Schuyler's Other Flowers - The Iceberg Floats Up

One thing that's always troubled me about reading, reviewing and thinking about poets' collected works, is that by the time these books are published--either toward the end of the poets' lives, or posthumously--we tend to think of these men and women as old. Certainly people do get old, and their poetry may get old, too. But I think it's always important to remember that they were young and energetic and uncertain and hopeful once, that their best work often is the product of their youthful enthusiasm and ambition, and not the guarded, careful summaries of old age. 

 

How it is that publishers seem not to be aware of the whole collected oeuvres of authors whose work they publish, is not clear to me. Perhaps it is a desire to capitalize on the reputation of writers, now dead or soon to be, while their fans are still around to purchase their books. In any case, this pattern of "uncollected works"--which we have seen in the cases of Frank O'Hara, Jack Spicer, and Charles Olson--neglected or "discovered" among the poets' papers after their death(s)--seems a recurrent phenomenon. 

  

Schuyler's Collected Poems was published 17 years ago by Farrar Straus & Giroux. At 429 pages in length, there was no practical reason for readers and lovers of Schuyler's work to think that there might be anything else, except perhaps a handful of scattered "lost works" or rejected drafts. In addition, given the sequence of Schuyler's publications during his life, and the logical progression of his style--moving from a cosmopolitan and casual descriptive style in the 1950's, to an increasingly confessional, extended narrative mode--there was no reason to suspect that there might be lurking a whole phalanx of finished, unpublished poems written in an entirely different and novel manner.                    

   

Like most poets, Schuyler's work began in confusion and diffuseness, and moved towards concision, necessity and wider implication. His first trade collection, Freely Espousing [Doubleday, 1969] was noteworthy for its refreshing, unpretentious, sensually uninhibited, painterly qualities. Slightly camp in its ironies, it offered a conversational tone and a rustic, bumptious spirit--all aspects which placed it squarely within the context of the coterie with which the Author had come to be associated, the First Generation New York School-ers John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara. It was a "late" collection as well, issued when Schuyler was already 45 years old. This was followed by The Crystal Lithium [Random House, 1972]. The advance over the earlier volume (in just three years), was impressive. The title poem, which appeared in the Paris Review, written in a long, Whitmanic style, rhythmic and sharply etched with vivid imagery, was like an epiphany. In three subsequent collections, Hymn to Life [1974], The Morning of the Poem [1980], and A Few Days [1985], he extended his claim on the long, autobiographical narrative poem, with increasingly personal details and candid, flagrant idiomatic turns. 

 

Despite this flowering, Schuyler had given no hint that he was interested in exploring less traditional modes of expression, or that he was willing to risk a marked departure from the stylistic successes of the 1970's and '80's. 

 

Schuyler was an unstable personality, frequently falling victim to delusional, bi-polar episodes which led to institutionalizations, and a regimen of regular psycho-active medication. He dealt with these problems openly in his verse, and it often may have seemed to readers that this instability in his character may actually have facilitated the free-floating associations and intense perceptual impressions which made his work so bright and sharp. This frankness, along with a certain colloquial ease, lent his work a liberated character. His work almost seemed to thrive on jeopardy, and uncertainty.                          

All of which makes the appearance of Other Flowers [Farrar Straus Giroux, 2010] a complete and unmitigated surprise and mystery. James Meetze, the Editor of this collection, explains in his Editors' Notes, that these poems were simply "waiting" to be discovered among the Author's archived papers in the Special Collections of the University of California at San Diego. If it is true that these poems were, in effect, known at the time of the publication of the 1993 Collected Poems, their neglect strikes one as fairly irresponsible. 

 

There is the natural conflict between honoring a dead author's desire to exclude works from publication, which he/she may have felt did not warrant inclusion, and acceding to the reading public's desire to see this rejected material. An author may have left these questions unanswered at death, or it may seem that the value and quality of previously unknown work outweighs any contrary wishes of the now-deceased artist. 

 

In this instance, it isn't clear what Schuyler wanted, since the Editors don't mention any publication issues. It does seem safe to assume, however, at least to a certain degree, that Schuyler's decision not to include these poems in any books during his life, probably means he thought they were either unworthy, in some way, or so unlike the "public" persona he had established, that they simply couldn't be allowed to be seen.    

 

A favorite critical pastime is noting the contradictory tendencies in an author's work, as evidenced by the contrast between intentional, and unintentional, effects or content. This may be made dramatic in cases where the work withheld during life, comes to light after the poet has been laid to rest. What would we be likely to think of Sylvia Plath's work, had we never have known of Ariel? Or, if, given a different sequence of disclosure, it had been withheld from view for an additional decade or more? Schuyler's Other Flowers strikes me as just such a kind of bombshell, not just because of its impressive mass, but because of the eccentric, challenging style in which it is written. 

 

Reading the poems in Other Flowers, I'm struck by their similarity--of voice and subject and occasion--to the work we were familiar with before--but also their difference. It's turned up a notch. There's a greater degree of abstraction and density here.

 

 

Love's Photograph (or Father and Son)

 

Detected little things: a peach-pit

basket watch-chain charm, an ivory

cross wound with ivory ivy, a natural

cross. The Tatoosh Mountains, opaque

crater lakes, a knickerbockered boy

who, drowned, smiles for a seeming ever

on ice-skates on ice-skate-scratched

ice, an enlarged scratched snapshot.

Taken, taken. Mad charges corrupt to

madness their sane nurses. Virginia

creeper, Loose Tooth tanned black snake-

skins, shot crows for crow wings for

a black servant's hat, lapped hot milk,

flung mud in a Bible reader's crotch:

"You shouldn't read the Bible nekkid!"

Family opals, selfishness changes hands.

Tatoosh Mountains, opaque crater lakes,

find me the fish skeleton enclosed in

a fish skeleton (fish ate fish) he had.

 

 

The Editors offer no information about this poem in their Notes, but place it among the earliest ones in the book, contemporary with work written in the early 1950's. The Tatoosh Mountain area is within the Pinchot National Forest in Washington State. In 1946, Martha Hardy, a "lady lookout" ranger, published an account [Tatoosh, New York: Macmillan] of her time there. It seems likely, to me, that Schuyler must have seen this book, given the date, since he never as far as I know traveled there himself. Tatoosh is a Chinook Indian jargon word meaning breast. I have never seen this book, but I suspect it may contain further hints to the details Schuyler mentions in the poem. What most strikes me about it is its profoundly elliptical concision, of physical properties--textures and surfaces, its adamant stuff--which so often constitute the distillate of a Schuyler poem, overwhelm any programmatic argument one might rationally deduce from it. It's almost like Stein in its suppression of sequence and narration; it's all surface and texture and no manners or philosophy.

 

This all comes down to us from Williams and Stevens, of course, this tapestry of physical enumeration and energetic/imagistic dynamism. But Schuyler's poems go beyond that, to a state that makes of his poems sculptural objects: They aren't the performance of a protagonist in a dialectic with an imagined audience, but constructions made out of the raw stuff of sensation. In a sense, they are what they describe. In the poems in Other Flowers, Schuyler carries this tendency a step further than we suspected he had in the work previously published.

 

Schuyler, like Koch and O'Hara, wasn't considered avant garde because of his abstruse language or syntactic exploration(s), but because of his approach to content. But these unpublished poems show us a side of his composition that widens our apprehension of his work, and gives us more than just a glimpse of a newer kind of writing--one more post-avant that we would have given him credit for being.  

 

 

Chantey

  

Now how who won all know

the game's for the tell-

tale teller. The spice isles

gemmed the ocean groin

nicely, hove to view, slack

sailed. "This dressing's 

to be changed: Bite 

the tube." Pain unfurled

like paper. School of schools

Sargassan, eel us home.

 

Vixens blunder the bluffs

pink palms shelving moustache

eyebrows: girls girls girls

us await. Yes, oui, us. 

 

Necessity invented intention,

that without which then

coupling's a loose-lip joiner.

Philosopher's tone, dancer's

prance, sway down the briney.

Tropics. Trance. Pines.

Morgan. Smith. Jones.

The ice-stream phosphor of

sea-beasts, coffin the fathoms.

We abroad no more.

Time shrinks in shell.           

 

 

A chantey, of course, is a song sung by sailors to the rhythm of their movements while working. Schuyler had been in the Navy during the war, in the North Atlantic. But this isn't any old seafarer's ballad. It's a a highly abstract, syntactically adventurous work! "Gemmed the ocean groined...eel us home...vixens blunder the bluffs, pink palms shelving moustache/eyebrows...coupling's a loose-lip joiner...the ice-stream phosphor of sea-beasts, coffin the fathoms...time shrinks in shell." These kinds of constructions push the syntactic envelope far beyond the limits which Schuyler had established for himself in his "public" work in the 1970's or '80's. They are, dare one say, almost like "language" poetry?--in their playful semi-referentiality, their playing loose with meaning (what is this thing talking about?). If you're unconvinced, check this one out--

  

   

Garment

  

Unnerve me sir, trounced to a boneyard

bedded sheer gulley slide side. The raft

drifts nude space placed, ruddering bags

lousing creek creeper skimmers. Simmer

samovar, juicy steam unlooked love put

upon the put upon. You quarried of me

a nickel worth o' ore, O fool: scummed

water flow full, typhic, highway-viewed.

"Be back come dogwood and jay scream."

Go go go go go...

Reel wheels, roads, whipper, our car, a

way away. Strasse us Phoebus abedward,

nourish soft-shoulder flounce of Pennsy,

Mount Joy valley view. Thoughtfully sewn

of corrupt flesh the fair brittle hair,

willow twig dipt, babble toned, you go.   

 

 

"typhic" (in line #8) by the way means spell of sickness or malaise. 

What is immediately apparent, from this and other instances in this book, is that Schuyler's range of expression was much odder and more unusual than we knew. It's possible to see in this the same kind of risible poly-morphic verbalizations which made his "straight" verse so fresh, albeit in a more non-specific setting. Schuyler's imagination was stimulated by the syllabic dance of sound the same way Ashbery had been in his Tennis  Court Oath, though he never was willing to foreground this flavor of his work to the general readership. How would we have thought about him, if he had?

 

I have said elsewhere, and more than once, that any contemporary notion of the completeness of our own awareness is an illusion. Just as 19th Century contemporaries "knew" nothing of Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins in their time, we "knew" nothing about the real James Schuyler--in his particular case, not because he was invisible, but because we knew only half the story. What history unearths are the embarrassing facts we either tended to ignore, or hardly guessed were taking place in our midst. We think we can write our own literary history, but this is a dangerous illusion. We can't predict what posterity is going to make of our time, anymore than we can predict how technology or morality will tend and bend down the road. It's imponderable. In the meantime, we have poems like this--

 

 

Blank Regard

 

Crystal flesh, starry lice,

gilded silver scows, ivory

death-mask fall feathered,

wrists' anemones, eyes' dials,

a viol slashes currant-red

damask love-seats and lapis

spittoons. Riots. Axe's drip

drip, a basket of heads. Of

embassies, of retaliant tunes,

hawkers, harpers, chronicle.

Dusty oxen scamper in hills,

greened, spiked, wheel cut.

Time, bite your tail, hoop

snake the steak-sliced neck.

 

 

(Can't find a definition for "retaliant"--perhaps it's a made-up word?) Unusual weeds keep showing up in the garden, transplants or foreigners or volunteers riding in on the air currents. Who knows what chance may bring? Do you think you know who's writing what these days? Not bloody likely. And even if you do, it's doubtful you'll "understand" what it "means" 50 or 100 years from today.     

 

Early Days: How the Division is Stacking Up

With one-fifth of the season now complete, it's interesting to take stock of the progress of the local heroes, and to estimate their chances for the post-season. Of the six big league divisions, the National League West looks the most competitive--with four teams (San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, and Colorado) all clearly in the running and capable of winning. 

  

As expected the Giants' strength has been their pitching, but surprisingly, Zito has replaced Cain as Mr. Reliable. In the fourth year of his monster seven-year contract, Barry seems finally to be yielding returns on the investment. Relying on greater control of his slider and curve, he's been like a reincarnation of his old Cy Young self. Though it's unlikely he'll continue at this pace (he was 5-0 going into last night's debacle against the Padres) for the rest of the season, if he could anchor the staff with a regular good 7 inning stint every five or six days, it would take an enormous load off the other members of the rotation. Cain, a pitcher with a history of hard-luck, has reverted to his old role, still only 2-1 after six starts. With a team ERA of 3.04, it's hard to imagine this team won't win at least 85 games.

            

 

After a torrid start, Sandoval has cooled way down, experiencing the longest slump of his career so far. The best news is that during this period, the Giants have been winning anyway, largely on the strength of the hitting of Uribe, Rowand, and Schierholtz. Without a genuine slugger on the team, timely hitting and base-running are the key to an effective offense. Most gratifyingly, Bengie Molina has managed to curb his impulsiveness at the plate, is hitting .337 currently, with only 8 strike-outs (!). Most disheartening has been the performance of Mark DeRose, who repaired wrist gave out again this week, which probably will mean the effective end of his season, if he elects to undergo remedial surgery. Huff has done what had been expected of him. Renteria was hitting well before he went down (again), but his replacement Matt Downs has stepped right in his place. If Sandoval can right himself, and the rest of the squad keep up what they've been doing so far, (4.5 runs per game on average--fully a run-and-a-half-greater than the team's ERA), I see no reason why this team couldn't compete with anyone. 

   

On paper, the Giants and the Padres are fairly evenly matched. Aside from Gonzalez, the Pads don't have that much greater punch. Their pitching staff has been performing well over their head(s), and is certain to come back down to earth soon, or at least that's the current wisdom. At their current pace (18-13. .722), the Giants would finish the regular season with 116 wins! If the Giants staff could come in with sesason numbers, for example, like these--

 

Zito                     17-10                  

Lincecum           20-6

Cain                    16-13

Sanchez              15-15

 

I think there's no question they'd either win the division, or run away with the Wild Card slot.

          

From the Gallery of Heroes: Edward Weston - Pioneer

Edward Weston, New Mexico, 1941 (permission copyright The Ernest Knee Photographic Trust

Edward Weston [1888-1958] is undoubtedly the most important "serious" "fine art" photographer of the 20th Century. Not because all his images rank at the highest level, or because his images are the highest expression of their various subject-matter. But because his career begins at the dawn of photography as a serious art-form--as opposed to a mere curiosity or recording device--and he is in many ways the first to exploit the medium with a purely aesthetic strategy. Weston's adventurous spirit, his willingness to go beyond traditional, popular notions of image-making, enabled him to pioneer photographic endeavor, and his place in the history of light-sensitive materials will always be preeminent.          

Since Weston's images are by now so familiar to the art public, and because so much has been written about them, both from an historical and an aesthetic perspective, there isn't much original observation or comment one might make that would shed new light on his career, or its affect on subsequent developments. 

It does seem clear that the technology (silver emulsion light sensitive process) he used is going away, supplanted by digital processes--and is unlikely to be revived or extended, except by a stubborn few. The simplicity and directness of silver halide emulsion manipulation--which was a method he perfected to his purposes--will not be generally available in the future, if at all. 

When Edward Weston began his career as a professional photographer, the medium had been stalled in a painterly conceptualization referred to as "pictorialism"--which derived much of its impetus from late 19th Century movements in the plastic arts--Impressionism, soft focus imagery, the emphasis upon "mood" as against starkly realistic depictions. Even Stieglitz, whose Camera Work promoted new photographic ideas and techniques, began as a "pictorialist" and did not initially see the potentialities of "straight" clear focus photography. 

It's difficult, now, to imagine what it must have felt like to see some of Weston's early daring pictures, for the first time. Abstraction at the level of Pepper #30 [above] might have seemed a familiar enough approach to those who knew of the work of the Surrealist painters. But for those who tended to think of photography as a merely pictorial medium--for taking still portraits, or for documenting architecture, or landscape, or atmospheric phenomena--such formally powerful shapes may have seemed baffling, even absurd.         

I can remember some years back, at an exhibition of Weston's 8x10 contact prints in San Francisco, two young men viewing a nude study. "He sees the human body the same way he sees vegetables," said one fellow to the other. "Yeah, and with the same disinterested objectivity. Ugly, isn't it?" This "objectivity" is precisely the kind of seeing--of a dispassionate appraisal of form--that Weston's vision consists of. 

In many ways, he was the first to see that a photograph could be seen as an expression of the same principles of design which painters had been thinking about for 100 years earlier. The fact that a photographer might "find" his images in nature, or already pre-existing in the world, did not suggest that the ultimate power and visual tensions could not also be expressed in a photograph, as well as they could in a painting.       

The very same principles of light and shadow, density and depth, texture and shape are exploited in image after image. Nudes, dunes, peppers, lettuce, seashells, bark, water, rock. How natural forms are expressed through the lines and masses of their structure, the weave of their growth, tending and constricting, flattening out or scattered across planes, etc.--this was the ostensible "subject" of most of Weston's prints.

This illumination--an epiphany, really--of Weston's visionary exploration of the power of forms in nature, possesses an originality which was almost unique. Between about 1925 and 1950, almost no one else was making pictures in this way.

       

Weston's personal life was as inspired as his art. Following his marriage to Flora May Chandler in 1909, he had a series of affairs with models and apprentices, culminating in his relationship with Charis Wilson, a buxom redhead half his age who shared his life during his most creative period. Throughout his adult life, Weston managed to juggle his relationships with his four sons, sharing alternating custody with their mother. Much has been written about Weston's bohemian life-style, and its probable affects on his artistic choices. Were Weston's sexual adventures an alternative expression of his artistic drive? Did his "open" life-style during his middle years, when he was separated from Flora and restlessly moving from place to place, from woman to woman, liberate him to pursue "forbidden" aspects of the world through his art? It seems likely.        

 

But in the end, none of this matters. What we have are his images, and they demonstrate conclusively that for 25 years, he was the avatar or vanguard of photography as an aesthetic medium. But the fascination we feel at seeing his images has nothing to do, really, with a liberated life-style, or a defiant attitude towards middle-class respectability.    

   

At their best, Weston's images have a kind of centrifugal, hypnotic power which is both the impact of their novelty--that sense of surprise that immediately catches our attention--as well as a strongly balanced overall composition. His images are always powerfully grounded (gravitas)--they rest solidly, and seem to grow out of their bases organically into the outer reaches of the frame. There often seems to be a kind of integrity derived from a struggle which is held in perfect check by the rationality of the mind (eye). This struggle--or tension--may suggest conditions in the maker (or viewer) for which the image is an analogue. But we need to be careful about imputing narrative or programmatic meanings to such analogies.          

Is the image below hot, or cool? Nervous, or relaxed? Sexy, or intimidating? Under the unforgiving light of the desert sun, the capitulating, undulant masses of crystalline sand cascade in waves of retreating instability. Do the regular increments of striation along the bottom submit to the darker, advancing, more erratic masses from the upper left of the frame? Is there a sense of invasiveness, perhaps even of violation, taking place?      Such psychological interpretations may stretch our credulity to its limits. But Weston's images repeatedly suggest such kinds of muscular struggle--a struggle which he usually seems to resolve. Whether this resolution is purely a command of the medium, or the mastery over his own passions and inclinations, is another question.   

Here in Katmandu - An Early Justice Masterpiece

Donald Justice [1925-2002], about whom I've written previously on this blog, was a fine poet as well as an effective teacher. I was privileged to take one of his workshop courses at Iowa in the early 1970's.

 

A native Floridian, Justice always maintained a fine Southern gentleman's bearing, and always brought a subtle, understated quality to his remarks about poetry, whether as praise, or condemnation. Having as deep an interest in music, as he did in poetry--he was trained as a composer as well as a poet, and might well have chosen the first over the second, had he not been so talented in writing--his apprehension of the musical characteristics of verse, in prosody, informed his poems with a craftsmanly finish that was also equally subtle in its translucent simplicity. Deceptively simple, was a phrase that often came to mind in discussions of Justice's verse--as if the ease with which it seemed to lie on the page, and sound to the listener, was a quality one might emulate. 

 

Justice was not the outdoors-y type, scurrying around the world looking for adventure. He was a quiet man, who lived modestly, and privately. The poem I've chosen to talk about, "Here in Katmandu"--though it is ostensibly about the vicissitudes of toil and adventure--is therefore not a celebration of the physical exhilaration of climbing, or the bracing impressions of altitude and the immediacy of strange landscape(s). It is, instead, a poem about desire and unresolved contradiction. 

 

 

Here in Katmandu

 

We have climbed the mountain.  1

There's nothing more to do.  2

It is terrible to come down  3

To the valley  4

Where, amidst many flowers,  5

One thinks of snow.  6

 

As, formerly, amidst snow,  6

Climbing the mountain,  1

One thought of flowers,  5

Tremulous, ruddy with dew,  2

In the valley.  4

One caught their scent coming down.  3

 

It is difficult to adjust, once down,  3

To the absence of snow.  6

Clear days, from the valley,  4

One looks up at the mountain.  1

What else is there to do?  2

Prayer wheels, flowers!  5

 

Let the flowers  5

Fade, the prayer wheels run down.  3

What have these to do  2

With us who have stood atop the snow  6

Atop the mountain,  1

Flags seen from the valley?  4

 

It might be possible to live in the valley,  4

To bury oneself among flowers,  5

If one could forget the mountain,  1

How, never once looking down,  3

Stiff, blinded by snow,  6

One knew what to do.  2

 

Meanwhile it is not easy here in Katmandu,  2

Especially when to the valley  4

That wind which means snow  6

Elsewhere, but here means flowers,  5

Comes down,   3

As soon it must, from the mountain.  1

 

 

Justice liked puzzles and problems--and was not averse to gambling occasionally. This casual interest expressed itself in his poetry as an attraction to solving formal structural design problems. His great facility with words enabled him to write poems which "hid" inside demanding structures, but which themselves didn't wear this gamesmanship on its sleeve. In other words, for Justice, a poem had to succeed on its merits, without falling into the trap of making "finger-exercises" like Hanon or Czerny. 

  

"Here in Katmandu" is an incomplete sestina. Justice's poem employs the classical retrogradatio cruciata but lacks the ultimate tercet. Repeating all six words in the concluding tercet would almost certainly ruin the poem by drawing undo attention to the formal crowdedness of the structure. I have numbered the lines to show the sequence of repetitions which the poem follows. In one instance, the repetition is altered--"do"/"dew"/"Katmandu"--to accommodate sound without using the same word--a deviation which, as much as anything, is experienced as a witty grace-note, instead of a failure of intention.   

  

Despite being a sort of closet formalist, Justice was as apt to be poking fun at formality, as he was advocating its use. Within the overall arc of his career, Justice tended to publish classical, traditional formal models, less and less as time went on. Mastery of one's craft may best be demonstrated when one has gotten beyond the need to tinker with the metaphorical acrostics of game-poems. Formal requirements may serve some poets as a pretext or justification for utterance, allowing them the freedom to speak in a voice that is in some sense a privilege that vers libre does not allow. This permission is similar to the institutional or ceremonial craving that many people feel about highly charged emotional occasions like birth, death, marriage, and religious service. Should a high degree of feeling or conviction move us towards classical form, or towards eccentric informality? It's a question for which there can be no correct answer, since the tendency varies from person to person.             

       

  

Any task which taxes us to an absolute limit develops strict procedures and requirements, rules and guidelines which may mean the difference between survival and death or serious injury. Katmandu is a principle city of Nepal, which contains eight of the world's highest peaks, including Everest. This is, literally, the "roof of the world." Many of these peaks were once thought insurmountable, but they have all been conquered; and Everest has been attained by almost 3000 individuals to date. Mountain climbing can become an obsession, just like any other difficult feat. 

  

The desire for height, its difficulty and challenge, has seduced men since the beginning of time. There are many myths about high altitude, its affect on consciousness and the imagination. The fact is that men are not suited to indefinite existence above about 10,000 feet. Genetic adaptations can allow people to live at such altitudes, but for most people, the thinness of the air (density of oxygen) will cause various kinds of sickness. 

  

    

 

Justice's poem sets up the familiar tension between man's desire for the attainment of such a higher state of being, and the quotidian existence of living in cities. This dichotomy is symbolized by the distinction between flowers, and snow. Living in cities--"It might be possible to live in the valley, /To bury oneself among flowers, /If one could forget the mountain"--is thus a kind of death, a submission to common, unchallenged existence. Whereas, climbing towards a goal, a difficult summit, amidst the struggle, "one knew what to do." The tension between this struggle upwards, the inevitable necessity to come back down to earth, among the comforts and requirements of civilization--and the longing and anxiety we may feel, for the rarified atmosphere of extreme effort and the ecstatic intensity of attaining the summit-- are held in perfect balance in the poem. Reading a poem like this is not unlike looking at a Rube Goldberg machine. Poems may be like devices--small machines made out of words--which "do nothing" except run in place--mere toys of the mind.       

  

      

 

Justice's poem is essentially comic in its implication, and droll in its manner. Up, down. Happy, sad. Lazy, energetic. Snow, flowers. The poem is also like a kind of prayer-wheel, spun round for luck or good energy or sacred protection or to accumulate wisdom. Play it again. It's the riddle of wanting and having, saving and spending, wishing and waiting. 

  

      

 
The best poems are often complete unto themselves. At poem's end, there's nothing left unsaid, or unattended, nothing wasted. Each kind of anxiety--whether for the heights or for static resolution--is perfectly weighted against its opposite. Nepal, where Hinduism is practised by a larger majority of people than in any other nation. In its passivity and stoic acceptance of given conditions, Hinduism strives to resolve the oppositions which pull human nature in conflicting directions. There is not a little of this concept in Justice's poem, though his investment in it is, typically, ironic and non-committal. At the highest plane of awareness, snow and flowers, the heights and the depths, are but the flimsy simulacrums of a deeper reality, of which this mortal world is composed. 

  

Like the strict formality which seems only a pretext for the occasion of a meditation upon a classic riddle, Justice's poem performs a rite of performance, a sort of mantra of resolve. Forms are but the shadows of a higher order, an order which it is not given to us to know. And so we practice these rituals of desire and frustration, forgiveness and grief.   

A new Petite Sirah - Girard

This evening over dinner at Lalime's, we had the better part of a bottle of a Petite Sirah by Girard, which I'd never tasted before. Rated a 93 by the Wine Enthusiast, it warranted a serious try. 

 

I'm not sure when I discovered Petite Sirahs. 35 years ago, when I first began to taste wines, I was strictly a Bordeaux and Pinot man, and occasionally a Burgundy man (when I could afford it).  Over the years, I've strayed far afield, but somehow neglected this fine grape. Some years back, we began to delve into Zinfandels, a wine which California vintners have been doing very well with. These potent wines can be overwhelming. Especially for novices, they can create the impression that wine tasting and appreciation is just a matter intensity and emphasis, whereas someone schooled in European wines generally finds Zins and Sirahs and brash young Cabernets to be harsh and much too forward. 

     
The Girard 2007 has all of the intensity of the best French reds, but it lacks subtlety (in exchange for power). This Girard is sufficient as a meal in itself, or--to put it more succinctly--it is the centerpiece of any repast: The food is more like an accompaniment to the wine, than vice versa. If wine this strong is not your thing, avoid strong Petite Sirahs! 

 

This Girard has almost a burning cherry quality, blueberry skin, chocolate, tobacco, charcoal and graphite accents, with a smooth finish that hangs in the air like frozen smoke. Once it gets a lock on your taste buds, you're sort of ruined for other flavors. I had an Idaho pork prime rib, honey mustard glaze, mustard-fruit chutney, rosemary Tom Thumb carrots, pickled beets, while M had Sonoma quail truffle with Meyer lemon emulsion, grilled radicchio, purple Peruvian potato salad. These straightforward dishes were dominated by the Sirah, as one would expect, and we did much better with the cheese and condiments plate earlier on. 

 

One complaint against the highest rated reds is that they're often too complex and overpowering to be "food" wines, that they're really best in a wine tasting, or just with crackers. Their resulting ratings are in consequence sometimes not to be trusted with respect to their use as accompaniments, or for special occasions. The wine tasting culture has developed almost as a separate tasting segment of the food world. Wine enthusiasts and wine maniacs may consume it as if it were a drug, to be sampled and steeped in, without the distractions of food or ceremony.       

   

The Coppertone Years & The Bathing Beauty - A Summer Cocktail

 

When I was a kid growing up in the 1950's, a tan skin was considered next to godliness. People who tanned easily, people who had a natural tan complexion, were considered lucky. A tan meant you had absorbed lots of healthy vitamin D, sure to be salutary to your health, and it was considered gross to be "fish-belly" white, unable to attain a natural tan without either rubbing dye into your skin, or suffering through a series of sunburns trying to attain one. It was also proof of one's access to leisure. Shut-ins and working stiffs didn't have the opportunity to frolic in the sun; tanning meant vacations, country-clubs, golf, beach time galore.   

 

As a Northern European genetic type, I was naturally quite fair, and was made to suffer through the slings and arrows of outrageous teenaged opprobrium for not looking spiffily tan by early Summer each year. I loathed swimming parties, and envied other classmates whose skin tanned easily. A tan skin was like a proof of one's social acceptance.

 

Tan was sexy.

        

In the intervening decades of course, we were to learn how dangerous tanning is. I can still remember "tanning salons"--maybe a few even still exist--but eventually it was discovered that UV rays--the blue end of the spectrum of panchromatic light--are quite harmful to human skin, especially to those genetic types with less natural melanin (the chemical that makes skin darker). The increase in bad skin cancers of various kinds, and the thinning of the ozone layer around the earth which has exacerbated them, has drastically changed how society thinks about tanning, exposure to sunlight, and how we view the tan look. Tanning--excess exposure to the sun's rays--can cause your skin to age prematurely--unlike the claim in the magazine/billboard ad shown below ("Beautiful tan today. Young looking skin tomorrow.").   

 

I can recall how "tan lines"--paler parts of a tanned body covered up during tanning--were thought somehow to be cute, slightly inconvenient, badges of honor, especially among women. The bathing suit craze, which really got going in the 1960's, with the advent of the bikini, prioritized tanning in a big way. 

  

The "Coppertone years" are thankfully long gone. Today, suntan lotion is rated for degree of blockage of UV rays, and people are much more cautious than they once were about exposure. The fair look, once so despised and reviled, has made a comeback. It's okay to be really white, if that's how you are naturally. Those heavy, dark tans no longer signify health, but instead perhaps an involuntary necessity to be outdoors more than is good for one. Lifeguards sitting in their chairs constantly rubbing themselves with goo. Older people with little bandages on their foreheads after minor surgery to remove moles and neoplasms from their skin. Those hip "Kool-Ray" sunglasses, which made everything look mildly blue, are also long-gone, replaced by brown and orange coated glass which blocks the UV rays from entering the eyes.       

  

  

 

 

As a partially nostalgic tribute to the Coppertone Years, here's a Summer Cocktail, The Bathing Beauty, to celebrate the coming warm season.  

  

  

Recipe (by proportion)

   

5 Parts bourbon

1 part Macadamia Nut Liqueur

1 Part Creme de Cacao

1 Part fresh-squeezed lemon juice

 

  

Stirred nicely and served up. It has a smooth, warm sweetness to it that reminds me of those lovely brown-tinted girls who once seemed so sexy.    

Why Offshore Drilling Is a Big Mistake

As I write this, estimates of the amount of oil which has leaked from the destroyed British Petroleum drilling rig in the Gulf have risen to as much as 2 million gallons. It seems a certainty at this point that this spill, which began when the rig tower exploded on April 20th, will go on to be the worst in U.S. history, dwarfing the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska. Why?

 

   

Because the oil is leaking from the sea floor at a depth of 5000 feet. Available technology for addressing a leak at this depth has not yet been developed. In documents the company submitted in its lease application to drill and pump at this location, it claimed that such a spill was extremely unlikely, and that it was prepared, even so, to address the possibility with state of the art mitigation. Unfortunately, the company knew, as everyone in the industry has always known, that there is no reliable technology to deal efficiently with a catastrophic event such as this one. In other words, though such events may be "unlikely," once they do occur, little can be done to control the spread of crude oil into surrounding ocean. 

  

The company has explained that the only possible mitigation would be to dig a new "side-well" to reduce the pressure from underground, then cap off the leaks. Estimates on the length of time required to do this are in the "90 day" range. What this means in real terms is that the spill will likely progress unimpeded for over three months, spreading as the tide carries it and emanating throughout the Gulf area, covering the fragile tidelands of Louisiana, Alabama and Western Florida, destroying the fishing stocks and eco-systems of the whole region. Though no one in the media has as yet admitted it publicly, this is going to happen and nothing can be done now to prevent it.     

   

What are the implications of this occurrence? What can we learn from the events unfolding? 

 

First, oil companies cannot be trusted to fairly estimate the risks involved in conducting oil mining on our continental shelves. Second, they do not have the resources, or the technical know-how, to deal with a catastrophic event of this magnitude, should it occur. Third, none of the Federal or State agencies has the means to deal with it either. 

  

Humankind tends towards complacency. Even when we know that we cannot really deal with what nature or accident may cause in our immediate environment, we still are capable of "convincing ourselves" that given potential rewards outweigh the "slim chances" of unforeseen consequences. This may not be an entirely stupid approach; optimism and positive thinking are good things when prudently exercised in many trouble-shooting situations, especially when the alternative may seem worse. 

 

But with oil exploration and exploitation, the central driving force is profit. Oil companies have extraordinary political and economic power, and can drive institutional policy much more efficiently than any public interest entity can. It may be that we "want to be convinced" of things that are so profitable, and/or of such apparent immediate benefit as cheap gasoline and heating oil. 

  

But off-shore drilling technology is worse than just a "risky business"; the oil industry has always known that oil spills like this can't be controlled. Now the public too is awakening to this realization. Did the oil industry lie to us about the probable risks, and about their capacity to deal with them? They certainly did. 

  

Did petroleum engineers, including those who work for our government agencies, also lie to the American public about it? They certainly did.

 

Petroleum corporations have been lobbying Congress and the coastal states to grant new exploration and mining leases for sites all along our coasts. Areas which once had been considered too fragile ecologically, have recently been put back on the table for discussion. The Obama Administration has openly advocated a resumption of the leasing process, to allow more offshore drilling. In California, the environmental movement has stymied the petroleum industry for the last few decades, citing potential damage to the Pacific marine ecosystems. Over-exploitation of the fishing resources all along our coast, as well as industrial, commercial, and public agency pollution, has already put these ecosystems in a state of crisis. 

  

Can we trust the petroleum industry, and our government, to protect us from an industrial accident of the kind that has just occurred in the Gulf? Not bloody likely.

          

The lesson here is, whatever the potential benefits of offshore drilling off our Western ocean coasts, we know the technology of mitigation is non-existent. If we were to permit extensive offshore drilling to occur here, we would have no protections in the event of a spill. What are the odds of failure, given the record of environmental damage from "accidents" or "acts of god" such as typhoons or tsunamis or earthquakes? What would be an "acceptable level of risk" to hold industry to? 

 

The Gulf Oil Spill of 2010 will provide the immediate answer to those questions. Mass death to our marine fish stocks. Total devastation to the shoreline ecosystems. Despoliation of our riverine ecosystems. Destruction of the tourist and sport fishing trades. These potential losses are far greater than any temporary, and limited benefit (who but the industry really benefits?) from allowing this development. The Gulf Oil Spill should spell the demise of future off-shore drilling. Will it? Probably not. People are stupid. They will entertain any kind of risk, if they can be lulled into complacency. Industry lobbyists know this. 

  

The future does not look bright for our coastal ecosystems.