BY JAN HAAG
POETRY
+
ESSAYS + MUSIC
+
TRAVEL +
FICTION
+
TEXTILE
ART
INTRODUCTION
+
HAAG'S BIO
33 ESSAYIC CONTEMPLATIONS OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT
for
THE 2001 POEMS
ESSAY I
#O1
05-18-01
What seemed imminent, important, imperative, yesterday
(written on my
hand -- more reliable than my brain
these days) is a "civilization gone
with the wind"
today.
Poof with urgency, necessity, time
dissolves
in the spring blossoms weather it sunshines or
rains.
Interest peeks twenty times a day, clouds over
like
Rainier.
Zen it's called in youth. Focus.
Be here now.
Today: just wait. It comes inescapably:
this moment, this rug before
you, this utter emptiness
that is now.
I study archaeology,
sympathize with the knee-high brick walls,
that, in an aerial
photograph, I mistake for the "new writing system."
Grid like, I can
almost decipher it, sole survivors of human speech,
human
error
buried beneath the millennial sand, happened upon, dug,
as mute as me
at Mama's dugs, mute as me soon, soon:
dust, no more, no thought, no
pattern: molecules blown by the wind,
gardened by eternity.
ESSAY II
#02
05-18-01
As I grow older, I grow
less afraid of the didactic. O swift thought
path,
winged creature, swifter than bird song, quicker than
swat
for
the provoking gnat. Say it bald,
no tease, truth as
I see it, shapely, grid-like.
Never mind the newly revealed shapes
beneath the microscope.
Nano-technology.
Curving, meandering,
who, my age, can
follow the rivers of thought, the blind,
asymmetrical, random
-- but always the same -- patterns built into
bone, tissue,
Ca, 40:08, 20,
the sphere? I wander the maze of
human knowledge,
spider-weaving, dew-coagulating hostra leaves,
grey-green, luminous drops vanishing with wind or rain
or sun. What
do we remember from yesterday? Chinese bronzes older
than
Shang?
Dig, dig into the earth, dig into -- view --
Zebrafishes'
pulsing nerves -- nervy impulses made visible. Dig, dig,
dig, O man until,
like the Hindu, you find that nothing is thought,
nothing is maya,
all is nothing.
Thou art that.
ESSAY III
#03
05-18-O1
Well, this is the Intro. I
don't want to mess with eternity's time
scheme, nor
even today's spent hours. I didn't think: "The
Introduction!"
until
two poems in -- what's the shame
in
that? I looked up "essay" -- no such word
as "essayic" -- but what an
interesting world [misspelling] word!
How
many of the words we
learn
young reveal, intrigue, ensorcel if we look them up
in our
dotage! I was moaning, groaning, mourning late
in my
morning
bed that I've had no inspiration lately. But open
the
spit-cock (spigot? spitch-cock? -- hmm, the closest word is a cut-up
eel
-- "to treat severely"*) and out it pours so fast, even the
computer
can't
grill it. Essay: "A testing... or experiment...;
a trial
specimen...; an effort to perform or accomplish...; a
tentative effort...; rough copy..."
"...put to the test...;" and,
halfway down: "also, a literary composition...of
no great length."**
*p 1799, Century Dictionary, 1933
ESSAY IV
#04
05-20-01
At times, I think it is
merely the obsessive reading of mysteries,
ordering the world,
making straight lines out of the chaos, sense
of
nonsense.
At times, I'm sure it's age,
memory's failure
simplifying things, letting the complexity go, dissolving
into the
backwash of time, tabula rasa of nascent
mind.
Could it
be
wisdom? Learning sans
memory is an awesome salt desert
prospect. What
occupies
the brain if memory is gone? It's a well-bucket
spilling
into space,
cascades of liquid facts, facts of liquidity, the ocean
of Europa, between the ice and the rocks, sloshing clockwise,
counterclockwise, pluming,
while with constancy Io, Ganymede and
Mother Jupiter revolve. They hear sphere
music,
watch randomness
sort itself to order in the silent
expanse, private interval, curved,
round like Earth's ball, thinking there is
no other, no reason. What
are we doing here? Walking Red Square
in the dusk.
ESSAY V
#05
05-25-01
What the kids don't know is
there will be time enough to make and break
a million habits -- all but the one (or possibly
two)
that
will infest them throughout their
lives, grinding down wisdom,
feasting on energy, sapping moral
fiber -- leaving it for pith --
letting chance in. Prancing
chance.
There's no choice of
addiction. It
comes willy-nilly with being human, being had, being at
the mercy of. Trust me kid! Develop good habits
of mind and
body, lest the demon crawl in through a nostril,
lest hair
folicles fall on fertile ground and independently raise a crop
of
havoc. Beware! Do not become too smart too soon: aware of
fate,
karma, destiny, inevitability, perniciousness. To be is to be
in pain. Keep that in mind as the devil dances on your
dainty
fingertips, taints the mind, using realgar for crimson. Poison is poison.
Dragonblood is dragonblood.
ESSAY VI
#06
05-26-01
Vikram loves the towered grain elevator.
It stands on the shore of the
morning Sound.
It's loading and unloading bridge stalks across the
water
one-hundred
feet high. Barefoot on the grass,
I walk,
wondering: plucked, winnowed, shipped, sucked, stored, re-spewed,
re-shipped, packaged, cooked -- when it reaches a plate,
how
nourishing
can it be? Odd thought: it
will grow again,
provide nutrients, last practically forever in
a dry climate. Tucked
into its genes, if not
destroyed by man,
are its instructions
to grow again, bloom, head, drop
its progeny, feed the life forms
unimagined today being invited splice by
splice into what humans
enjoyed thinking of as "our world." Even without
human
interference, we promise to be but a transitory
phase
in the earth's evolution, one bright earth flare on the sun's
horizon,
then darkness, lightening striking, volcanoes spewing, earth
quaking, its architectural tendencies molding
remolding the land.
ESSAY VII
#07
05-27-01
On my way to the library
I heard a cat fall from a sixth story
window, yesterday, on a quiet, Sunday, sunny tree-lined
street.
Plop.
A dull frightening dead plop sound --
I looked
around, across the street a cat curled
on the sidewalk -- no other
reason for the sound.
Fear.
I crossed the street, the grey-white
cat, soft and shiny and cared for, betrayed, stayed
in the middle
of the concrete sidewalk rigid, trembling.
I moved closer.
The
cat limped behind the bushes edging the cement.
Crouching, she turned
to face me, one crimson drop at her mouth,
a smudge of blood at her
nose, her right leg twisted. From
overhead,
a young man asked
me to stay. I murmured
to the cat until he arrived. His love, the
cat's owner, came
crying. The startled, injured, mute cat flashed
through my mind again and
again that night.
ESSAY VIII
#08
06-06-01
A vision last night before sleep:
Leaves and leaves and leaves, leaves
curling like shadows,
awareness floating through, dream-like in
chiaroscuro, golden-brown, parting darkness;
emerging,
but
still into jungle, like roots
over stones/crumbled buildings. Where am
I? Angkor? I
see jungle, no buildings. Still moving, I can't get
beyond.
I stand at an edge of
giant formations, twisted,
obscured by my vision. Dim light
glows from the horizon. It might even
be dawn
but, though faint,
it seems too bright for dawn in the
north.
Does tropical dawn come up brilliant? Is it candlelight? A
billion flickering
candles rimming earth's edge. I open my eyes again.
I am awake,
without
fear. I feel I could have visions often, if
I wanted, if I waited quietly for them. I question its meaning.
Was it a prophecy, a remembrance, another life -- or just the
meaningless
beauty of living?
ESSAY IX
#09
06-12-01
As if oaring into the sea,
I shove my needle into the sheet, snatch,
pull,
three times jerking, then with teeth, I pull
it
through.
Another stitch, a repeated pattern
of
impossibility, fingers stiff, like swollen knees, except they
look
familiar, act familiar, are familiar until I ask
them
to
do things they have always done
before, stitched
before. Now, not talented, recalcitrant, they can't
be reasoned with.
They don't bear talking to. They
don't hear. Ears
are
perfect, as far as sound goes, but they
can't make out the words. They
can't distinguish syllable from similar syllable.
Sheeting used to be
an easy mend, O gliding needle, now it
is
my shroud I stitch
as if oaring into sea
waters, deep. My hands tingle, my wrists are
like bark holding up
a tree. Word by word I try to paint pictures I
hear
but can't feel.
ESSAY X
#10
06-19-01
Poetry seems to have flown away
on the wings of doves and other darker
crows.
Is it comfort? Is it boredom? Is it a
waltzing
in
the greenhouse to see how
busy I can be? I catch a glimpse of
incremental dendrite building via multitudinous lectures. Here at my
now
and only fingertips, I know everything.
Whatever there
is to express, I can do so.
There is no secret to the universe but
knowledge.
Lots of it.
So what is this low-grade mewling of the
heart?
Habit? Orneriness? A life wish? A death wish? A longing for
silence?
Explosions in abandoned minds? Methane? Bauxite? Tiny wee
glimmerings of little elses?
Who
will put up with it? And for
how long?
Tendrils creep beyond clouding windows, quano must be scraped
from the door.
All parts of nature request inclusion. Our delusion we
can do anything
about it -- lies.
ESSAY XI
#11
06-20-01
I used to feel that I
must choose a destiny. Now I feel that I'll
let a destiny choose me. I've given up judging
things.
I've
given up being things. I've
become content that all things are
different from me.
I'm neither fish nor fauna, moral or immoral.
More
each
day I find that Buddha held
the views of an old
woman who sees old
age, sickness and death everywhere, and comes to
peace
with it, who
sees desire evaporate and wonders what to
replace it
with, who mediates, lives in the moment and cannot remember
the moment
before, can no longer defend a point of view because she
has
no
point of view. How easily one slips toward death,
finds the slowness of reality dissolving, becoming unremembered
dreams, sadness unfulfilled, bearable.
I no longer have to argue or
believe, listen, recall, instruct nor
breathe to live.
ESSAY XII
#12
06-22-01
Dear Martin: I need your help
again -- in several things. The
proportional working out of
the twenty-two srutis . I have the
information, layout,
cents,
placement, et al, but I need
some human communication to bounce the count about with
me. Also I
need to know, in the twelve
tone
scale, if each note, say
Sa ,
contains all the harmonics -- which I suspect not -- but
if not, what are the harmonics each note contains?
Can you tell
me that? Sa contains... Re contains... Ga
contains... ma
contains... Pa contains... Dha
contains... Ni contains... And if they are sharped,
tivra or komal , flatted, do they then contain different
harmonics? i.e. Tivra
Ma
contains... and Komal
re contains... Komal ga contains... Komal
dha
contains... Komal ni contains... I have to work these out in
reds, oranges and golds, proportions and placements. Lets get together
again soon.
Help! Love, Jan
ESSAY XIII
#13
06-23-01
Out. Wandering in the world. Through
memories. Street corners that
remind me of earthquakes, romance,
domiciles, roommates, poems, changes
in the world at the
King
Street Station -- long ago gone seedy,
its grand promenade concealed, juxtaposed to Chinatown's edge scraped
up into sheer edifices gleaming with glass, beaming anonymity
--
very
Chinese -- whether its modesty or steel.
I wander on up
into Little Saigon (so posted)
-- where it says, on a Vietnamese
shack, in among
its curlicue, works-of-art
lettering, I can
get French Coffee. Beyond its small
malls transformed to Southeast
Asian vitality, litter, I spy one ancient house
golden-yellow,
stripped of its paint-over-stucco by the Northwest "monsoons." Is it
lived
in?
Is its jungle-garden occupied? Inspection yields no
secrets. All
I'm allowed is a graft to wandering memories, a reminder
that I
have trod other worlds, seen prototypes, wandered twisting,
ever evolving, side walks
of the mind.
ESSAY XIV
#14
06-24--01
MEXICAN LUNCH WITH NANCY: I eat
my breakfast taco alone, whole wheat
filled with all
sorts of good things, bean sprouts and broccoli,
tomatoes
and
peppers, salsa verde, pork (I didn't
say it
was perfect) and Udo's Choice, both oil
and grains, but I miss the
soaring laughter, the
gossip,
the plunges into philosophy and
giggles.
I miss my Buddha, who sits on Boards, is
loved and loving,
and happily lives to eat lunch
and dinner
in sophisticated
places. But together (mostly my choice, her
bill) we ate in a low-brow
Mexican restaurant in Sonoma's Historic District,
had margaritas (I
never drink), guffaws, cheese, hot sauce, tortilla chips. I
told
her everything -- as far as I could remember it --
in my
always-anguished soul. Between us everything winged like a gleeful
cockatoo
toward sunshine. She told me wild tales I'd never excavate
from
people
on my own.
ESSAY XV
#15
06-24/25-01
I've had the priviledge and the
pain of walking alone on this earth --
in a
melancholy mood on a grey afternoon, late, nodding
in
on
the chanting of a Christian service
in a Vietnamese
church, wandering the gardens of a
Buddhist temple where small cut
stones simulate a great
pool,
acres of deserted lawn in a
park, a vast night market of unknown fruits, unknown
vegetables in
Little Saigon, steep hills, deep valleys covered
with houses, new
and ancient, the cool wind kicking up on the
Sound, the gulls
crying, my heart empty, relentlessly anguished and blank and
still,
shopping cautiously, buying eatables I have never bought before, catching
the
bus
home through the intricate streets of Route 60, past
the hospitals, the view of downtown's edifices, our 100 story building
-- only
two blocks to walk, swinging my groceries, eager for night to
fall,
to stop walking.
ESSAY XVI
#16
06-26-01
Another walk, another thought, like fog
hanging in my brain, summer
won't come and, under
the grey sky, the weather remains cold, windy,
wintry.
June.
I continue to take my Vitamin
D in pill form,
walk the arboretum only on
the upper path where leafed-out trees
shelter the gravel
from
the rain. We live in a
rain forest.
Not everyone objects. Nonetheless, happiness wells up
from time to
time in that sexual way, permeating
my limbs, enervating
joy,
relaxation. Do the cedars feel it as well?
Do fragile maples suffer
from bliss in the cold dawn -- turn red,
purple and shiver? Defend your
choice of the nomad's life, the
walking.
Ask the seagulls what
they do for dinner, entertainment.
Is riding the wind, feeling the
scent of the salt from sea
and the Sound enough? "Ah, bright wings!"
Yes, some days, enough, other days,
discipline will do.
ESSAY XVII
#17
06-26-01
Fooling around with words in a
language, any language, is almost as
foolish as fooling
around with greed, with wealth, with passions of
the
heart
and other men's passions -- noticeable until
proximity to death quiets one down, lets one peer
into the well's
echoing, flashing, ebony depths which swallow
time
and
intention. My quarrel is not
with God, but with Buddha. Having
achieved desirelessness, what
did he think one was going to do?
Poof!
You are gone!
That's as simple and simple-minded as old
age, sickness
and death being the problem. The problem is time and the
river.
Not the river Styx, but the river of time, of flowing
on.
Time,
once having cleared out the debris, hangs heavy on
one's hands, mind, footsteps. With no desire and no goal, and not
favoring being a fund-raiser for the preaching of inaccurate doctrines
one is
lonely before Nirvana.
ESSAY XVIII
#18
06-27-01
The golden building, the grey sky,
the brilliance of scarlet geraniums
on the terrace, lobelia,
the fine strike of raindrops on the window
panes,
overcasts
the coming day. Sirens and horns,
a distant
train, a plane, lobelia and geraniums on
the window sill, little
lychees starting from seed bought
at
a Chinese market, and
their sweetness
eaten, a California fern -- revolving from daughter
to
father
to daughter, sending up new shoots from bare earth --
my
company as
the morning's poem shapes itself in a language not
native to America -- genes in Sumeria, India. The poem form, my own,
my heritage from ten generations on this continent -- how many in
other
lands? --
confident, my years assuring me that what is
is.
what comes into being exists, what happens is the record, the
lobelia,
the geraniums, the white lilies, the sunset roses, the
parsley, the rosemary,
and the thyme.
ESSAY XIX
#19
06-28-01
In the University quad, Yoshiro cherries
bloom and, among other
fountaining, cascading, exuberant blossoms cherries
flow through the
arboretum and dance on Seattle's city
streets.
They inhabit the
Olmstead gardens necklacing
the Emerald City, in Ballard and to the
east,
behind the church on 9th and in a photograph
on
my
desk. To look up through
blossoms into the blue sky and breathe the
ephemeral
stillness is to know that tomorrow the leaves will
green
and blossoms
will fall. The cool shade of cool summer will
take
their place. Rain-forest green everywhere shrouding the memory of white,
pink-tinted
blossoms growing from branches, from gnarled trunks,
bouquets, nosegays, a billion fragilities
snowing
on one's head,
flaking one's shoulders, defining one's stance
on the lawn shared by
trunks of cherries, some striped sensual copper-maroon, iridescent,
brilliant,
ringed, peeling, supporting the blossoms, remaining through
summer the same,
but growing larger.
ESSAY XX
#20
06-29-01
DARK THOUGHTS
With sunshine so bright it might
be California, I sit bemused. What is
there to
write about? For the feet have already walked miles,
today.
Dreams have been dreamt in hypnogogic
wakefulness.
Fruit eaten to satiety. Chapters read in three
books, and several
library pamphlets. I wait to exercise.
In
the meantime, I have
checked all
my plants for moisture, watered one lobelia, exulted over
the two lychee, and noted two -- who knows what?
As a matter
of principle, I throw most of my seeds -- avocado,
lychee,
cherry, peach, apricots, nectarine, papaya, lemon -- into the next pot to
be planted. Who knows what has the courage to come up, or
strength
to fight the irradiation, the killing involved in
creating
terminator seeds, the greed to own all the foodstuffs of the
world.
Indeed, what is there to write about in this cornucopious world,
fecund
with human greed.
ESSAY XXI
#21
06-30-01
Kitsch, Korn and Komic Book Art --
Academia grabbed the art scene by
the short and
curlies. No curators now without doctorates, indeed, few
undoctorated
artists,
all busily at work justifying
juvenilia.
Previous profundities declared: "Scholars are not artists."
"Those who
can't do, teach." But now everything's changed, scholars do
what
they do, they post-modern, they deconstruct,
they do
kitsch, korn and komic book art, and,
since it ain't art, they've
conscientiously re-defined art to
be, kitsch, korn
and komic
book art. See it in museums, see
it in galleries. Academics choose
the educated untalented, dub Dr.'s artists. Art,
once cherished by
humans as human's truth-beauty-wisdom, is egalitarianized out of
existence.
Trendsetters
help us to admire the distasteful, the
obscene, ugliness,
shit, shock, stupidity, clap-trap, all clothed in
jargon-rich justifications: "If you don't
comprehend-iality the art,
stupid..." "An artist, as any entrepreneur, is defined, stupid,
by his lucre."
ESSAY XXII
#22
07-01-01
The water ran perfectly yellow, perfectly
clear and so real that, when
I remembered it,
I couldn't recall if it were reality or dream,
the
Yellow River, the Yangtze, lychee-stem dye
or, an
after thought, pee. It was clear, it
was bright. It sheeted from the
white, wide spout,
flowed
from sheer, shining, stele cliffs.
It
was sunshine, high and bright, in a white sky.
Did it have
meaning? Was it just present? I
live in a
yellow building,
dote on sunshine. Saffron fabric from India
covers my computer. Saris,
tiles, other oddments, Shiva, bones and Kuan Yin
sit about my room,
protect me from crucifixions of the brain. Number
2
yellow
pencils, felt tipped markers, usually jarred and unused,
and a heart
like a tear-drop, pale purple, very pale purple, against
gold, soft
yellow, bright white, sent by Laurel, stand behind another Shiva,
bottled heena, mother-bones.
ESSAY XXIII
#23
07-02-01
Essays begin to lose their interest
for me. I've said enough. What's
the next
step? Flight into darkness -- and beyond -- into darker
darkness
-- beyond.
Devayani, you once wrote, "Emptiness is
the beginning of love." But you don't recognize it
as your path.
You've lost your path, all is
shadow
as you look around. It
always
was. Now it is darker. The irreversibleness of
history
strikes such recoupable sadness in your heart, the
devastation
of the earth
by your countrymen. They got here
early, 1634,
in plenty of time to carry the infectious diseases, like
smallpox, measles,
dysentery and greed. Looking for their own freedom,
they did not mind
devastating
all others. In the north and in
the south,
your English ancestors ravaged the earth, killed its
peoples, destroyed its civilizations --
partly in jealousy, for
Americans were more advanced than the living squalor
of marauding Europeans.
ESSAY XXIV
#24
07-03-01
I walk the streets of Seattle,
projects invading my mind like
nuthatches, little brown-grey, round
fat birds, pecking bits of
experience from the city's
streets.
Walk the streets, write a
poem
for each. Write a poem for the municipal buildings,
in which,
passing at 5:33, the last of
the
street-people are rising from
their marble-floored
sleep. Tomorrow has begun. Watch the sun
yellow-sheet the
upper flanks of the tallest buildings, illuminate the
Sound,
strike West Seattle.
Cruise along the empty rivers of
concrete, some flowing
north, some flowing south, all deserted, and
the fresh wind blowing one
more morning up for delectation. The old
library's empty, but not yet
gone.
Watch bus-waiting-people
drink their coffee, read their books
and newspapers. Every street from
the east to the west ends in
the Sound, the gull's sound, circling. A
ferry slips past the pier-d
end of Union.
ESSAY XXV
#25
07-03-01
Allow ecstasy to reign. In blankness,
in boredom, in the aloneness of
age and uncertainty,
the brain tangos through the tangle of memory.
Let
it
dance. Fear not. Walk on. Cool
wind. Ode the
city. Memorialize your grief. The parks
are emptier now, the
geraniums redder. Count the grungy
cedar
trees along a
chain-linked fence, handsome
really, better than only chain-link,
asphalt, white-lined parking troughs.
It's all down hill in Seattle,
squared off between-building-clips
of a watery
Sound, woods
and squat, sunlit condos terminate the west,
the frontier of
roller-coasters down from First Hill. Very strange end pieces,
like
abandoned abbey walls, truncate the ends of The Rainier Club, its
facade
under reconstruction -- probably from the earthquake,
Richter scale 8.2,
which rolled through the February city, or from the
upheaval of greed
and foment of protest. Seattle's throes, passion,
extravaganza of construction will make
a nice ruin.
ESSAY XXVI
#26
07-03-01
Secret walks in the dawn. No
one knowing I'm gone, or abroad. Even
those in
the streets met face to face -- I do not
know
and
they don't know me. We
pass in silence or with a smile. Fortunately,
for
the most part, I have resisted the training in
fear --
the big seller of American Media.
Like Lawrence's Arabs of the
desert, "I go where
I please and strike where I please." And you
could too, but
don't come out to clutter my mystical, naked
streets
of the dawn. Let quiet, let desertion, abandonment rule, let
me dream
of what it will be like, an Angkor Wat of the future.
The
Columbia Tower, how they will marvel. The two pancakes
full of seats, decorative ridges rising, just to the south, one black,
one white -- like the fulfilled plans for the Taj Mahal. That will
puzzle them, too.
ESSAY XXVII
#27
07-04-01
Happy Birthday, U.S.A., today.
Is this two-twenty-five? Imagine that,
another quarter century gone --
or accomplished -- depending on your
point-of-view. Not an awful
lot --
having just been reading a
lot
of pre-history, B.C. or B.P.E. or
whatever of those half dozen
designations scholars are trying --
to
make sure Christian
counting WILL BE
adopted by the whole scholar's world -- and some
of
those cave sites include habitation spanning 5,000 years.
So here
we
are feeling our oats, perhaps at the pinnacle of
our
civilization, galloping fiercely into the future! -- unheeding,
unyielding,
challenging, snubbing nature,
jumping the traces -- into
the future we go. Where? Machu Picchu, Chaco
Canyon,
Mohenjo
Daro
-- you name them, though skeleton remains, the
flesh is gone, and so's
the spirit. We're arrogant enough to think
we'll escape, but we won't.
What magnificient ruins "Delirious New York" will
make, Dear Koolhaas.
ESSAY XXVIII
#28
07-05-01
Mukti Bhavan charges no rent, accommodates
no luggage, serves no food,
allows no medicine, each
cell is as bare and comfortless as the
grave.
It
is a place for dying. It
is in Banares, Varanasi,
Kashi, The City of Light,
the Forest of Bliss. To die there, is
to
receive the boon of liberation, never
having to return
to this earth. It ends the
turning of the wheel of samsara,
ends
reincarnation, pays
all debts. Mukti
Bhavan, this "hospice,"
endowed by an industrialist, stands near
Dashashvamdedha Ghat, near
the
Gadauli intersection. If you want to get well,
you cannot stay. You
must go to a hospital. This house is
for
dying. No other
activity is condoned. Fifteen days are
allowed. Extensions are rare.
The rules are painted on the wall. Continuous
chanting, Ganga water,
tulasi leaves are free and available. Mukti Bhavan means
House of Salvation.
ESSAY XXIX
#29
07-05/11-25-01
Eleanor arrived today, a Norfolk Pine,
stemmed, large-boughed,
tapering, capable of curtseying gracefully, her skirts
dark green --
not terribly old. Aside from 55 +
humans
to gaze at her,
there is
a small plant of her own species, a daughter
who stands in
the ante-room. Lynn raised Eleanor, and
brought
her; Paul
provided transport. No doubt, Eleanor will like
it here, the rest of
us do -- looking out on sunny gardens,
muted yellow walls, light,
delight, where people talk and walk and weed,
water flowers, share
the herbs. Though young, she's used to stasis, patience.
Her
room is spacious, couches and tellys and tables. Distinctive, noble
Eleanor
will not feel captive. Never having known her homeland, we
foresee that,
repotted,
nourished, moved about by company, she
will no doubt
flourish for us -- away from the wind -- as she did for
Lynn.
Some older humans talk to plants, some younger ones play the
piano.
Time passes daily.
ESSAY XXX
#30
07-06/11-25-01
Dinner, last night, with Tom V.
Reeling drunk, a sugar-high, from
grape-apple juice. Dining elegant,
downtown, Italian, we talked and
talked and talked, like
I
haven't talked for a year. He
told me his life-story, I told him (partially) mine.
He a young
man, 40, more interesting than most,
a
good friend's son. He
lives in
a widow-walk house with 360 degrees of view.
Rainier
wearing evening sun, Rainier was out for our delectation.
We talked about
life-immensities I had forgotten, life-vistas,
now shaded, receding. Neutrality
welled from volcanoes. Munching
slowly, Pele* laved my soul. The vast experience
of another human
tunneled in passionate and neutral. Ah, the middle way!
Jan,
the widow-walker, danced above the city, cavorted among embers,
ate little, should have drunk less, avoided acquiring new cravings,
cultivated no
new unsatisfiable addictions. Last to leave the
virgin-white-topped tables, the help had
already gone home.
*Pelehonuamea, the Fire Goddess