Category Archives: Writing

Day 171 12/14/13: Visiting Van Gogh’s Mother

by in Art, Los Angeles, Poetry, Writing and tagged , | Leave a comment

Once my brother Sean told me about a painting he “liked to visit” at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. A  Jackson Pollock. I guess it must have been “Number 10,” .  To visit a painting, like Rilke visited Cezanne, means to really spend time with it, and to learn how to see, how to look.

Yesterday I decided that I wanted to go find a painting to have a relationship with. When I say relationship, I don’t mean it like those crazy people I hear about on Howard Stern who declare their deep romantic attachments to Ferris Wheels, bridges, bows and arrows, and a host of very public monuments (if you’d like to learn more about these very “alternative” relationships, you can watch a documentary called “Married to the Eiffel Tower” ).

I just wanted a painting I could visit and study and get to know. The hunt for such a painting would be interesting even if I never found a canvas I could “settle down with.”

The closest museum to me is the sedate and manageable Norton Simon in Pasadena. I don’t mean to make it sound like a nursing home. There are lots of exciting paintings there and a beautiful pond outside. It’s just that if I don’t wear the right shoes to a museum, my feet ache after one hour, and even though the Getty Center has comfortable places to recline in the galleries, it can feel overwhelming.

One of Norton Simon’s most well-known paintings is Van Gogh’s “Portrait of the Artist’s Mother.” I had seen it for the first time last year. It seems like famous pictures are either way smaller in person or monumental in a way that completely alters your conception of them–I felt that way when I saw Rousseau’s paintings for the first time. The Van Gogh picture is fairly small (16 X 12 3/4), but alive and electric as so many of his paintings are, and green—strange sickly green. According to the refreshingly direct wall text:

“By the autumn of 1888, Vincent van Gogh had settled into his Yellow House in Arles, and at the end of October he would welcome Paul Gauguin in what he hoped would become an artist’s collective—a “Studio of the South.” Portraits were on the Dutchman’s mind, as not only had he exchanged self-portraits with Gauguin, Émile Bernard and Charles Laval that same month, but he had also set out to complete a series of family portraits. According to van Gogh’s letters to his brother, Theo, this portrait of their mother was based upon a black-and-white photograph. Of the portrait, the artist wrote, “I am doing a portrait of Mother for myself. I cannot stand the colorless photograph, and I am trying to do one in a harmony of color, as I see her in my memory.” Despite his intent to liven up her visage with his palette, van Gogh created a nearly monochromatic version—in a pallid, unnatural green. Nevertheless, this preeminent figure in the artist’s life sits attentive and proud—a model of middle-class respectability.”

I sat on a bench in front of the picture, feeling annoyed when other patrons crowded around MY painting. When they’d dispersed, I moved in for a closer look. What I love about her green flesh is that while it is so potentially alienating, the color of living death,  the overall impression of the picture is one of presence, as the museum put it: “attentiveness.”

Maybe I could become more alive by meditating on the face of Van Gogh’s mother.

The dark green background and the pale green portrait reminded me of Blake’s poem “The Nurse’s Song” from Songs of Experience:

When the voices of children are heard on the green, 

And whisperings are in the dale, 

The days of my youth rise fresh in my mind, 

My face turns green and pale. 

Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down, 

And the dews of night arise, 

Your spring and your day are wasted in play, 

And your winter and night in disguise. 

Oh the levels of green! The green where the children play, the implied green of youthful inexperience, (light green–light in shade and weight) the pale green of the nurse’s face comes with a certain kind of remembering–a dawning sense of mortality and dread…and I think of Van Gogh telling Theo that he wanted to paint a portrait of his mother in harmony of color, as he saw her in his memory. What is the color of memory? Does it vary depending on the thing remembered? I used to imagine my mother’s past in black and white while the life she led with me unfolded in color.

I decided to see what other paintings were around. Manet’s Ragpicker is impressive dominates an entire room. His pants seem romanticized, (only one tear), but his hands tell the truth. The Ragpicker also avoids eye contact with the viewer.  He seems to peer down some unseen side street, as if assessing a promising, glittering heap of junk.

In her portrait, Madame Manet, the painter’s wife, looked serene, but distracted.

Matisse’s “Nude on a Sofa” possessed the unsettling stare of a murder victim posed as a an artist’s model. But I liked her mismatched nipples and that the hair on one armpit seemed bushy and full, while the other armpit was just growing in.

I also admired the pocket mirror-sized Goya portrait, and Zurbaran’s St. Francis, whose brown robe matched the skull precariously tipped beneath his praying hands. I even saw two paintings featuring female satyrs ( a first for me).

But no picture had the magnetic draw of the kind and glowing Mrs. Van Gogh.

The best plan is probably to find a few pictures (or sculptures or…) in each museum, each piece designed to elicit contemplation or agitation, reverie or possibility and go visit them depending on your mood. Plan a visit. Or show up unannounced. Pick a popular painting and eavesdrop on the conversation it inspires. Make a pilgrimage to the museum on an unlikely day, when the sun is shining and everyone else is playing Frisbee or going to the beach. Sit alone and look at the painting. When you get tired or restless, keep sitting. Push past boredom.  See if the painting dissolves or resolves into something else. Notice what the picture causes you to remember. See what it allows you to forget.

Portrait of the artis's mother

Portrait of the artist’s mother (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Day 164 12/6/13: Taking A Walk in Los Angeles

by in Literature, Los Angeles, Meditation, Shark Conservation, Teaching, Writing | 3 Comments

GreetingsFromLosAngelesNow that my shark class is winding down, now that we’ve discussed the threat of overfishing and the horrors of finning, now that we’ve explicated “The Shark” by Mary Oliver and written about how power pivots on the ability to speak, now that we’ve learned about the wondrous diversity of sharks, their hidden traditions (intrauterine cannibalism) and their supernatural senses, I’ve rounded out the semester with readings about the importance of awareness (David Foster Wallace’s brilliant Kenyon Commencement Address) and action (Derrick Jensen’s Loaded Words: Writing as a Combat Discipline).

I am hoping to plant seeds—something that might take root and grow beyond the boundaries of the classroom. Don’t forget about the natural world. Be present. Get out of yourself. Try to be of service.

I thought I had better follow my own advice and go walking in Los Angeles on an afternoon at the end of the year. The light looked almost stormy streaming from robust clouds, random in its distribution of illumination and shadow.  I decided to walk toward a less-traveled neighborhood, near the newly converted Kadampa Meditation Center where I went to meditate the other night, remembering once how I’d almost rented an apartment near there in an old Spanish building with a ship for a weathervane, hallways full of antiques, and, the landlord revealed with a degree of pride, a ghost.

It’s so interesting that the same street can live multiple lives in the same city—Palmerston, Alexandria, Kenmore—to walk these streets north of Franklin is a different world than their southern extremities. I paused at the Kadampa Center; the formerly Christian church where the burning thorn pierced heart in the stained glass window has been replaced with a lotus flower, and then headed north on Palmerston. I love to look at architecture in Los Angeles. I love the curving, quiet streets where houses can’t make up their minds, yet the incongruities are somehow awkwardly resolved—the Spanish roof sheltering a porch of Corinthian columns. The green shingled house with the curving storybook path. My head felt like a camera that pans, reveals. All I wanted was to walk deeper into a place I did not know, past rambling brick houses with dark Tudor windows whose solemnity is relieved by the reflection of manicured grass.

Climbing a hill, I noticed Christmas lights emitting a steady, secret glow from a blasé hedge while above, on an overhead branch, a Halloween skeleton floated in the breeze—clearly articulated “life-like” skull, skinny mummy arms, and a body that ended abruptly in streaming burlap rags. The arms were wide and fleshless palms open. I’d seen pictures of Jesus in that same attitude of supplication. This skeleton, streaming like a flag in the sudden breeze, naked skull limned with golden light, appeared to be preaching, perhaps to the rosebushes.

I love California, but my early Northeastern life has structured and nurtured my deepest responses to nature. I find myself always drawn to those houses shrouded in tall, green trees because they remind me of the places (once real now memory) that I am afraid to return to, fearing that great undertow of memory will sweep me out to sea. Today I found one such place. The green trees (tall, tall-evergreen and deciduous) seemed less brooding than expectant. When I peered over the curved iron gate, I noticed a half-hidden house. A modest pale green turret with narrow windows, felt monastic, regal and I flashed on the uneven shards of colored glass on the cover of the St. Patrick’s missalette I left on an empty pew a thousand Christmas Eves ago.

But I couldn’t feel sad. I had no need for remembering when everything felt so generous and alive, the trees rising up from the ground dotted with eyeholes, and the sudden blue and white of a house like a bright postcard from Santorini. I thought: Everything keeps changing shape—the streets curve, the houses assume their forms and postures, the tree roots declare themselves busting through the concrete. The memories of all the places that we can never return to, grow like living things in the body, their roofs push at the ribs, their fields unfold, erasing thought.

I kept waiting for the spell to break. Surely all would dissolve into quotidian reality as the light changed.  Yet even as I headed back toward Franklin, past all the apartments and vintage stores turned invisible from being endlessly seen, even as I cursed the errant plastic bag skittering across Vermont Avenue, there by the 7-11, in the rounded nest-shaped bush next to the bus stop, a dozen or more little brown and white birds popped out of the hollows between the branches, all chattering at once, all looking at me. Don’t just survive here, the birds told me sing, sing.

Day 155 11/27/13: Winter Meditation

by in Literature, Loss/Grief, Meditation, Writing and tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

Meditation is a strange thing. It can take you to some surprising places. There are the meditations when I “go deep” like David Lynch talks about in his book on creativity and meditation “Catching the Big Fish.” Then there are the meditations in which I keep thinking, but more in pictures than in words. Still thoughts. Still coming and going. But pictures–fading like slide shows or lingering like living dreams–actual places I can travel to.

I was listening to some music that is supposed to open the heart. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between healing and shutting down. Both involve a certain kind of closing. So tonight I thought I had better think about opening whatever it was in me that might have closed.

As I sat with my eyes shut, listening to this wordless music, head lolling like the helpless subject of an B-movie hypnotist, I began to smell evergreen trees. A very old and specific scent of Christmas branches wrapped in white paper. My sister Janet was sentimental, a record keeper. When we found a particularly beautiful tree, a full, robust tree, she always clipped a branch from it. Sometime in early January, she would put it away with the ornaments wrapped in white paper. The next year we’d find it rust-colored, the emissary from a previous December, a once glorious now sad and ancient thing. I used to think that the branch was an example of Janet’s excess–that her desire to catalogue and organize and preserve every experience from a movie matinée to a play list from a Bruce Springsteen concert was noble, understandable, but often too much. A gilded lilly. But because Janet died before she was 40 years old, I cannot help but think that  she saved things because some part of her might have wordlessly understood that, as Rilke said, she was meant to “disappear early.”

And then from our childhood house I found myself on a little rise above the pasture. I am standing by the water pump. The night is so quiet and cold and the moon has made everything almost a metallic silver. Even the wood of the gate looks somehow like metal. The moon has a wreath of frost around it. And the stars–I can see them all. The sky is cold. It is so quiet in the New Hampshire night that I can hear the horses chewing the hay in the field. I can hear their lips thudding in the dark. I never want to come back to Los Angeles where I never see stars, where it is never so quiet as to allow a person to hear all the many variations on the word “rustle” where it is never so cold that the water freezes in the pump.

I am so confused about time. Was this so long ago? I was there. I remember the cold light. The little hill and the horses. Maybe eight years ago. I stood in the dark on the little rise and I listened to the horses and saw my own breathing. I looked at the stars. And now I am stunned–not so much that it is over–the horses, the house, the fields, the winter nights that I would volunteer to go out to the barn and fetch the buckets and plunge my hand into the deep scented darkness of the grain bin–all of these pleasures, pure pleasures–but that they ever happened at all.

Part of what meditation does is to help us, through silence, merge with something greater. To step out of language and into that infinite, often blissful place. In those meditations that enter the big silence, I  feel transcendent. Free from language, free from identity, free from linear reality.  Sometimes the darkness seems to move, to part, as if I am traveling through it.

Other times meditation  plunges me into some very specific places. Like the little hill above the pasture. Maybe I was meant to see moments like this as more than “a memory,” but a state of being fully alive. Did I not feel a oneness with all things as I stood listening to the hay move and the tails swish and the hooves stamp? Did I not feel complete as I looked at the moon and the frost? Did I not know a wholeness as rich and true as any mystic when I stood upon that worn hill and listenedwinterscenecharl2–my eyes open in the dark.

Day 152 11/24/13:Poetry Mashup #2: Automatic Sea

by in Literature, Poetry, Writing and tagged , | Leave a comment

Today’s creation is a combined effort from “How to Do Automatic Writing” by Edain McCoy & one of those great old volumes (#13, I believe), from the series The Ocean World of Jacques Cousteau entitled “A Sea of Legends.”    (I can’t believe this book is only 85 cents on Amazon. I love the messy early 70s color of the pictures and the illustrations are a nice mixture of Greek antiquities, Medieval woodcuts, modern painting (Paul Klee) and random delights like a photograph from a weird, experimental ballet called Sea Shadow) The automatic writing book is a nice beginner’s guide, and a creative way to bypass the  inner critic or nag one’s spirit guide. I’ve used it once and had a nice conversation (transcribed with my left hand in weird, sprawling ransom note script), with some unknown entity who seemed to have my best interests at heart.

Xeno-escrite: The rare phenomenon of writing in a language unknown to the writer.

Why the deities who live vividly in our minds

cannot be projected onto paper

is uncertain.

Venus could only be produced by the sea,

but the sea had to produce also a being more popular,

more accessible than a goddess.

She appears on the water looking into a mirror

to see if she is closer to becoming a fish.

Allow…energy to flow gently into your writing arm

Some people like to imagine that this is the life-giving energy of a benevolent deity

A soft, dreamy half wake focus.

Pliny wrote that when winter has been severe,

many fish are taken in a state of blindness

& all seas are purified at the full moon.

Asking about the Far Future: Moon phase: Full or early 3rd Quarter

Retrieving Information about the Past: Moon Phase: 3rd or 4th Quarter

Contacting the Dead: Moon Phase: Any

Xeno-glossy: the rare phenomenon of speaking in a language that is unknown to the speaker.

Everything on the earth and in the sky had been listening to the Great Master of Song

and choosing a specific language for itself,

but the fish had been quite helpless.

Never blindly follow any commands but those of your own heart.

The Sirens called for Ulysses, for they had knowledge of the past and future and could give him happiness.

Jonah sank…but as his breath failed,

he began to remember

the blue and shining sky,

the sweet odors of the desert

and the happy dreams of childhood.

Keep practicing until you can go fairly deep at will.

Write your name over and over.

If necessary, write the name of the entity you wish to contact

or write the word WRITE.

When you have received all the communication you want

or if it has stopped of its own volition,

sit in front of a mirror in a darkened room,

repeating the undeciphered tablets

to your reflection.

Day 145 11/17/13: Poetry Mashup: On The Nature of Shark Attacks

by in Poetry, Shark Attack, Shark Behavior, Writing and tagged , , , | 4 Comments

This is a great exercise to defeat writer’s block. Take lines or groups of lines (selected at random or purposefully) from two different texts and combine them in a poem. What’s fun about this is that each text (especially two very different sorts of books) begins speaking in the cadence of the other and correspondences are revealed between music and also subject.

For this poem, I combined lines and whole stanzas/paragraphs from Roman poet/philosopher Lucretius’ imagespoem “On the Nature of Things (circa 1st century B.C.) and a 1975 book by George A. Llano called “Sharks: Attacks on Man.” I loved seeing how these two books spoke to one another—Lucretius discussing the nature of the soul and the body, Llano recounting the sometimes gruesome and terrifying accounts of shark attacks. There’s a tension I found between the fear of death and an attempt to understand the nature of existence thereby extinguishing that universal dread.  Here is a longish excerpt of my “poem”:

All the wounds were full of sand.

The rest of the soul dispersed through all the body

Half moon incisions, leaving the bones exposed

Are we to say that the soul resides complete in each of the pieces?

I dove from the wharf and headed out into the sound.

There was a constant cloud of minnows

Earth, and sea and sky and life in all its forms

From a shark’s point of view all humans must look like dreadful swimmers.

I don’t know if it was a fin or a tail.

I knew it was some kind of fish.

But things are made of atoms; they are stable

until some force comes, hits them hard, and splits them.

I saw the shark throw the woman out of the water and then I saw it grab her again.

I’ve shown that things cannot be made

from nothing, nor, once made, be brought to nothing….

The shark let go disappearing in a cloud of blood.

“Let me die, let me die, I am finished,” she said on the beach.

Words pass through walls and slip past lock and key,

And numbing cold seeps to our very bones.

The reports of men adrift at sea

imitating liquid notes of birds

little by little the men learned

As it was a moonlit night, and during some moments very clear, I was able to observe that strange figures crossed very close to us..until at a given moment I felt they were trying to take away the corpse, pulling it by the feet…I clutched desperately the body of my companion and with him we slid…

For if in death it’s painful to be mauled

and bitten by beasts, why would it be less cruel

to be laid on a pyre and roast in searing flames

or to be put to smother in honey, or grow stiff

with cold atop a slab of icy stone

or be squeezed and crushed beneath a load of earth?

When the body and soul have been divorced

then nothing whatever to us, who shall not be

can happen

Keep close to your companions.

Swim smoothly in retreating.

Keep your eye on the shark.

Day 121 10/24/13: A Poem for Sharktober

by in Poetry, Writing and tagged | 1 Comment

I don’t know how I feel about this poem yet…..what do you think?

Requiem Shark

By Rad Smith

This morning as I gulp five gleaming white
capsules of shark cartilage
to make me strong again, I want
another look at the terrible
eye with its nictitating membrane,
those extravagant fins,
the ampullae of Lorenzini freckling its snout,
all of that huge body on the rippled sand
in turtle grass
with an entourage of neon-blue barjacks,
and a remora wriggling in
and out of its gill-slits.
I even want to touch it again,
and this time not just with my fingertips,
but my palm, loveline and lifeline,
my wrist, the underside of my forearm.
I want to press my cheek against its chaste
astonishing skin smooth as a headstone,
want the touch that feels like a blow,
the summoning touch, the touch
of reckoning, the consummating touch, as well as
the stinging sandblown touch of regret,
the stranger’s touch on the train,
the reproachful touch,
even the last touch of a human
who has lain down with a shark,
the touch I have spent my life so ignorant of,
your touch as you unbutton my shirt,
the searing, unbearable touch.

Source: Poetry (March 2000).

Day 118 10/21/13: Sea Fragments

by in Animal Welfare, Education, Literature, Poetry, Teaching, Writing and tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

School passed in a blur of dangling modifiers, wordy and mixed constructions and about twenty-four recitations of sea poems by Frost, Baudelaire, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore and that time-traveling favorite “Anonymous.” One student recited a poem I had memorized and recited in 1979, John Masefield’s “Sea Fever.” It is amazing to me that I remember even a fragment of a stanza of “Sea Fever,” since I can’t remember what I had for lunch–but certain phrases whip and twist around my head like ghost nets. Simple juxtapositions–“the lonely sea and the sky,” and the hurried feeling (then & now) of “a gray mist on the sea’s face and a gray dawn breaking.”

I could tell which students connected to the specifics (the curve of a shell) or believed, as Marianne Moore believed that the sea is “a grave.”

The language of effective conservation has to include poetry, science and humor. It has to become a lasting and permanent force inside us, not something we dutifully digest and regurgitate in slogans–although I spotted the words MORE BIRTH LESS EARTH spray painted on the side of rusted bridge over the 101 Freeway, about 20 years ago. It’s stuck with me as stubbornly as any poetic fragment.

P.S. I hope it’s true that demand for shark fin has declined 50-70% in China.

John Masefield, Hampstead, January 1st, 1913.

John Masefield, Hampstead, January 1st, 1913. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Day 100 10/3/13: Seal Lullaby

by in Literature, Marine Conservation, Writing and tagged , , , | 1 Comment

I post this Rudyard Kipling poem in honor of my trip to the Marine Mammal Center tomorrow where I will meet some pinnipeds on the mend:

Seal Lullaby

Oh! Hush thee, my baby, the night is behind us,

And black are the waters that sparkled so green.

The moon, o’er the combers, looks downward to find us

At rest in the hollows that rustle between.

Where billow meets billow, there soft be thy pillow;

Ah, weary wee flipperling, curl at thy ease!

The storm shall not wake thee, nor shark overtake thee,

Asleep in the arms of the slow-swinging seas.

Pacific harbor seal in recuperation pool at th...

Pacific harbor seal in recuperation pool at the Marine Mammal Center. Photo Credit: The Marine Mammal Center (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Day 80: 9/13/13: The Way It Is

by in Animal Welfare, Literature, Writing and tagged , | Leave a comment

Once in a while you read the poem that articulates something you’ve been trying to say your entire life. This is one of those poems for me.

Animals & People: The Human Heart in Conflict with Itself 

by Pattiann Rogers

Some of us like to photograph them. Some
of us like to paint pictures of them. Some of us
like to sculpt them and make statues and carvings
of them. Some of us like to compose music
about them and sing about them. And some of us
like to write about them.

like to write about them.Some of us like to go out
and catch them and kill them and eat them. Some
of us like to hunt them and shoot them and eat them.
Some of us like to raise them, care for them and eat
them. Some of us just like to eat them.

them. Some of us just like to eat them.And some of us
name them and name their seasons and name their hours,
and some of us, in our curiosity, open them up
and study them with our tools and name their parts.
We capture them, mark them and release them,
and then we track them and spy on them and enter
their lives and affect their lives and abandon
their lives. We breed them and manipulate them
and alter them. Some of us experiment
upon them.

upon them.We put them on tethers and leashes,
in shackles and harnesses, in cages and boxes,
inside fences and walls. We put them in yokes
and muzzles. We want them to carry us and pull us
and haul for us.

and haul for us.And we want some of them
to be our companions, some of them to ride on our fingers
and some to ride sitting on our wrists or on our shoulders
and some to ride in our arms, ride clutching our necks.
We want them to walk at our heels.

We want them to walk at our heels.We want them to trust
us and come to us, take our offerings, eat from our hands.
We want to participate in their beauty. We want to assume
their beauty and so possess them. We want to be kind
to them and so possess them with our kindness and so
partake of their beauty in that way.

partake of their beauty in that way.And we want them
to learn our language. We try to teach them our language.
We speak to them. We put our words in their mouths.
We want them to speak. We want to know what they see
when they look at us.

when they look at us.We use their heads and their bladders
for balls, their guts and their hides and their bones
to make music. We skin them and wear them for coats,
their scalps for hats. We rob them, their milk
and their honey, their feathers and their eggs.
We make money from them.

We make money from them.We construct icons of them.
We make images of them and put their images on our clothes
and on our necklaces and rings and on our walls
and in our religious places. We preserve their dead
bodies and parts of their dead bodies and display
them in our homes and buildings.

them in our homes and buildings.We name mountains
and rivers and cities and streets and organizations
and gangs and causes after them. We name years and time
and constellations of stars after them. We make mascots
of them, naming our athletic teams after them. Sometimes
we name ourselves after them.

we name ourselves after them.We make toys of them
and rhymes of them for our children. We mold them
and shape them and distort them to fit our myths
and our stories and our dramas. We like to dress up
like them and masquerade as them. We like to imitate them
and try to move as they move and make the sounds they make,
hoping, by these means, to enter and become the black
mysteries of their being.

mysteries of their being.Sometimes we dress them
in our clothes and teach them tricks and laugh at them
and marvel at them. And we make parades of them
and festivals of them. We want them to entertain us
and amaze us and frighten us and reassure us
and calm us and rescue us from boredom.

and calm us and rescue us from boredom.We pit them
against one another and watch them fight one another,
and we gamble on them. We want to compete with them
ourselves, challenging them, testing our wits and talents
against their wits and talents, in forests and on plains,
in the ring. We want to be able to run like them and leap
like them and swim like them and fly like them and fight
like them and endure like them.

like them and endure like them.We want their total
absorption in the moment. We want their unwavering devotion
to life. We want their oblivion.

to life. We want their oblivion.Some of us give thanks
and bless those we kill and eat, and ask for pardon,
and this is beautiful as long as they are the ones dying
and we are the ones eating.

and we are the ones eating.And as long as we are not
seriously threatened, as long as we and our children
aren’t hungry and aren’t cold, we say, with a certain
degree of superiority, that we are no better
than any of them, that any of them deserve to live
just as much as we do.

just as much as we do.And after we have proclaimed
this thought, and by so doing subtly pointed out
that we are allowing them to live, we direct them
and manage them and herd them and train them and follow
them and map them and collect them and make specimens
of them and butcher them and move them here and move
them there and we place them on lists and we take
them off of lists and we stare at them and stare
at them and stare at them.

at them and stare at them.We track them in our sleep.
They become the form of our sleep. We dream of them.
We seek them with accusation. We seek them
with supplication.

with supplication.And in the ultimate imposition,
as Thoreau said, we make them bear the burden
of our thoughts. We make them carry the burden
of our metaphors and the burden of our desires and our guilt
and carry the equal burden of our curiosity and concern.
We make them bear our sins and our prayers and our hopes
into the desert, into the sky, into the stars.
We say we kill them for God.

We say we kill them for God.We adore them and we curse
them. We caress them and we ravish them. We want them
to acknowledge us and be with us. We want them to disappear
and be autonomous. We abhor their viciousness and lack
of pity, as we abhor our own viciousness and lack of pity.
We love them and we reproach them, just as we love
and reproach ourselves.

and reproach ourselves.We will never, we cannot,
leave them alone, even the tinest one, ever, because we know
we are one with them. Their blood is our blood. Their breath
is our breath, their beginning our beginning, their fate
our fate.

our fate.Thus we deny them. Thus we yearn
for them. They are among us and within us and of us,
inextricably woven with the form and manner of our being,
with our understanding and our imaginations.
They are the grit and the salt and the lullaby
of our language.

of our language.We have a need to believe they are there,
and always will be, whether we witness them or not.
We need to know they are there, a vigorous life maintaining
itself without our presence, without our assistance,
without our attention. We need to know, we must know,
that we come from such stock so continuously and tenaciously
and religiously devoted to life.

and religiously devoted to life.We know we are one with them,
and we are frantic to understand how to actualize that union.
We attempt to actualize that union in our many stumbling,
ignorant and destructive ways, in our many confused
and noble and praiseworthy ways.

and noble and praiseworthy ways.For how can we possess dignity
if we allow them no dignity? Who will recognize our beauty
if we do not revel in their beauty? How can we hope
to receive honor if we give no honor? How can we believe
in grace if we cannot bestow grace?

in grace if we cannot bestow grace?We want what we cannot
have. We want to give life at the same moment
we are taking it, nurture life at the same moment we light
the fire and raise the knife. We want to live, to provide,
and not be instruments of destruction, instruments
of death. We want to reconcile our “egoistic concerns”
with our “universal compassion.” We want the lion
and the lamb to be one, the lion and the lamb within
finally to dwell together, to lie down together
in peace and praise at last. 

Day 75: 9/8/13: On Animals and the “N” Word

by in Activism, Animal Rights, Animal Welfare, Vegetarianism/Veganism, Writing and tagged | Leave a comment

Performed a hodge-podge of shark chores today: signed this petition to ban shark fin soup in Australia, stuffed more envelopes in my endless restaurant letter campaign, did miscellaneous shark-related schoolwork. But what really kicked my ass today is this post from the Vegangster blog  that extends the argument of John Lennon’s 1972  song “Woman is the Nigger of the World” to animals. (John Lennon is pretty much my favorite person ever, but more on that later).

I have been a “sloppy” vegan for quite some time, eating bits of goat cheese here and there, and once every few months an egg or two and I never feel good about it.  I’m also tired of whining about how hard it is go completely vegan. Feeling guilty and lame about my half-assed veganism is even more difficult.

Woman Is the Nigger of the World

Woman Is the Nigger of the World (Photo credit: Wikipedia)