A full generation has passed
When I hear your voice
Swirled in a turn of phrase
The way you turn a phrase
In upon itself:
High mineral content
A certain degree of lightness
And agility
Subtle overtones of peony
A touch of pleasant tension
Yet approachable in its evolved structure
And I fall into it
As I fell into it
A full generation ago
The complex notes of your song
Dancing against the swill.

 

Frank was on his way to a meeting when he got a text that the meeting had been cancelled, so he decided to take himself to breakfast. It was Thursday and just past eleven o’clock, a little late for breakfast on a weekday, so when he walked into Burnt Toast, a classic greasy spoon that he had been to a few times and could see himself becoming a regular, he was one of only three seated at a long counter. 

At the grill was a middle-aged African-American man named Tyrone that the wait staff usually addressed as T. Tyrone had a shaved head with a spider web tattooed into his scalp. He had a thin waist and broad shoulders, and, as Frank had noticed when he first ate here, his hands and forearms were oddly asymmetrical. Tyrone’s right hand was enormous, with fingers like kielbasa, and his forearm was muscled like Popeye the Sailor. His left hand and forearm were small by comparison, appearing almost shriveled. Frank wondered if the right was bigger and more muscular from years of strenuous tasks that required only one hand, or if the left had been deteriorated by illness or injury. Perhaps Tyrone was born with this strangeness, and his genetic propensity for it was something that had been passed down through the generations and somehow traceable to the ships that brought his enslaved ancestors to this country from Africa, yet another putrid aftershock of this country’s cruel and unpardonable sin. Frank thought, Is everything about today’s America understandable primarily as the legacy of slavery?

Each time Frank had eaten here, Tyrone greeted him as he did everyone seated at the counter, with a jaunty salute and a big smile. But today, as Tyrone stood about six feet down the counter putting take-out orders in cardboard containers, he spoke directly to Frank in an accent so thick and unfamiliar that Frank could barely discern his meaning from body language and facial expressions. Did Tyrone know that Frank couldn’t understand him, or maybe he didn’t care. Did he use it as a filter, as in the people who really know me have no problem understanding what I’m saying? Or maybe he just liked fucking with the white people who were obvious transplants to New Orleans by seeing how long he could go on talking before they said something or just gave up. Frank was finally able to make out the word, “usual,” so he said, “Sure, T, thanks,” assuming this meant Tyrone remembered what he had ordered before, a chili-cheese omelet with rye toast and a fruit cup, no grits or potatoes.

Frank appreciated this interaction with Tyrone, and was flattered to be recognized and remembered. Frank ate out often, mostly alone at the counter or the bar, and had lots of longstanding relationships with servers, bartenders, cooks. Some blossomed into deeper friendships, but most didn’t, even though they were a significant and valued part of Frank’s life in New Orleans, where so many smart, fun, and kind people of all backgrounds worked service jobs. Occasionally, the transactional nature of these relationships picked at the scab of Frank’s loneliness, and he recognized that, friendliness, familiarity, and frequency aside, there was something artificial and impermanent about these relationships. At some level, he knew that his friends-across-the-counter were, as the song says, paid to smile.

After a few minutes, Tyrone delivered Frank’s breakfast. As he stepped back to the grill and wiped his hands on the dish towel he had tucked into his belt, Frank noticed again the oddness about his hands and arms. Frank considered his own hands, and the oddball way in which he was ambidextrous. There wasn’t anything he could do equally well with either hand, but rather, he did some things with his right, like throwing, and other things with his left, like writing or brushing his teeth. He looked down at his hands to see if there were any visible differences. There weren’t.

Frank was emboldened by the flattery he perceived in Tyrone’s attention, and flattered himself by deciding that he was now officially a regular. He called down the counter, “Hey, Tyrone. Can I ask you something?”

Tyrone turned and took a few steps toward Frank. “Sure, my friend. What’s on your mind?” It struck Frank that up close, he could understand T perfectly. From any more than a few feet away, with all the kitchen noises, forget it.

“I don’t mean to pry, but what’s with your hands? You know, the different sizes?” Frank motioned with his hands as if he were tossing a tennis ball back and forth. “How did that happen? Were they always like that?” Hearing himself, Frank immediately thought the question might be inappropriate, and his casual tone and presumption to ask disrespectful.

“Thank you, my friend,” Tyrone said with a big charming smile. “Yeah, you right. All day long.” With that, he stepped back to the grill and began to flip the dozen or so pancakes sizzling on the hot metal.

Frank thought if he asked again, if he persisted by calling out his question across the counter, that it would somehow be worse. Either Tyrone would continue to misunderstand, or he would be put off by an intrusive question, or he’d be annoyed by the difficulty of communication between them. Frank knew that any interaction with Tyrone that took them beyond the paid-to-smile pleasantries would require that he traverse not only the service divide, but geography, race, culture, lineage, class, privilege, … But Frank wondered what it meant to let it drop, to not even try. Was that offensive in some way? Was it racist? Did it reveal that any attempt at even casual conversation was nothing more than a sham, an awkward courtesy that was, underneath the facade, discourteous? Did any of this matter to Tyrone?

Frank was still struggling for what to do, here, now. Should he ask again about the hand? And even if he did, Tyrone was certainly under no obligation to talk about it. What made Frank think he was entitled to an answer anyway, that it was okay to intrude like that? Would Tyrone appreciate it as a sincere and empathetic question from a regular, or was he sick of explaining it because people asked about it all the time. Frank wanted to say something, anything for a moment of connection. After a few seconds, he blurted out, “Hey, T. Can I get a side of bacon?” and immediately felt as if this knee-jerk default to their “service” relationship only lengthened the distance between them.

Tyrone nodded slightly without saying anything, or even looking back at Frank. He reached up and grabbed a handful of bacon from a metal tray on a high shelf. He dropped it on the grill where it hissed and sizzled.

 

does it take to bring
a difference in quality,
 
the water overflowing
its vessel, escaping
its shape
though the change
was a slow building,
incremental.
 
The eye seems a revelation,
but invertebrates
are clothed in skin
that senses light.
Living things moved
toward sight
before it had a name
 
Is it like that to move
toward compassion?

Summer of 2021

Over my 20 years of teaching high school, I’ve learned that if I don’t take some time to do absolutely nothing during the first weeks of summer break, there’s little hope of entering any creative state during my time off, let alone a transcendent one. The muse just won’t show up unless I force her presence with a sustained period of militant idleness. This is especially true after a particularly challenging high school term. The 2020-2021 academic year had been just that, a bewildering “hybrid” of many sorts—in-person and online classes, surprisingly affectionate yet eerily detached students, frustratingly chaotic yet refreshingly innovative new systems. I knew that if I didn’t get some distance from it immediately, I’d spend the whole summer recovering, not writing. So, as soon as classes ended and I had finished my last performance of the season, I rented a car and got the hell out of New York City.

When I arrived at my cousins’ country home in the Catskills, I dropped my bag in the master bedroom, walked out into the blazing, late-morning sun and sat down in the backyard to meditate. Just as I crossed my legs, a dragonfly alighted on the dried stalk of a tall rhododendron at the height of my eyes. At first, I was careful to stay still, worried that it would scare and flee. But I understood quickly that my movements would in no way influence its determination to stay just inches away from my face for almost an hour, except for when, every few minutes, it would circle around the bush and me, (45 times, I counted), after each revolution returning to exactly the same spot right in front of my nose. Its perch was so close that I could clearly see the irregular outline of an indentation on its back from which its iridescent wings radiated. As I closely scrutinized this dent, which resembled the impression of a footprint or a bite mark, I suddenly had the feeling that this insect was all I was, or that all that I am could be contained in an insect. Yet, at the same time, I felt that the insect was vaster than I could ever be, and of much more importance. Then, when those seemingly opposing feelings wore off, the folly of the whole idea that we were at all different by any degree came sharply into focus and for a little while we remained completely merged.

To believe that we are any different from a tree or an insect is madness, I thought. Then I thought how presumptuous it was of me to anthropomorphize nature to any degree! And this second thought brought to me a pang of regret for all the animals and plants I had contemplated in the past: Had I asked the consent of every tree I’d talked to before unburdening myself? How did I know they were down for hearing my human nonsense?

Any experienced meditator will recognize this jarring double-take as par for the course in meditation: There’s a very individualistic part of our psyches that instinctively resists states of oneness and asserts itself by ripping us out of a beautiful contemplation by any means. Nonetheless, somehow on that day on the grass, Dragonfly’s magic helped me assimilate even this flight of attention into the very state of union my ego had attempted to flee. I contemplated this sense of oneness. What is its quality? Is it characterizable? If so, how?

The skein of the universe, that commonality that unites all things—like the recently-discovered full-body organ named the “interstitium” that encases all organs and systems—manifests as very different things to different people, but is, constantly and statically, the same throughout these seemingly individual experiences. It’s not sufficient to say that (Dude…pass the spliff) “all is one” or that “the commonality is greater than the discord” because the phenomenon is both grander and simpler than that. It can only be alluded to by example, so, God help me, let me try:

It is only by way of this universal, interweaving, interstitchumy quality that your astrology is your childhood, and your childhood is your astrology. It is by the grace of this grand, amorphous, primordial communality that your tarot reading is both a representation of the contents of your mind and a clue to what is outside it. It is by this mysterious, unifying totality that you can simultaneously change your life anew with every thought and harmonize yourself with what has already been created. It is by the power and ease of this ineffable mystical yoking that we can experience god within and god without, and how we remain both human and divine.

Yet, in our very-human striving to find continuity in all things, we are always in danger of disrespecting the diversity of Nature’s great, fragmented, wild holiness. When we round off the edges of seeming incongruities, merge similarities or downright fail to honor the mismatched, fragmented, unruly whole through its beautifully disparate parts, we do ourselves and our fellow beings a great disservice. To achieve any sense of peace, any belonging, or at the very least, a true sense of compassion, all differences must be embraced wholeheartedly. Every one. Without exception. This includes everything from Nobel Prizes to childhood cancer. Yeah, it’s a tall order.

But as I sat with Dragonfly that day, contemplating her multidimensional interrelatedness and fractured wholeness, I realized that while I’ve rarely had trouble extending understanding and acceptance toward others (Trumpers, Covid-deniers, social conservatives, etc.) as varied expressions of the divine, I’ve had an unusually hard time accepting myself! Who knows why I am so damn hard on me? I feel the need to be more, or different, or better.

Perhaps I’m just a rather extreme expression of what the yoga scriptures term “anava mala”—roughly translated from the Sanskrit: “not enoughness.” Isn’t it groovy that there’s a Sanskrit word for this? Anava Mala describes the inherent feeling in the heart of humankind, an “original taint,” the disturbing feeling that something is wrong with us, that something should be different. According to yoga philosophy, it is simply this “notenoughness” that obscures our innately enlightened natures. I think, despite all my inclusivity and compassion, that the inherently varied and fractured nature of existence is simply “not enough” for me. I fail to see the whole in its parts. I have a hard-on for metaphysical harmony at the expense of existence’s beautifully banal particulars.

Dragonfly helped me understand that far from a desire to be seen correctly, or meaningfully, or thoroughly, the only “original taint” I have is the desire for continuity. I don’t believe in sin, or penance, or really any wrongness at all, but if there were any real crime against god of which I am guilty, it would be my inordinate longing for a contrived wholeness. Somehow the differences, the mad, wild, differences are never enough. I am guilty of philosophically forcing an existential consistency that is disrespectful to Nature herself. I desire “oneness” in ways that are less than spiritually sanctified, as if this desire itself were productive, that it would bring peace. Alas, no. The peace is in the pieces, in the chaos and complexity.

I think we are all a bit guilty of looking for continuity. It’s in the reptilian mind, that pattern-seeking survivalist instinct we so often explain away as a thing of the past, as if the Paleo Diet were the only vestige of our millennia of evolution. I suppose this is why we meditate, if we do. By closing our eyes and watching the mind grasp and aver, expand and contract, we experience this individuation and impersonality repeatedly, until (most of) what we see with our eyes open is somehow both intimate and detached enough for us to bear.

If you’re not a meditator, I’m sure you’ve been somewhere relaxing, perhaps on vacation, when a feeling of ease finally comes over you and you’re momentarily free from your daily grind—only to get a sudden surge of anxiety about some duty left undone in your work-world. There are fight/flight, evolutionary explanations for this, of course, but let’s put aside the Darwinian for the spiritual: This ubiquitous phenomenon of merging/dissolution/reconstitution is why every single time you have a peak experience, feelings of loss, despair and confusion inevitably come next. A complete disintegration of what you conceive as permanent about yourself is virtually guaranteed to follow any experience of oneness, just as the ego’s reassembling of itself is certain to follow any momentary respite from its tyrannical presence. What is hardest for us to accept is this: The dissolution and confusion—not the heightened state of oneness on the top of Kilimanjaro—is closer to the truth of our nature, if we could only remember this while we’re in its throes.

I believe that finding beauty in a state of dissolution is crucial right now, as I’m afraid to tell you there’s little hope for healing our environment. What they taught me in the 1980s about exponential global warming is coming to pass and anyone who tells you differently should rightly cause you to feel the grating psychological friction of the boy in “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” It’s too damn late and you’ve got to know it, or at least feel it, which is even more discomfiting if you’re not acknowledging it. Any residual desire for continuity has been intrinsically thwarted by nature of simply being alive during these “trying times.” We are death doulas to the world in this era of its existence.

I’m not suggesting that we throw up our hands in defeat and stop recycling or limiting our carbon footprint. We must continue to care for the earth and engage in rituals of respect, but only because it’s beautiful and honoring to do so, the price of admission for living here, and NOT because doing so will stave off her sweating us out, which is all but inevitable. We are here to honor the end of this cycle of abuse, just as the last, childless siblings of an old family line take domestic violence, mental illness and alcoholism with them, smilingly, at their hereditary dusk. Of course, if somehow all of us conspired to end our legacies of pillaging the earth without expectation of environmental salvation and simply for the honor and beauty of doing so, we might actually generate the momentum needed to arrest global warming, just as we could stop Coronavirus in its tracks only two weeks from today were we able to unite the world around one singular purpose for that sliver of time. However, the odds of both happening are slight.

But here’s some hope: The great boon of my 20 years teaching 8^th and 9^th graders is that I get to witness how each class is effortlessly closer to developing just this unconditional respect for the earth of which I speak! I can’t quite tell you why these students come to me so wise—that will have to be the subject of another essay—but if I were to conjecture, perhaps it’s the availability of so much pre-loaded information. They’ve learned to attend to so many things at once that their hyper-processing brains can hold enough complexity to weather the disintegration around them, rendering them more susceptible to the ineffable, chaotic, quixotic quality of wisdom.

I can’t tell you why these kids come to me so cool, but I’m here for it. For all their seeming distractedness and alienation on the surface, it’s clear that GenZers are authentically connected through their technology, like the mirrored canopy of roots that connects the entire forest underground. Indeed, if I didn’t teach adolescents, I’d probably be really depressed about the state of things.

Of one thing I’m certain: It’s our charge to live beautifully as the world wanes—well, not the world, just humankind as we know it—and concentrate on nurturing the few, fine seeds that will live on in a form we cannot see or even imagine, a continuity our collective ego cannot control, characterize or colonize. No overlord class will emerge from bomb shelters in New Zealand to reboot civilization where we left off. It will be something less direct, less linear, how The Last of Us will live on.

The Maya may have destroyed their environment, too, and suffered the consequences, but we know their culture never ended, that indeed it carries on today, represented in such multicultural symbolic complexity as the Virgin de Guadalupe, just as centuries of West African culture are imbued in the spirituals of the Black church, or how, in the late albums of Miles Davis, whose tracks he refused to name or credit so their magic couldn’t be captured by the suffocating dominant culture, unnamable magics persist. We will continue within the diffusion, and the heart of humanity will be carried on in its complexity. As the great Jessye Norman said of the song “Amazing Grace,” ‘The words may have been written by a Scottish-American, but the melody sounds West African.’ There’s the words and there’s the music…

The ancients believed they could perceive
any person’s character by studying their laugh.
 
Although it fell out of favor ages ago,
this art might be a boon in these dark days.
 
So laugh,
and let me tell you who you are.
 
Set a feast on a blanket in the sun.
I will listen as the laughter pours out like wine.  
 
Seek the wisdom of a balloon in flight.
I will hear you giggling on the breeze.
 
Mortgage tomorrow for a carousel ride today.
I will heed the gleeful gales of childhood recaptured.
 
Climb a tree in every season,
I will comprehend the taxonomy of joy.
 
Who knows what we might learn
from the geloscopist’s craft.
 
Let’s just dare to laugh,
and be whoever we hope to be. 

 

The Entrekin Foundation is a proud sponsor of this documentary of Berkeley poetry and history.