Tag: poetry

On Being An Outsider

~ Paul Maher Jr. ~ Leave a comment

And we all can claim this, of being outside the world, always looking in, wanting to be, and feeling at times happy not being, but realizing that this ‘otherness’ is you in the world distinctly lacking.

Of being talked over, trying to get a word into the tumult of the rushing seethe of a room, and nobody is listening.

I have always had the feeling of not belonging, it didn’t matter the setting. And, in not belonging, there was also the feeling of belonging with my self where nobody else wanted to be.

As a boy, the gang had ways of doing things, an understanding and invisible language that somehow eluded me.

I have been passed over and ruled out before I was ever considered in passing. Maybe they thought something was just ‘not right’ with me, and so felt it best to go with the other person. I don’t know. I wonder sometimes…

In a workplace setting, there I am again, sitting at a desk where others pass, without a word or a glance, and in retrospect it doesn’t matter (or maybe it does which is why I am writing this), but I feel this otherness, this isolation is complicit with my state of being, that it was always meant to be.

But I wasn’t completely alone. I was never lonely. I had much contentment with myself. There, alas, in the world of books, the other world opened up and invited me and made feel like I belonged. In there things made sense. People talked my language. Of this I have never disputed.

From books came a new mode of self-expression. I found that I could write with relative ease even though my grades in English classes were relatively dismal. I could not identify grammar particles for the life of me, but I could construct sentences and then paragraphs and, eventually, long spates of prose with relative ease.

With that came an understanding of the world jostled into abstraction, yet somehow making sense in a convoluted way, as if my understanding was drawn from some kind of Utopian yearning that would never mesh with the concrete ‘wants’ and ‘whys’ of the rest of society.

I see the poverty of the world stems from poverty of the mind. I see that there will never be a time when all is resolved like an alg`ebraic equation. There will always be struggle without resolve. There will be voices louder than my own shouting outrage into the whirlwind. I will always, too, not understand, and fight my own struggles, as many as are thrown at me without mercy, wonder how others have the time to do it.

I see daily the world of men, and I feel like I am not one of them though I am among them. I wonder what it is that made them that way, to assume this ‘manliness’ and tout it as superior to all else. These boasts and jostling, posturing and buried aggression. I don’t feel like I belong then even among my gender.

Nor do I feel even that I belong among my race, my species, genus or world order. There is something else unlatched from the mother spaceship of humanity that drifts e into some other orbit.

I don’t know what it is, and perhaps I will never find out. It isn’t my right or duty to find out. It is my duty to just BE.

In being there is no outside or inside. There is no rightful place. I write and conduct the order of my life out of structured consciousness that is neither inclusive or preclusive of some understanding.

I want to be like all of you, but you do not want to be like all of me. But in all of us, there is a multitude of possibilities.

There is never truly an outside. We’re all outsiders looking in to somewhere else, never feeling that we quite belong, or want to belong.

Or is there even an inside?

Taos Elegy

~ Paul Maher Jr. ~ Leave a comment

Sunrise: Sangre de Cristo Mts.
6:30 a.m.

Clouds like tattered rags
squat as furrowed shaman brows
over heights of lava rock and shale,
bested by Spanish conquest of
Don Fernando, yet eternal still
to endure.

A ragged coyote limps across
a field, turns warily eyeing
down Cam Del Paseo Pueblo Norte,
trotting dust into spirit clouds.

Seraphic cherub sits
on marble tombstone,
chubby chin on palm
brooding over a child’s
collection
of toys:

Matchbox cars, toy soldiers
and a plastic dinosaur.

Daughter: Mercedes E. Avila
1920-1945
sleeps like desert doll beneath
wooden frame of fence pickets.
Gopher holes tunnel
a labyrinthine network
around her,
bonding
the
living
with the dead.

Taos, New Mexico
(April 9, 2016)

The Sons of Anak: Henry David Thoreau and John Brown

~ Paul Maher Jr. ~ Leave a comment

The Sons of Anak

Concord, Massachusetts – Fall 1859

“It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know.”
— Journal, October 4, 1859

On September 5, 1859, Concord was seasonably cool after strong winds (those that pelted the fifty-six-year-old Emerson’s yard with unripe pears),[1] prevailed two days previous. Green urgent sprouts of corn emerged from Concord’s fertile loam and pumpkins, “yellow and yellowing,” blazed the earth creating what Thoreau described as a “genuine New England scene.”[2]

On this day, Thoreau sauntered through the Acton woods searching for a millstone suitable for crushing plumbago into the fine powder he sold to electrotyping firms. (An advertisement in local newspapers of the day states: “PLUMBAGO Prepared EXPRESSLY FOR ELECTROTYPING by JOHN THOREAU, PENCIL MAKER, CONCORD MASS.”) The business was a responsibility inherited (along with the lead mill) solely by Thoreau after the passing of John Sr. in February 1859. Within the first weeks of that year, Thoreau had initiated a period that would begin and end with the presence of death, that of his father and, in December, a distant acquaintance named John Brown.

Read the rest of my new essay on Henry David Thoreau at EMPTY MIRROR.

There’s Nothing Like a Cheap Paperback …

~ Paul Maher Jr. ~ 3 Comments

I believe a cheap paperback of great literature dresses up a book shelf better than overpriced hardcovers and oversized trade paperbacks… I mean just those small ones that fit right in the back of your pocket like it was always meant to be there. There’s plenty I found through my years bought for a nickel or a quarter, or maybe I stole from some flea market table where I didn’t have the dime or quarter, but the title or author drew me to such extremities. I feel guilty about that…

There’s a whole line of Faulkner paperbacks I have with split black spines and mysterious photos of a vanished America that retains the hate and desperation of its people in the American south, of fronds of Spanish Moss and blood soaking in puddles within a rutted wagon wheel path. All the Snopes and Compsons in the world took up a couple of feet on the bookshelf near The Tibetan Book of the Dead and Women In Love.

I have a really aged copy of Kerouac’s The Subterraneans sent to me from Terry Malick. He said he had it as a boy when he worked on a farm where he drove a tractor to harvest wheat. He kept it in the glove box. He told me one December evening in Austin that he “wanted to look cool,” but he never really understood the book at all. A few months back he mailed it to me with a neat inscription.

Cheap dirty paperbacks, the pages pungent of must and experience. If we could lift the prints from the cover, how many murderers and saints have clutched these titles in a search for redemption and resolution?

Maxwell Bodenheim was murdered clutching a copy of Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us, and as he laid there in the Bowery cold water flat, the blood sea of his heart pumped out his life essence to stain his Arrow collar shirt.

Once I rode a trolley to Tijuana from San Diego holding a thick paperback of Steinbeck’s East of Eden. I never have been able to read it the same way again, with the lift of spring flowers wafting through the air imagining the Salinas Valley.

Right here with me is a Vintage paperback of Faulkner’s Flags In the Dust with its front cover photo of a dilapidated home and Weeping Lilac Tree and I remember reading it, the first time reading Faulkner, and being entranced with the language (and this was not even vintage Faulkner in his prime!):

“They drank again. It was high ere, and the air moved with gray coolness. On either hand lay a valley filled with shadow and with ceaseless whip-poor-wills; beyond these valleys the silver earth rolled on into the sky. Across it, sourceless and mournful and far, a dog howled. Before them the lights on the courthouse clock were steadfast and yellow and unwinking in the dissolving distance, but in all other directions the world rolled away in slumbrous ridges, milkily opaline.”

These words turned me on to Faulkner, and at the time, I think it was a little bookstore in a Massachusetts mall, there was a shelf of them, all Vintage books, each equally enigmatic. Light In August had its cover of a window shade with the mysterious yellow light tinging it, and The Sound and the Fury had its little country cemetery awash in sunset blood red sky.

Pocket paperbacks: a dishwasher in Detroit washing pans with a volume of Stephen King jammed in his back pocket; a socialite reading Lolita in the back of a limousine; an old man reading Beckett on a park bench; a sailor reading Jack London’s Call of the Wild; a bored teen reading Naked Lunch. I would defer to a quality paperback of Ulysses over a grand Folio edition. In between its beat-up pulpy pages, a secret pulses like a buried ember in its bed of ashes, waiting to spark into full flame.

As a kid, we went to flea markets spread out over the lot of a drive-in theater, and there was table after table of people with books, many of them remaindered. We knew they were remaindered because they tore the front cover off, thus stripping the book of its character. Dirt cheap, then, wasn’t always better. I was weaned from young adult fiction to Stephen King back then. I distinctly remember finding an almost-newish copy of the Signet edition of Salems Lot with its slick black embossed vampire girl with that one crimson drop of blood seeping out of the corner of her mouth and no title on the cover. A collectible now, it was commonplace then … and I could never pick up the novel again, because that edition kept with it the entire mystique of the little village taken over by everyday vampires. Who could ever forget floating Danny Click in that book?

I’m not one for memory lane type of blogging, but picking up this copy of Carl Jung’s edited collection Man and His Symbols published by Dell flooded me with memories.

What’s your favorite pocket paperback book?

Even the flowers are fucked into being…

~ Paul Maher Jr. ~ Leave a comment

I have started reading D.H. Lawrence, starting with Lady Chatterly’s Lover before turning back to the beginning with The Trespasser, The White Peacock and now, Sons and Lovers.

I anticipated how to meet the challenge of this formidable author. How do I read something that leads toward the truth? What miracle can I tap from this body of work that could benefit me? How can life flow so effortlessly from between two covers? Reading, for me, is the greatest voyage on earth.

How do I break from the torpor of normative thinking that plagues current-day America?

Reading D.H. Lawrence unshackled me from my own conservative bent, an enterprise striving to break free from the constraints of nonfiction writing, and address the embers of creative writing stirring within. To use the words of Lawrence, how do I “fuck the flames into being”? Before, in the throes of my naive shrugging-off of English lit, I held little regard for D.H. Lawrence, until at last I read Lady Chatterly’s Lover and came across the following:

“His body was urgent against her, and she didn’t have the heart anymore to fight…She saw his eyes, tense and brilliant, fierce, not loving. But her will had left her. A strange weight was on her limbs. She was giving way. She was giving up…she had to lie down there under the boughs of the tree, like an animal, while he waited, standing there in his shirt and breeches, watching her with haunted eyes…He too had bared the front part of his body and she felt his naked flesh against her as he came into her. For a moment he was still inside her, turgid there and quivering. Then as he began to move, in the sudden helpless orgasm, there awoke in her new strange thrills rippling inside her. Rippling, rippling, rippling, like a flapping overlapping of soft flames, soft as feathers, running to points of brilliance, exquisite and melting her all molten inside. It was like bells rippling up and up to a culmination. She lay unconscious of the wild little cries she uttered at the last. But it was over too soon, too soon, and she could no longer force her own conclusion with her own activity. This was different, different. She could do nothing. She could no longer harden and grip for her own satisfaction upon him. She could only wait, wait and moan in spirit and she felt him withdrawing, withdrawing and contracting, coming to the terrible moment when he would slip out of her and be gone. Whilst all her womb was open and soft, and softly clamouring, like a sea anenome under the tide, clamoring for him to come in again and make fulfillment for her. She clung to him unconscious in passion, and he never quite slipped from her, and she felt the soft bud of him within her stirring, and strange rhythms flushing up into her with a strange rhythmic growing motion, swelling and swelling til it filled all her cleaving consciousness, and then began again the unspeakable motion that was not really motion, but pure deepening whirlpools of sensation swirling deeper and deeper through all her tissue and consciousness, til she was one perfect concentric fluid of feeling, and she lay there crying in unconscious inarticulate cries.”

Beyond the sexually-charged prose, it is Lawrence’s magical brick-laying of the human condition, that the animal act of fornication is brought to a higher level via poetry. It is elevated by the energy of language. The stirrings of the cloth bed to a higher purpose. This is church-energy hallelujah choruses stirring the masses into quickening resolve to do good against the encroaching evils of the world. Somewhere within is a Jungian dream-language resonating in the bell-towers of consciousness. Who knew the pathos of human desperation had its own language?

In The Trespasser (1912), Helena observes her illicit love Siegmund like the anemones she watches in a Isle of Wight tide pool. Siegmund is a violinist, she is his student. He is married with children. Still, he pursues his passion as determined as he attacks the violin churning out strained exasperated notes at the furthest edge of its extremities of sound. Many readers walk away from the narrative depressed by the sobering bite of the book. But it is no less depressing than our own lives when we break it down into chapters. It is the implications and consequences of adultery. It is the fragility of ego and limitations of compassion. Siegmund returns home from his weekend to find himself no less scorned than before.

Have we in the modern age even made adultery boring? One slide of the finger in Tinder and magically one has a hook-up at will. Lawrence would have bored with such effortless resolve. There’s no poetry in smartphones.

In The Trespasser, a progenitor of sorts to the Lady herself, Lawrence riffs from his source material (a friend’s journal) to explore the capabilities of language:

“The sea was smoking with darkness under half luminous heavens. The stars, one after another, were catching alight. Siegmund perceived first one, and the another one flicker out in the darkness over the sea. He stood perfectly still, watching them. Gradually he remembered how, in the cathedral, the tapers of the choir-stalls would tremble and set steadily to burn, opening the darkness point-after-point with yellow drops of flame, as the acolyte touched them, one by one, delicately with his rod. The night was religious, then, with its proper order of service. Day and night had their ritual, and passed in uncouth worship.”

Such delicate improprieties are forgiven under the auspices of such charged hypnotic prose.

It is time, then, to light the candle anew, and fuck the flame into being.