"The loss of normalcy; the fear of economic toll; the loss of connection. This is hitting us and we’re grieving. Collectively. We are not used to this kind of collective grief in the air."I am also thinking of one of my long - time, tried and true poetic standbys, "The Nose Poem," in which poet Lee Perron highlights the significance of plans:
"your mate dies, or parentsPlans, glorious plans! Remember Adela Quested (from E. M. Forster's A Passage to India)? "She loved plans." It's funny how just a couple of weeks ago, we thought our plans were up to us -- whether we went out for lunch or maybe dinner. But no! Turns out we don't get to decide after all.
or one of your other friends
there is nothing fearful in the death
the deadman is not the problem
his letters perhaps
some phrase he spoke that rings every after
the way he died, what the surgeons did to his brain, or kidneys,
or heart
what you & he would have been doing now
next week, all summer long as you always did
the deadman did not die
your plans died
and this is what is so upsetting
this makes us so sick we cannot even think . . . "
[emphasis added]
". . . in this beauty the car stopsContinued thanks to Jim Barnes for teaching me this poem back in 1977; and to Lee Perron for befriending my family back in 2003 after receipt of our fan letter.
the arm reaches for the doorhandle
and there is nothing left to it but the pulling up on the handle...
and one of you looks back through the car window
you may touch one another's lips, or not
it hardly makes any difference, so beautiful is desire"
Passages from "Desire a Sequence" by Lee Perron
Published in The Chariton Review, Fall 1977
Editor, Jim Barnes
A Litany in Time of Plague
alternately entitled:
In Time of Pestilence, 1593
Adieu, farewell, earth's bliss;
This world uncertain is;
Fond are life's lustful joys;
Death proves them all but toys;
None from his darts can fly;
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!
Rich men, trust not in wealth,
Gold cannot buy you health;
Physic himself must fade.
All things to end are made,
The plague full swift goes by;
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!
Beauty is but a flower
Which wrinkles will devour;
Brightness falls from the air;
Queens have died young and fair;
Dust hath closed Helen's eye.
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us! [emphasis added]
Strength stoops unto the grave,
Worms feed on Hector brave;
Swords may not fight with fate,
Earth still holds open her gate.
"Come, come!" the bells do cry.
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!
Wit with his wantonness
Tasteth death's bitterness;
Hell's executioner
Hath no ears for to hear
What vain art can reply.
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!
Haste, therefore, each degree,
To welcome destiny;
Heaven is our heritage,
Earth but a player's stage;
Mount we unto the sky.
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!
Thomas Nashe (1567–1601)
from his play Summer's Last Will and Testament
"[T]he trick is to follow the rules of classic storytelling. Drama is basically about one thing: Somebody wants something, and something or someone is standing in the way of him getting it. What he wants — the money, the girl, the ticket to Philadelphia — doesn't really matter. But whatever it is, the audience has to want it for him."Asked recently by David Marchese, Sorkin re-emphasized:
Marchese: "Your characters often struggle to try to understand people and ideas with which they disagree. What have you learned about how best to dramatize that struggle?"A similar sense of conflict is embedded in music as well. The composer presents intention and obstacle; the listener shares in the struggle as the composition itself yearns for resolution.
Sorkin: "I wouldn’t want to give the impression that I’ve mastered anything, but there are a couple of things I know now that maybe I didn’t know when I was starting. To begin with, I worship at the altar of intention and obstacle. Somebody wants something, and something is standing in their way of getting it. They want the money; they want the girl; they want to get to Philadelphia. Then the obstacle to that has to be formidable, and the tactics they use to overcome that obstacle are what shows us the character."
Back in the day, before Girl Scout Cookie flavors included Coconut Samoas and Peanut Butter Tagalongs, there were
1. Yums Yums,
2. Heyday (Carmel Peanut Logs)
[very similar to Yum Yums)] &
3. Ideal (Chocolate Peanut Bars)
[practically a candy bar]!
What You Missed That Day You
Were Absent from Fourth Grade
Mrs. Nelson explained how to stand still and listen
to the wind, how to find meaning in pumping gas,
how peeling potatoes can be a form of prayer. She took
questions on how not to feel lost in the dark
After lunch she distributed worksheets
that covered ways to remember your grandfather’s
voice. Then the class discussed falling asleep
without feeling you had forgotten to do something else—
something important—and how to believe
the house you wake in is your home. This prompted
Mrs. Nelson to draw a chalkboard diagram detailing
how to chant the Psalms during cigarette breaks,
and how not to squirm for sound when your own thoughts
are all you hear; also, that you have enough.
The English lesson was that I am
is a complete sentence.
And just before the afternoon bell, she made the math equation
look easy. The one that proves that hundreds of questions,
and feeling cold, and all those nights spent looking
for whatever it was you lost, and one person
add up to something.
~ by Brad Aaron Modlin
~ in his book Everyone at This Party Has Two Names
***********
Mike Carrell Always Wore
his pants almost to his neck
and one time virgil phillips sucked
all the ink out of a pen
into his mouth
mrs beavers wouldn't let me
carve in wax in art
cause i told her i could do it real good
i was fibbing at the time
but she said "if you already know how,
we'll let you work in clay"
boy did i ever hate clay
and phil mcdaniels fell down at recess
and cut his bottom
but he was embarrassed to have mrs rogers
look at it or fix it but he was really bleeding
so she let a 6th grader fix it
he was red all day and I don't mean his bottom either
miss crawford told us every day how
smart she was and
how her oboe would fit in her underarm
but we all liked singing better
mrs harod who really road a wagon in the land run
would drink cough syrup right out of the bottle
and by last period
she would sure act silly
once she asked us to learn limericks
for the next day
and ole virgil phillips
learned the dirtiest one
i'd every heard and
mrs harod got choked and nearly
passed on right then
mean old miss habor hit bucky one time
so hard he fell outa his chair
and it was scotty who was talking
mike morris told dirty jokes at recess
ole mike was really popular
i'd laugh and laugh
but i didn't really understand
i wanted to ask somebody but i was afraid
one time there was this word on the sidewalk
and bucky pretended he didn't know it
so i sounded it out
and it was nasty
and everybody laughed
but when mrs matheson
would read to us
about holland
i'd think about holland and
be real happy
and fourth grade sure went fast
~ by Kevin Bales (b. 1952)
~ in the collection Mad, Sad & Glad
~ edited by Stephen Dunning
Guenever was doing some petit point in the gloomy room, which she hated doing. It was for a shield - cover for Arthur, and had the dragon rampant gules. Elaine was only eighteen and it is fairly easy to explain the feelings of a child -- but Guenever was thwenty - two. She had grown to have some of the nature of an individual, stamped on the simple feelings of the child - queen . . .
There is a thing called knowledge of the world, which people do not have until they are middle-aged. It is something which cannot be taught to younger people, because it is not logical and does not obey laws which are constant. It has no rules. Only, in the long years which bring women to the middle of life, a sense of balance develops. You can't teach a baby to walk by explaining the matter to her logically -- she has to learn the strange poise of walking by experience. In some way like that, you cannot teach a young woman to have knowledge of the world. She has to be left to the experience of the years. And then, when she is beginning to hate her used body, she suddenly finds that she can do it. She can go on living -- not by principle, not by deduction, not by knowledge of good and evil, but simply by a peculiar and shifting sense of balance which defies each of these things often. She no longer hopes to live by seeking the truth -- if women ever do hope this -- but continues henceforth under the guidance of a seventh sense. Balance was the sixth sense, which she won when she first learned to walk, and now she has the seventh one -- knowledge of the world.
The slow discovery of the seventh sense, by which both men and women contrive to ride the waves of a world in which there is war, adultery, compromise, fear, stultification and hypocrisy -- this discovery is not a matter for triumph. The baby, perhaps, cries out triumphantly: I have balance! But the seventh sense is recognized without a cry. We only carry on with our famous knowledge of the world, riding the queer waves in a habitual, petrifying way, because we have reached a stage of deadlock in which we can think of nothing else to do.
And at this stage we begin to forget that there ever was a time when we lacked the seventh sense. We begin to forget, as we go stolidly balancing along, that there could have been a time when we were young bodies flaming with the impetus of life. It is hardly consoling to remember such a feeling, and so it deadens in our minds.
But there was a time when each of us stood naked before the world, confronting life as a serious problem with which we were intimately and passionately concerned. There was a time when it was of vital interest to us to find out whether there was a God or not. Obviously the existence or otherwise of a future life must be of the very first importance to somebody who is going to live her present one, because her manner of living it must hinge on the problem. There was a time when Free Love versus Catholic Morality was a question of as much importance to our hot bodies as if a pistol had been clapped to our heads.
Further back, there were times when we wondered with all our souls what the world was, what love was, what we were ourselves.
All these problems and feelings fade away when we get the seventh sense. Middle-aged people can balance between believing in God and breaking all the commandments, without difficulty. The seventh sense, indeed, slowly kills all the other ones, so that at last there is no trouble about the commandments. We cannot see any more, or feel, or hear about them. The bodies which we loved, the truths which we sought, the Gods whom we questioned: we are deaf and blind to them now, safely and automatically balancing along toward the inevitable grave, under the protection of our last sense. "Thank God for the aged", sings the poet:
Thank God for the aged
And for age itself, and illness and the grave.
When we are old and ill, and particularly in the coffin,
It is no trouble to behave.
Guenever was twenty-two as she sat at her petit point and thought of Lancelot. She was not half-way to her coffin, not ill even, and she had only six senses. It is difficult to imagine her.
A chaos of the mind and body -- a time for weeping at sunsets and at the glamour of moonlight -- a confusion and profusion of beliefs and hopes, in God, in Truth, in Love and in Eternity -- an ability to be transported by the beauty of physical objects -- a heart to ache or swell -- a joy so joyful and a sorrow so sorrowful that oceans could lie between them: then, as a counterpoise to these attractive features, outcrops of selfishness indecently exposed -- restlessness or inability to settle down and stop bothering the middle-aged -- pert argument on abstract subjects like Beauty, as if they were of any interest to the middle-aged -- lack of experience as to when truth should be suppressed in deference to the middle-aged -- general effervescence and nuisance and unfittingness to the set patterns of the seventh sense -- these must have been some of Guenever's characteristics at twenty-two, because they are everybody's. But on top of them there were the broad and yet uncertain lines of her personal character -- lines which made her different from the innocent Elaine, lines of less pathos perhaps but more reality, lines of power which made her into the individual Jenny that Lancelot loved.
"Oh, Lancelot," she sang as she stitched at the shield - crown. "Oh, Lance, come back soon. Come back with your crooked smile, or with your own way of walking which shows whether you are angry or puzzled -- come back to tell me that it does not matter whether love is a sin or not. Come back to say that it is enough that I should be Jenny and you should be Lance, whatever may happen to anybody."
The startling thing was that he came. . . .
Clarent (aka Caliburn) = the Sword in the Stone
used in ceremony
designated Arthur as rightful heir of Uthur
Sword of Fire
Excalibur (aka Caliburn) = given by the Lady of the Lake
used in battle
signified Arthur's divine right to rule England
Sword of Ice
Not clear if "Caliburn"
is a second name for Clarent
or a second name for Excalibur
or a third sword altogether.
