2012.10.27 — The Loneliness of the Whale and a Pile of Bones: Moby Dick, a Morgue and Balloons — Some Fushigis*

It's been over a month since I've blogged anything. I was very busy completing the text for the anti-economics courses I gave earlier this month. And, even as I was panicking with getting everything done in time, I was experiencing plenty of fushigis, which I didn't properly document even on the expanding pile of sticky notes.

But in the last few days, with the courses completed, I was hit by a couple of particularly interesting ones, Not outstanding in themselves, but their clustering has made them interesting. [And the clustering continued even the following day before I could finish this post.] And, of course, it is always nice to have a [Carl] Jung-like synchronicity petite, and so, that is what I'll begin with.

2012.10.19 Friday
At work I bumped into BH, one of my students from Banks Skanks, which had had it's last class the night before. I was a bit concerned that I'd been a bit too wordy in the lecture, because I'd cited from a range of sources old and contemporary. BH assured me that it was fun, although it went a bit quick. 'But,' she added, 'the discussion was good afterwards.'

When I asked how she found the material, she said that, paraphrased, somehow it made her feel a little bit lonely. 'That is,' I said, 'one of the first signs of the beginning of wisdom.' Then I added, 'Jung talks about this, here and there, in his complete works.'

That night, feeling a bit restless about the books I was currently reading, I meandered upstairs, with no particular goal in mind, attending for one book from the more than a thousand books I have scattered in the thirty-two shelves of books to call out to me. Well, I gravitated to the Jung section, and from the three shelves of books I have there I chose a slim volume that I hadn't read before,

It is the self-described 'Short Introduction' to Jung by Anthony Stevens titled Jung in the 'Past Masters' series by Oxford University Press, New York. Well, I was very surprised when, on page one, I read the following:

He had to keep faith with the truth as he saw it, and it was not his fault if this led him into realms of theory and experience which were deeply at variance with the prejudices and preoccupations of his time. 'I feel it is the duty of one who goes his own way to inform society of what he finds on his voyage of discovery,' he wrote.

Not the criticism of individual contemporaries will decide the truth or falsity of these discoveries, but future generations. There are things that are not yet true today, perhaps we dare not find them true, but tomorrow they may be. So every one whose fate it is to go their individual way must proceed with hopefulness, and watchfulness, ever conscious of their loneliness and its dangers (p1 citing CW Vol.II, par. 201 my emphasis).

As I said, a small fushigi at best, with the smallest of links to loneliness.

2012.11.24 Addendum: Later, Stevens re-emphasizes Jung's perception of being lonely because of being aware:

The solitary crusader is the Christian soldier, marching as to war. He has a goal, a destiny which he has no choice but to fulfill. It is an image of what Jung was to become, not as a Christian but as a man. 'If a man knows more than others, he becomes lonely' he wrote at the end of his life (93).

Later that day [Friday the 19th], I began to write a poem that I posted in the WSS on:

2012.10.20 Saturday night
The 141st WSS Weekly Short Story topic was Morgue. After my class-work-necessitated absence from the WSS poetry writing contests I decided to write a poem. The topic brought to mind the Cadaver topic poem I wrote a few months ago, as the morgue was a great segue for it. I wrestled with that being too obvious, but the idea wouldn't go away, and so I wrote:

What's Left But the Bones: Cotton for Comfort Redux.

It was my mother who identified me.
Not by my remains,
For the little that remained of me
was comprised of the natural white anonymity of fleshless bone.
Sex, once curvaceous and vibrant and fetid
had become a dry geometric puzzle,
the curve of the pelvic girdle and coccyx
the sere mystery of skull and bone density,
agéd clues in de-gummed teeth and voided cranial sutures.

It was my clothes,
the clothes I'd been killed in,
the made of comfortable cotton clothes
that so affronted my mother's sense of social propriety,
that became the means of my escape from the unmarked grave
of an anonymous de-animation.

There were tears.
But …
How to say this? The tears were not for me, now,
but for the simulacrum of a corpulent me that once appeared to exist in the mind's eye,
the giddy distracted mind for the gaudy embodied me I once dizzily revelled in.
Or, at least that's what I'd like to think I want to remember,
to be remembered by
by the strangers I was bound to by the soft
pillowy cotton delicate strings made by
and dedicated to the social obligation of family stones.

Stones? How to explain this weight?
In so far as my skeleton is sensate,
I feel compelled to embrace Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book* cant
and list my listlessness as follows:
cross bones, tomb stones,
head stones, hearth stones, heart stones.
Cajones, nerve, verve.
Vicissitude.

In the morgue I rest, un-rued on cold rude un-stained steel,
pillowed by the dead sure attitude found solely
in an unremarked gravestone, wet from an unexpected cloudburst,
and in the lost certitude of my lonesome anonymity.

    *It has been called a book of lists, because Shonagon included lists of all kinds.

I finished writing this Sunday morning, around 1am or so. The first fushigi connection began a few hours later, when, after a short sleep I decided it was time to resume Moby Dick. On the cover I saw stuck an old fushigi sticky, dated 2012.07.22, which I'll get to next, in an effort to catch them up. But, things went sideways when, on …

2012.10.21 ~8:30am
I continued from where I'd left off before my Economic's course work took over my life. And within two pages I read:

…. I promise nothing complete;

because any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that very reason infallibly be faulty. I shall not pretend to a minute anatomical description of the various species, or — in this place at least — to much of any description. My object here is simply to project the draught of a systematization of cetology. I am the architect, not the builder.

But it is a ponderous task; no ordinary letter-sorter in the Post-Office is equal to it. To grope down into the bottom of the sea after them; to have one's hands among the unspeakable foundations, ribs, and very pelvis of the world; this is a fearful thing. What am I that I should essay to hook the nose of this leviathan! The awful tauntings in Job might well appal me. "Will he the (leviathan) make a covenant with thee? Behold the hope of him is vain! But I have swam through libraries and sailed through oceans; I have had to do with whales with these visible hands; I am in earnest; and I will try. There are some preliminaries to settle (110).

What struck me initially was the use of pelvis in both texts as a measure of a body, or a body of knowledge. [I didn't catch until tonight that Ishmael from Moby Dick 'swam through libraries,' which is an odd echo of my grabbing the book on Jung which had the small fushigi, as noted above.] In each case the context is very unusual, but even more what struck me with a second thought was that both were focusing on a physical anatomy as metaphor to something unknowable. The whale in the depths of the collective unconscious and the soul or spirit of a person reflecting on the inability of life to understand death, the return to the natural world, or the natural state of physical existence and perhaps the collective unconscious.

2012.07.21
And since I am also intent on catching up on old fushigis, and since the one above involved a poem and death, here's another one with that theme. From the sticky note stuck to Moby Dick. Now, I don't remember how/why that sticky got stuck on that book, and not in my pile, but since it did, I'll blog it now.

The fushigi began in 2012.07.21 with my being asked by Cheyenne in WSS to give my editorial advice on her poem Balloons and Letters. With her permission, here is her—

Fushigi Interruption Alert: The Above Fushigi has Been Interrupted by an Immediate and Pressing Poetical Fushigi connected to Moby Dick!

While writing 2012.07.21 ML woke from her nap. Just before we were to get going on preparing to braise the country style spareribs that we'll be devouring later, she called me over to read "An ode to B.C.'s poetry power couple" from Saturday's Globe and Mail p. S4. The article is about the multi-award winning poets and spouses, Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane. Well, it turned out that ML had followed an intuitive prompt that brought her to read this section of the paper, something she rarely does. And she was curious as to whether or not I 'knew' either Crozier or Lane

because, as it turned out, she had attended a workshop with him when she was in university in Saskatchewan more than forty years ago. 'No,' I answered, and then added, 'But given the accolades and awards listed, I have quite likely read them. Give me a sec to check." I went up to my library and fished out a likely anthology, The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English. Crozier was absent, but Lane had three poems representing his oeuvre. The first listed is Stigmata:

for Irving Layton

What if there wasn't a metaphor
and the bodies were only bodies
bones pushed out in awkward fingers?
Waves come to the seawall, fall away,
children bounce mouths against the stones
that man has carved to keep the sea at bay
and women walk with empty wombs
proclaiming freedom to the night.
Through barroom windows rotten with light
eyes of men open and close like fists.

I bend beside a tidal pool and take a crab from the sea.
His small green life twists helpless in my hand
the living bars of bone and flesh
a cage made by the animal I am.
This thing, the beat, the beat of life
now captured in the darkness of my flesh
struggling with claws as if it could tear its way
through my body back to the sea.
What do I know of the inexorable beauty,
the unrelenting turning of the wheel I am inside of me?
Stigmata. I hold a web of blood.

I dream of the scrimshawed teeth of endless whales,
the oceans it took to carve them. Drifting ships
echo in fog the wounds of Leviathan
great grey voices giving cadence to their loss.
The men are gone
who scratched upon white bones their destiny.
Who will speak of the albatross in the shroud of the man,
the sailor who sinks forever in the Mindanao Deep?
I open my hand. The life leaps out (p292-3 my emphasis).

Okay, this was rather remarkable because it binds Moby Dick together with my poem through bones, death, and whales in a way that is amazing. What cannot be properly expressed, is that my reading this poem aloud to ML was an almost unprecedented act, that her reading about poets is even more rare.

2012.10.22
Monday turned the fushigi weird. And that weirdness began with my conscience wrestling about the appropriateness of sending my poem to BH. I was torn between it being a simple ego thing and something that BH might like. Eventually I sent it. [Reflection on ego-wrestling match: if I'd been thinking, I might have been able to argue that my wanting to send it only to BH, and not anyone else, would suggest that it wasn't an ego thing — or at least not only or mainly one, anyway.] I sent it to her work address because she doesn't reliably read her GMail account. I got a communicator pop up from BH wanting to discuss the poem.

I wandered over to her desk, and we talked about the poem. She really liked it, which was nice. Then I mentioned how it got tied in with a weird fushigi with Moby Dick. "Are you kidding me?!" she interrupted me. "What?"

"You're not going to believe this, but that is too weird. This morning, when I was reading your poem, I had to look up some words. And I accidentally clicked on some kind of advertisement in the dictionary. You're not going to believe it, but it was something like 'Moby challenge', or 'Take the Moby challenge.'"

[I had BH forward the information from her browser, afterwards. It was an ad for a California British Fish and Chips place, called The Britannia Arms. Here's The Moby Challenge, page 3:

The Moby Brit
Captain Ahab couldn’t finish this one off and if he did, he’d be sporting a stylish new Brit T-shirt! two pounds of fresh cod dipped in our own special beer batter, lightly fried, and served with a mountain of chips and coleslaw. Take the "Moby challenge, ” clean your plate, and earn a free Brit T-shirt. $29.95

Well, as the 'chit chat' continued, as BH might say, it turns out that she'd tried reading Moby Dick a few years ago, but gave up on it. "Why," I asked, "did you want to read Moby Dick?"

"Oh," she answered, "well, because, doesn't everyone?"

I laughed, and assured her that that was not the case.

"Are you sure?"

"Yes," I answered, and then asked a few people around us.

One thing led to another, and told her I love reading out loud, and if she was game I would have a blast reading Moby Dick out loud. And so, the following day, after fishing out the trade paperback she'd bought to read, we meet and I get to read out loud at work! That imagery of that is nonpareil. And I'm loving it and, I think/hope, that BH is too. Even reading the text had a small fushigi, that I'm not recording here, in this already far too long a blog.

2012.10.23
Well, the following day ML was talking with our friends on the Island. She asked LM if she'd read the article. It turns out that she had. When ML began to explain her having attended a workshop with him, and then the weird fushigi with me, LM called out to her husband. He came onto the phone and explained that he had a connection to Lane, too. Not only do they have one of his books in their book shelve, but GM happened to work with Lane's son for a day, when both worked for an Island fish farm in the northern part of the Island.

End of fushigi interruption.

Now, back to Cheyenne's poem, as now that I continue to create this post, I see that it actually has a tiny fushigi tying it back to too Lane's poem.

Balloons and Letters

Balloons dance
In the sunlight filtering through
Spring's new leaves
Letters flap like flags
Attached to the balloon strings
Letters of greeting
Farewell
Letters telling of a new husband
Or baby
Letters mourning
Small hands gone limp
Or large ones that will
Only ever light another pipe
In Heaven
Letters written
By those aching to hold
The little one that never
Took a breath
That only stirred long enough
In the womb
To be counted as a loss
Letters released
By tear darkened fingers
And watched by upturned faces
As they make their journey
Past the clouds (my emphasis)

What made this the beginning of a bizarre fushigi was that the following day I heard a news story on TV about a young girl killed in a freak accident: soccer goal posts fell on her.

…The family held Jaedyn’s celebration of life at the Bethel Tabernacle Church in Ladysmith on Sunday. The church service was followed by a gathering on the beach for a balloon release — all pink and purple, Jaedyn’s favourite colours — and a BBQ.

Jaedyn died tragically on July 4 after a soccer net collapsed and the cross bar struck her in the back of the head while she was playing in a field at a local Watson Lake, Yukon high school. The family splits their time between Watson Lake — where Amann runs a business — and their home in Cedar, near Nanaimo (The Province, 2012.10.22 by Larissa Cahute).

Truly bizarre.

2012.06.10 — A Blast of Fushigis* — Time to Clear the Sticky Note Pile (1)

I have been away from my blog over the last couple of months. But I have been writing in the WSSCC on Goodreads a lot, and work and life in general has been keeping me busy. I will be posting some of my other writing at some time, but for now, it is time to begin to clear up my BIG pile of *fushigi scrawled sticky notes of many colours festooning my desk and challenging my wife's sense of household propriety.

I will warn you right up front that I wouldn't label any of them as being 'WOW! That was amazing' But what may not be extant in the individual can perhaps be made up with in their power as a collective with a steady flow and peculiarity. Although Jung would be castigating me if he'd heard me elevate the collective to be on par the individual!

As this Blog post will takesome time to complete, I will post it in instalments over several days. I will post my addenda as separate blogs with this date, but with the name incrementing. And just to make it a little more confusing, instead of picking up where I left off my fushigis at 2012.03.17 — A Half March of Little Fushigis, I will work backwards to them.

2012.06.06/09 So, today's strange little fushigi began a few days ago when I copied into iTunes a CD I'd borrowed from the library. It was a random pick during a get a couple of quick CDs while the take away pizza across the street is being cooked. So, amongst two others, I grabbed a weird one by someone I'd never heard of before. The CD was Mysterious Mountain and And God Created Great Whales by Alan Hovhaness. I had wanted to like this more than I did, although I did enjoy it enough to not delete it from iTunes and will continue to re-listen to it to see if it grows on me.

So, the fushigi — and I'll ignore the kind of obvious one, which is that I am well into and thoroughly enjoying Melville's masterpiece Moby Dick right now, which I didn't even think of until now, righting out this blog!

This morning, after doing my shopping, I got into the car, turned the ignition and heard not only the engine start but a woman, cellist Amanda Forsyth as I subsequently learned, describe being terrified as a girl of five by a piece of music called Voice of the Whale by I had never heard this music before and may have heard the name George Crumb with having listened to CBCR2 for almost thirty years, but I do not have any conscious awareness of him, his music or his reputation. (Okay, now wasn't that music truly … unusual? It certainly is engaging, but I find myself hard pressed to see it as what I understand to be music.)















2012.06.04
At 11:10pm I finished and posted a character/author dialogue in a thread of the Weekly Short Stories Contest and Company in Goodreads @ Poems Topic: Car Music. It ends:

Me:
Well, what about your students? I've heard that, in a rather pathetic sounding sports parody, professors get their share of groupies, too.
Professor:
Yes, I've heard that too. [Quiet.]
Me:
Well!
Professor:
Well what?
Me:
Are you serious?! I am going to bed, you educated moron! [Leaves]
Professor:
[Pulls out his pipe. Before initiating the tobacco ritual, he wanders over to recover the remote control and turns on the TV. He doesn't look at the screen after confirming that the volume was low enough to be heard but without being disruptive. He very leisurely cleans and stuffs the bowl, assures himself of a proper draw, and with a great sigh, fires it up.] That Guy guy. Just when you think he might have his sh*t together, he shows himself to be no master, but simply eking out adequacy. [Draws in the smoke, sits in the big leather overstuffed library chair. He turns to the bookmarked tome beside him and begins reading it with the Simpsons playing softly in front of him.]

Nothing special there, of course, although I have emphasized the germane bits. The fushigi completes when I re-commence Moby Dick @11:30pm at Chapter 27 'Knights and Squires', where I read:

What, perhaps, with other things, made Stubb such an easy-going, unfearing man, so cheerily trudging off with the burden of life in a world fail of grave peddlers, all bowed to the ground with their packs; what helped to bring about that almost impious good-humor of his; that thing must have been his pipe. For, like his nose, his short, black little pipe was one of the regular features of his face. You would almost as soon have expected him to turn out of his bunk without his nose as without his pipe. He kept a whole row of pipes there ready loaded, stuck in a rack, within easy reach of his hand; and, whenever he turned in, he smoked them all out in succession, lighting one from the other to the end of the chapter; then loading them again to be in readiness anew. For, when Stubb dressed, instead of first putting his legs into his trowsers, he put his pipe into his mouth.

I say this continual smoking must have been one cause, at least of his peculiar disposition; for every one knows that this early air, whether ashore or afloat, is terribly infected with the nameless miseries of the numberless mortals who have died exhaling it; and as in time of the cholera, some people go about with a camphorated handkerchief to their mouths; so, likewise, against all mortal tribulations, Stubb’s tobacco smoke might have operated as a sort of disinfecting agent.

2012.05.28
This is a very boring fushigi, but peculiar in its own right. It begins with my catching a part of the televised conversation of reality TV protagonist Bethenny Frankel that my wife watches. Normally I tune out and listen to music with my headphones while writing. Anyway, what I caught was BF talking/crying with her therapist about how alone and lonely she feels. (After the fact, I noted the time as being around 7:45pm Pacific.) The fushigi completes around 9pm when I became curious about the translation of the Tao Te Ching I bought the previous weekend. Well, I quickly read through it — the translation is good — and laughed when I read Chapter 42. Stephen Mitchell's translation of it goes:

The Tao gives birth to One.
One gives birth to Two.
Two gives birth to Three.
Three gives birth to all things.

All things have their backs to the female
and stand facing the male.
When male and female combine,
all things achieve harmony.

Ordinary men hate solitude.
But the Master makes use of it,
embracing his aloneness, realizing
he is one with the whole universe.

Of course what makes this peculiar one very funny, is that this BF is a celebrity extraordinaire, who became a near billionaire 'overnight', etc., but the Tao sees her as ordinary.

[2012.06.11: Solitude Addenda.
I finished writing this pile of blog last night, with the final post around 11:00pm. This morning as I was driving into work, at around 6:25am or so, I was bemused to hear that solitude had cropped up again. This time from Neil Young's song Lotta Love. (Note that my commute was less than 15 minutes, and so I heard about 3 songs, max.) From 'Lotta Love':

…

So if you are out there waitin'
I hope you show up soon,
'Cause my heart needs relation'
Not solitude.
…

Now, I don't really think of this as strong enough to fushigi blog, although it did catch my ear. (I'm not a big fan of Neil Young, nor of that song, actually.)

This became a bit more interesting when I bumped into TK in the kitchenette area at work at around 2pm. We had a long discussion about various things, but mostly about her mother who is developing dementia. Last week was a bad week for her, TK said. She commented that her mother is feeling lonely, and needs to be with someone. Specifically, her brother walked in to find her sitting beside the phone, feeling too tired and sad to answer it.

But it truly gets fascinating when, about 20 minutes later, when I left work (late!) I turn on the car at 2:23pm or so. When I turned on the car I heard Holly Cole singing a song with solitude lyrics in it.

When I looked it up, she was covering Hank Williams song I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry. Here's the lyrics:

Hear that lonesome whippoorwill,
He sounds too blue to fly.
The midnight train is whining low,
I'm so lonesome I could cry.

I've never seen a night so long
When time goes crawling by.
The moon just went behind a cloud
To hide its face and cry.

Did you ever see a robin
weep when leaves begin to die
Like me he's lost the will to live,
I'm so lonesome I could cry.

The silence of a falling star
Lights up a purple sky.
And as I wonder where you are
I'm so lonesome I could cry.

And then, tonight, I joined a new thread in the Dims Hall group in Goodreads. One of the threaders wrote:

… I want a real person to love me. Sometimes I just want a real person to say they love me and I don't even care if they really do or not. It's horrible, but sometimes I'm just so lonely and being alone is a dreadful feeling….

And that's it for the lonely/solitude stuff! At least for now.]



2012.05.19
Today I listened to Naqoyqatsi by Philip Glass for the first time with care. It has been in my stack of CDs for a long time, and I have listened to it before, but I had a creative/intuitive urge that this music would work with the poem Cotton for Comfort that I'd recently written and read into Garageband at the request of a poet with the nom-de-plume of Koeeoaddi. (Ko is a great poet! You can listen to my reading her poem 'Migraine' at Guy's Soundcloud Space.)

Oops back to the fushigi. Naqoyqatsi's soloist is the famous American cellist Yo-Yo Mah. Oddly enough, I have never been a big fan, although I have tried various of his CDs. Oddly enough, I am not a huge cello fan to begin with — except for Zoë Keating's Avant Cello. Anyway, shortly after listening to Noyaqatsi on my iPad, I turn to my attention to networking poetry on Goodreads. I visit the private group with which I am a member, and visit a poem put up by Joan Colby's looking for critiques.

Joan gets some, including a very technical one from RTO on the musicality of the cello. RTO is familiar with the instrument and is balking at Joan's depiction of 'chords being plucked' as being extremely rare and not really appropriate for the cello. So, from Joan' lovely poem 'In the Pines, In the Pines':

…
Peeling a tangerine, the golden juice
A blessing or how a cello sounds
Its deepest chords plucking at the strings

Of dailyness. …

From this line evolved the cello discussion, which culminated in my reading reference to Yo-Yo Mah literally within fifteen minutes of listening to him, and actually enjoying the performance and the production!.

This pile-up of sticky-noted fushigis is to be continued as addenda blogs.