschedules, the cold platforms, the heart-breaking 'Please find alternative transportation,' the disappointments just getting to work, then later, at last, home.

As I slogged from the bus stop down Mt. Hope Street along the trenched sidewalks, happy that bullets weren't whizzing over the parapets of snow, that mashed body parts weren't underfoot, that in fact the walkways are being kept cleaner by abutting homeowners than ever before, I thought, as perhaps many of you do, 'Come what may (and more snow and frigid temps are in the offing), we're still here, still going ahead.

Vocab

This artifact, the English word,
Logically formed, but sometimes absurd,
One way written, another heard:
Why is my imagination stirred?

Vocabulary, he was saying, was the core of his problem. He couldn't remember words for a more than a short while, then he'd have to commit them to memory again. They don't make sense, he explained, and I can't remember things like that.

Sense? When has that been requisite for memory? What arbitrary moments or facts picked up at random from the bookstalls of our experience lurk in the library of our memory, ready to work their way out and fall on our heads unexpectedly as we pass.

But okay, I'll give you sense. There's the systems of cognates: reduce, produce, conduce...; the system of synonyms: extend, lengthen, elongate, prolong, protract; the Latin/German duplications: freedom and liberty, and the system of ancient lineage: whir and worry; in addition to words associated with stories attached to people: boycott, lynch, and historical events:waterloo. There are the words cavalierly chosen for their sound and aburdity: google, quark. Shorn words: shrooms, and compound words: onepercenter. We can look sort the many words of English into a typesetters tray of different categories, each of which has a sense and a non.

Like Terry Tempest Williams writing on the geographical term, nose: 'Like the mouth of a stream, finger lakes, an arm of the sea, the crotch of a rock, the brow of a ridge, rock nipples, elbow canyons, a neck of land, and les grands tetons of Wyoming, another reminder of how we see ourselves in the places we inhabit.'

How would you like your words served? Braised, baked, blended, battered, brisketed, broiled or burned?

But then, you with a shy smile started to share with me some of the layers of intricacy in which even simple syllable words like he can be embedded. One word, one sound and thirty meanings; same word, different sound, innumerable more. Then words in combinations, both phonetic and graphic. And many of these words with famous associations: love affairs, wise emperors...

I'm not learning Chinese as you are English (more sorrow mine), but clearly we revel in our word hoards. Rather than making too little sense, there are too many ways words work. Nothing that humans use is ever simple; we are incessant multipliers of complexity, impellers of implication. Perhaps, to love words is to love mankind.

Thrilled

The 6:30 bus was crowded with people happy to be near home before the T shut down completely at 7 for the next 36 hours just to cope with the amount of snow we'd had that day on top of all that had fallen before. Hanging on a strap I read a poster advertising a local start-up church quoting Augustine: 'To fall in love with God is the greatest romance; to seek him the greatest adventure; to find him, the greatest human achievement.'

I'd just spent much of the previous hour waiting on a chilly platform with a horde of other commuters waiting for sense in the system, and meanwhile amusing myself finishing Peter Watson's just published The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God. 

It reviews the heroic and honest intellectual efforts of those from Nietzsche to today who can't or haven't been able in all conscience to conceive or concede a deity like you, God-in-love. What a cast of characters whose thoughts are pretty fairly portrayed: artists, poets, dancers, theologians and philosophers, scientists: Freud, Yeats, Shaw, Chekov, Signac, Gide, James, Proust, Valery, Kandinsky, Heidegger, Joyce, Wittgenstein...on and on up to Rorty, Dworkin, Dawkins and Dennett, atheists all.

It's a history of the bright people of the twentieth century, including atheist militancies from Stefan George and the Soviets to the new atheists of the moment, as well as those more disappointed and wistful, who have faced up to the non-existence of a transcendent deity, and sought to concoct recipes for worthwhile life given that absence. Perhaps some have believed but not in a literally living god and so have produced arguments for living the meaninful lives independent of reference to you. One is led to think that none among the luminaries of the last 150 years ever prayed.

Confronting such a cloud of witnesses, many of whom I sincerely admire, I'm in an awkward position. Believing in you, God-in-love, makes me somehow pitiably pusillanimous, if not laughably deluded, or at least dishonest, like a con artist foisting some self-serving scheme on a credulous population, but not certainly an intelligent, open-minded person truly thrilled by Augustine's assertion.


All the fanaticisms, the unanswered prayers, the absent evidence, the history of coercive power structures and doctrines, the imperfection and hypocrisy of believers, the ridiculous arguments all create the perfect modern storm of outrage and scorn at the center of which, as in any good storm, is emptiness, nothing worth acknowledging, at least nothing like you.

And yet you seem to me a real presence, sometimes directly, usually indirectly, known. I don't feel I am or have to park my mind or my morals to engage with you. I welcome your unforced companionship.

Belief such as I have in you, God-in-love, is equated with a kind of ignorance, perhaps willful, and certainly the very opposite of  knowledge. It's as if I when I know something, I stop believing it, and when I believe something, I really don't know it adequately. Put another way, when I feel the bottom, I stop treading water and if I'm still treading water, it's because I'm afraid to put down my feet. It seems to me more that knowledge is a kind of belief (in say systems of verification) more than belief is a kind of ignorance (an absence of or falsification of experience.)

I learned a lot from the book, covering a lot a territory in just a few hundred pages. (Did you really have to be so dismissive of A.N Whitehead?) Particularly well presented was the argument, made by great writers like Robert Musil and Cesar Milosz, for the essential contribution of poetry which 'explores the world piecemeal, detail by detail, as the poet finds a form of words--what Heaney calls the 'jurisdiction of achieved form' (itself a pleasure)--that marries observation and emotion in an intuitive order that can be had in no other way, in which there is as much feeling as understanding.'

'If there is one thing that the thinkers discussed in this book are agreed upon it is that there is no one overbearing benchmark by which the world may be judged, so let us relish that truth, not continually try to deny it. Observation of the world can be heroic. That is what the people in this book have taught us. Observation can be liberating, enlarging--that is what we thank them for.'  Yes, yes, yes.

Toward the end, Watson considers all that has been established in this long search across the century:

'The central role of ethics and morals leads us to divide life into three realms: the realm of science, which most of us can't escape and which has brought us so many advances, technological, intellectual and in terms of expanding understanding; the phenomenological world , the world of Sartre's petites heureuses, of art and poetry, the world of small, patient, non-competitive entityhood, which is its own form of understanding and so complements science. And the world of desire.'

'In this one sense (relationships), then, modern life is impoverished, is harder for us to find meaning within. Religious people might claim that they experience an enduring love for their church, or their God, but can a church or a God reciprocate like a wife, a husband or a partner? Is reciprocity not the essence, the pleasure of desire, the heart of its desirability? Is there anything more consoling, satisfying, fulfilling than to be desired and to go on being desired?' Watson arguing here, I think, for the value of wider, deeper human community. Yes, and again yes.

Can you, God-in-love, rub my back that way my wife can? Can I listen to you lecture the way I can Richard Feynman? Can you stare me in the face like the possum my friend told me about that she caught hanging in her closet when she was a girl? No, but you're not absent from any of those encounters. And you're in love, with what includes me and us. And the very providingness of the universe, and beyondness that draws both of us is also you. I should feel like a fool, but instead I feel blessed.

Skype night

Sunday evening skyping with you: what a joy! Your parents, my daughter and son-in-law provide the context and the commentary, but just watching and listening to you is what charges your grandparents. Two and half years old, with long blonde pageboy cut, you're not a baby or a toddler or any kind of infant any longer but a boy, at least, proto-boy, with the facial expressions, the physical exuberance, the love of words, the eagerness for games, the readiness to try anything.

You with your shovel outside helping dad clean the driveway, or moving chairs to get the sink to wash dishes or, hold on now, the stove to cook 'trees' (broccoli): nothing is too mundane to model.

Libraries and books, kids games, farm animals, childrens' museums, a wide assortment of broadening experiences is your everyday diet. Eager to learn, the inbound traffic is incessant, and the outbound is what we see on Sunday evening: things to say, things to show, things to want.

Another on the way, you'll not be alone, but you'll always be special. I keep thinking of all the things that you can learn than I can teach, and the many more that I can learn along with you, and that number more which far beyond my capability.  I think of all the adventures of derring-do that await you, the adventures of perception, the adventures of relationship. I think of all that will touch you deeply and tantalize you, and of the indignations that will move you to action. I think of those who will depend on you and how staunch you will find yourself being. All the poems you will sing to yourself and others. These stories are to be told in days to come, but they are part of the broad realm of your inheritance.

Still, Wigglewort, you've got lots of things to learn, and time. Don't go too fast for me to not recognize you next weekend.

Initative or provocation

Product or extraction?  Confronted with the Not Us, do we see something to which we can offer, or that which requires something from us. Whichever, what I do, say or make will represent who I am.

So as I write, read and look out the window at the snow, again, and others shoveling, blowing, busy coping with slow-mo storm Marcus, I 'm thinking of the snowmen I haven't made, the extra parking spaces I haven't cleared, the skiiing or snow shoeing I haven't engaged in, much less the snow since last night that I haven't cleared away from my cars.

Instead, I've been content to look out at the white on white on white getting whiter with the down-slanting of wisps of white from clouds that look grey with their burden of whiteness.  Oh winter, for these last two weeks, you've played with us as with a shuttlecock. In the midst our various maladies, a Super Bowl victory parade and head-down slogging forward. You take no notice of us (except insofar as our greenhouse gas emissions triggered you) but we have to take into account who you are. We are acting, asserting and arranging, especially mounds of, mountains of snow, revealing who we are. Stoic as the Emperor Aurelius himself in mien, we see snow, we shovel it.

Juno, Linus, Marcus: I'm glad we name you storms now. Anonymous atmospheric disturbances we used to just endure, now we encounter. You extract exertion from me but I, we, give you Olympian or imperial dignities.

There have been killer storms, dyke busters, coast-drowners, house-exploders, tree-topplers, violently raging, toothed. They've taken the lives of thousands, refugeed tens of thousands, broken the backs social and ecological systems. There may be more of these ahead. God help us.

Still, I'll enjoy your relative benignity, Marcus. Head out and move some generic material, wait to see what you do tonight, respond tomorrow, et cetera.

All, not some

Everything for drivers, nothing for pedestrians. That's the way it is after snow storms such as we've had. The streets are clear and soon dry, the parking lots are emptied and snow piled in mountains next to the main roads, the sidewalks right in front of the stores: 'clean as a whistle' as my friend Yori says.

But if you're on foot, or with a baby carriage or shopping cart, or with a cane, or a a walker (forget a wheelchair), you get to walk out on the street because the sidewalks are not shoveled at all, or if shoveled, only in the form of a lumpy narrow track (certainly not the required 42 inches), and tracks sometimes dead end where the next property owner has failed to shovel. Then it's backtrack or stumble over a wall of snow out onto the roadway.

What about bus stops? What indeed?  'I saw one old woman standing in the road right at the exit from the shopping center, cars whizzing around the corner as they do to get on or off American Legion Highway. Her bus stop was completely snowed in. If she were at the bus stop, she couldn't get to the street over the snow. So she had to hope the bus didn't run her down. It makes me furious.'

His eyes flash as he recounts all this in my living room this afternoon, our first chance to get together in over a week. 'It's the responsibility of the property owners,' he says, 'not the city, no matter what they say. They have their parking lots clean just hours after the storm is over, but not the sidewalks, even days later. They just don't care.'

He's reported violations and some tickets have been issued. He's sat down with city inspectors. He's taken pictures. He's called managers, and had a area police official call managers. He's gone up hierarchies as far as they'll let him. He's kept a log of all his contacts. But behavior hasn't changed, or if it has, only grudgingly and temporarily.

'It's not that hard,' he notes. 'The property owners just have to hire a sidewalk cleaning service as they do a parking lot plowing service, but they don't.'

You have gotten some results,Yori. I remember walking home from dropping off my car for new tires, and finding two flush-faced young men tunneling through a small mountain at the corner of Mt Hope St, in front of the company owned ultimately by an oil company notorious for its environmental insensitivity. You got a canyon but with a trail going through it.

I'm in awe of your relentless, righteous rage. You've put in hours of work already this winter, forgetting what you did last year. This isn't your problem (except when you risk your life trying to take pictures of it) but you feel it's part of Boston making provision for all its residents, not just some. You may be quiet but your voice is full of power. I know it's exhausting for you, but it's inspiring for me.

You got me to sign onto the city website and make a complaint. Okay, scofflaws, we're on the look out.

Too soon

Despite some irregular fits of hacking cough and noisy snufflings, I feel so much better, so much more energetic today, that the Peter of a week ago seem like someone else altogether. The mid-onset Peter had such a narrow focus. I was happy at this time of day to stumble home and sprawl semi-comatose on the arm chair with feet up and a blanket pulled up to my chin, arms crossed tightly on my chest, slipping again and again down the slope of unconsciousness. (Bless caregivers, in my case, my wife, at such times.)

My mind,when aware of anything, was confused, dazzled by light and action, and fixated on definite goals: upstairs, bed, blotto. Even later as I recovered, thinking was like a house with single bulb. To read in a different room, unscrew the bulb and take it with you there. Some mental activity took place but much of it consisted of just shoveling out conceptual cave-ins. Interest in drawing? Forget it.

Blue sky thinking, sweeping, broad, spontaneous, with horizons throbbing with distant implication, has finally come back. So how does the more and more cocky Peter of today view the abject Peter of before: someone truncated, crippled, rehearsing the gratitudes of simple survival, committed only to indominability, hearing in his mind's year over and over themes from Tales of Hoffmann?  Am I Kleinzach, with his click-clack, click-clack?

Be generous, Peter, to that ridiculoso. After all, he did manage to painstakingly cobble together the strategies that led to a successful launch of his new evening class, something he'd been wrestling with before the onslaught. He in fact prevailed, something you don't always, in your mental effervescence, don't always attain to. And don't forget the snow he's managed to shift.

In fact, now that the sun is down and the lights are artificial, I'm feeling my head fill with vapors and my skin shiver with chills. Don't laugh too soon.

Cut and burn

For a moment this afternoon as I sat in the dermatologist's office, my head felt as if it were outside and uncovered in the midst of one of our recent pelting storms. Pinpoint needles of terrible cold plunged into my scalp here, now there, now on my forehead, now at my temple. Once over, pause, then a second time. The skin gloving my skull throbbed with the raw liquid nitrogen experience.

'That should do it,' the doctor said smiling. 'They'll blister, then scab, then fall off, taking the problematic skin with it, but I'm afraid they'll be others.'

This skin, this envelope, my biologic alternative to 'paper or plastic' for keeping my guts from spilling out on the sidewalk, has a tendency to develop these crusty, or bleedy areas, and I'd gone to see about one. I had one on my arm which was removed quickly with equally quick recovery. I had another on my nose requiring 'pulling this from here to fill in that removed from there' which left my face black and blue and my nose bulbous for over a week, but finally resulted in a nose not much different than before--a pretty good trick, I think. 

So today was to confront something just above my collar bone. He sliced it away and sent it for biopsy and later, I guess, it'll be time to neatly trim the edges of the wound and sew me up.

Why, oh why, do you continue to do this, you skin cells? Am I not looking out for all of us, and you too? Don't I wash you, and soothe you, and clothe you, and... Okay, I don't use sunscreen but I do wear hats, and seldom do I expose my collar bone. Aren't we working together?

Even who I am divides into I and You with aims and agendas some consonant and some dissonant. Singularity is always multitudinous, in my experience. Justus Buchler's Ordinal Metaphysics says it all: everything that can be discriminated is a complex which is at once comprised of a variety of traits and is constituent trait to a number of other complexes.

You lowly squamous cells are sophisticated in the complexity of your own functions and structures. Still, it's disquieting to think of as many patches of incipient rebellion active at one time as the doctor said were there. Does nobody love me? Am I Lear wondering if there are any left who remember who the king once was?

 I'm just now emerging from war over my airways: just whose lungs are these anyway? The tenacity of the enemy is like glue. Do I have to be reminded of other areas chronically in revolt? As a walking shell of fly-away bacteria, perhaps it's just good sense to own up to the obvious.

Still, skin, baggy, saggy, wrinkled and crinkled as you are, I appreciate you even if though you periodically hint at prospective orgies of hyper-fecundity, getting almost ready to do something. Don't try, though; or I'll cut and burn; see if I don't.. 

Medic

When I went for an annual checkup--at the urging of my wife--I took pride in being a picture of beaming health, an example of what people could and should be like. Doctors were for those who wouldn't.

The old exalted view of the doctors, august and omniscient, is long gone. We know them to be people like ourselves, knowledgeable, though we are able to confront them with alternative diagnoses and treatment we've found online.

This most recent bout of illness convinces me, though that fitness itself is no charm against a persistent microbe, such as has lodged in my lungs. All my miles are rendered moot. What good fitness on the periphery, arms and legs, when the core is vulnerable?

My doctor is from the Phillipines, very affable, always bustling around his clinic, in and out of waiting rooms, but taking time to listen when I describe my symptoms. Okay, so some of the things I've been to see him about recently were not emergencies, were self-correcting; still I'm a little nonplussed when he doesn't get excited about my problems as I do. No grand maladies,  no exotic diseases, just what loss his patents get. He sure I'm happy to know that nothing is out of the ordinary.

And treatments? Well, sometimes a prescription, sometimes some simple advice most of which comes down to: wait, it will get better. I think, 'Does this guy keep up with the latest advances in...?' but then, by gosh, I do get better. He's a less-is-more kind of guy. I haven't seen him handle an emergency or a real conundrum, so I stand to be corrected.

One's physician is supposed to be a confidante, a holder of deep personal secrets, privy counselor to one's corporal realm, but my doctor seems more interested in keeping me from taking myself too seriously. After all, he's a busy guy with lots of patients whose health concerns seem to them center-of-the-world issues. Perhaps he's practiced in talking us all down to the rather mundane ailments and treatments that really afflict us.

Still, this stuffed and greasy nose, this bird perpetually flapping in my chest ready to caw out raw cough, this weakness of voice and wooziness of head, and for a weak now, and yes, better, but not enough and certainly not quick enough, doesn't this deserve a name, a distinguished name, even a eyebrow-raising name, and some commiseration, and a prompt full counter-attack using all resources.

Instead, you give me a course of antibiotic pills, advice to rest and an invite back if nothing changes in a week or so. I hope this tantruming-monster inside me is impressed because I'm underwhelmed. But you're probably right. Time, and the right stuff, is on my side.

Who knows?  Maybe you're a William Carlos Williams at night or on your house calls (if your make any, which I doubt). 'There is a woman in our town...' the New Jersey poet-doctor wrote in one passage that ended, 'if ever I see you again, as daily I have sought you without success, I'll speak to you, alas too late!'

I don't sense that urgency in you, Herr Dr, but it's okay to confirm again that things are still going on as they should, a miracle yes but a standard one. Let these kinds of visits extend long into the future.

Oops

A moment from a nightmare evening: bumper to bumper traffic on a snow-clogged Cambridge street. Already I'd been an hour and a half in transit, dodging from street to street to get free of traffic.

I'd been changing the CD in my car player when I realized I'd bumped into the car ahead, an SUV.

There was another car waiting to pass the other way, but the driver of the SUV took his time to open his door and walk to the back of his vehicle to see any damage. (None.)

I got out off my car and stood up and faced him. Already the evening reeked of impending disaster. I was late, woefully underperformed for classes waiting for me.  Why not this?

'So we're in bumper to bumper traffic, what happened?' this middle-aged burly man demanded.

'Well...I'm waiting for an answer,' he insisted, as I looked around at the car-packed, snow-canyoned illuminated street. 'I guess I wasn't paying attention,' I said meekly.

'Well, be more careful,' he said and got back into his vehicle and moved ahead slowly. I followed.

And the evening wasn't a complete fiasco, either 

Black on white

Storm Linus is spraying another foot or so of on top of the two feet we already have. Snow on snow.

Every so often plows go by in pairs, heaping the snow against the sides, making the city's snow problem into my snow problem, but afterwards it's silence again. White on white without shadow, so the channels, grooves, paths and passages painstakingly excavated after the last storm are now invisible, their edges and heaps smoothed into undulating contours, near and far are indistinguishable. Where is anything?

The birds, flock of black starlings, are active however. I see them in the vacant lot next door perched on branches and twig, flying from one place to another within the compass of the flock place, then suddenly all streaming at once down the road to a destination unknown (and hard to imagine as better). Black on white, as sharp a contract as possible.

The fast food dispensaries at the foot of the hill are an endless source of stray french fries, muffin bits, scraps of paper smeared with ediblia. Sometimes the little fowl wrangle over this or that scape, chasing each other across the snow yet not sinking in it.

It may be that your thoughts as you sit huddled on your perches, black cloaks pulled tight around you, flakes falling on your gleaming, pebble-like eyes whenever your lids are open, are not 'How much longer do I have to wait?' or 'I should have made other plans,' or 'Please, just make it stop.' Instead, you may experience discomfort (surely you do) with a resignation untainted by resentments, reproaches, rage. Wi.nter is as it is; if a crumb of comfort can be found, fight for it; otherwise submit to the exigencies, wait and watch.

It's slim pickings for you here, but you are opportunists of the first water; you've survived other winters. Blow the wind as it may, you sweep here and there on your little quests, until as night falls, you huddle under the boughs of some tree like the Scotch pine in my back yard, and hope for morning.

In the lurch

Not that it was bitterly cold, though it was, or windy,  which would have meant a challenge as we navigated your king-size mattress into the truck, nor that the streets were so constricted with snow that you'd already got the truck stuck once, nor that we'd tickets to see the MetHD broadcast at one, meaning we'd have to be there at noon to get seats so I wouldn't want to be toiling through Somerville streets at noon, no, for none of these reasons was I not able to help you move as I'd promised,  but rather that I was still sick, felt lousy, and couldn't imagine engaging in any kind of exertion.

I left you in the lurch,  I know,  but I simply couldn't do anything else. Messages with suggestions winged your way,  but you had to swallow the disappointing change of plans,  and find another way forward, by your own admission, not your strong suit.

The last you'dd said was that you'd maybe call a friend. I went to the theater feeling guilty apprehension. In early afternoon,  a message came that things were going well. My dread went into abeyance.

No news through the evening,  until we got an end-of-your-tether call about of we had a parking space for a loaded pickup truck overnight.  No,  absolutely not,  but wait, don't hang up,  maybe we can arrange something down the street.

You looked beat when you finally came in and sat down, saying very little before you went up to bed.

In the morning,  you were on your way early and in good spirits, while I still slept. Ah,  the resilience of youth and the resourcefulness evoked by circumstances.

A difficult situation but you pulled it off. I'm proud of you.