...consider death

A Consideration on the Death of My Father

         (written after his passing on Jan 20, 2018)

Well it may be shocking to us, but he was ready.

The word is Thanatopsis: derived from the Greek 'thanatos, (meaning death) and 'opsis' (meaning view or sight), invented by American poet William Cullen Bryant, and meaning 'a consideration of death.’ The poem it was created for was a favorite of Walter’s, though I might say it was a more of a perseveration he had on death:

          

The graves, the pictures of graves, the coffin I helped him build, the poems upon poems about death, the gravestone designed, the Day of the Dead imagery and trinkets, the shelves of books on burials, rituals and perspectives on death, Poe’s ubiquitous presence over his project, and the passing comments in conversation.

“Someday I’ll be gone” he’d allude. “I could die any time.”  And we’d reshift in our seats, growing ever familiar with his Danteian obsession. But there’s something I grew to respect about it—something honest and unabashed, like a child unafraid to call the king naked. It was his opus, in a way. Death. His great Love. He celebrated her, he did not tuck her into a corner of the fearful mind, pretending she didn’t exist with her terrible scythe until those unfortunate times in life when she forces her presence upon you like a sudden dark, cold rain—an old friend passes, a family member. No, he brought her into the light and appreciated the beauty in that blink of time when eyes grow empty but hearts do not. As many poets did before him, like Bryant, like Poe, he spent time pondering that solitary moment, and what one was doing right before it, and what happens right after. “I hope I’m alive when I die.” He wrote.

Walter looked upon gravestones, these obvious physical markers—with epitaphs so poetically concise for a entire life lived--and he recognized life unfinished, because the people underneath them were unforgotten. There was some hope in that. He honored all those poets when he gathered us in mirth around marble and exhumed the words of sleeping linguistic engineers. He revived their legacies and encouraged us all to do the same. Has Edna St. Vincent-Millay’s life truly ended, or Margerie Frost’s, or any of theirs, if The Dead Poet Guy celebrates their words?

I spent six weeks in the Poemobile with this artist, traipsing around the American West where I now live, finding the graves of poets passed. D.H. Lawrence snuggled in his shrine in the mountains of Taos, New Mexico with his feline companion. Others in traditional plots. Some scattered to sea. And in that time, I began to see my father in a new way, or perhaps just more fully. See, I was no longer his child, I was his companion and co-worker, and saw him less opaquely.

Walter was a deeply passionate man. He had an energy that was always brimming, a kettle near-boiling. He was inspired each day, ideas like children at an amusement park. And this energy was infectious to those he pin-balled passed: the waitress at the truck stop restaurant; the motel clerk on some ghostly stretch of highway; the daughter of a poet she thought everyone had forgotten. His project invigorated people all over the country because someone didn’t forget. Because someone was celebrating “my favorite poet.” He was our Nation’s literary Vasco de Balboa and our Matthew Parris: discoverer and historian. Always seeking, finding and logging, a cartographer for the pilgrims of poetry.

But he was a pained man, too, a man I often watched trapped in some frustrating chaos of chords, bags, tasks, needs, equipment, plans, sleep, health, expectations. There was a darkness he could not shake, that haunted him like Poe’s “demon in my view”, and he lived with it for so long. It was a veil between intention and perception, a thinness of heart, a shackle to speech. In the hardest moments I saw in his expression the face of a prisoner, trying so hard to find the eye of the storm, to breathe easily, to sculpt his ideas into form. To find for once that everything was where it belonged.

But in a way it was. My father belonged where he was in life. He belonged in Dedgar, in China. He belonged in his chaos, his creativity. He belonged in his projects, his love, his quirky expressions and surprising visits. He had a lot to live for, and was not eager to pass, but when the time came he too was right where he belonged. He was ready, even if we weren’t. Thanatopsis: his perseveration on death. Perhaps, it was his perspective on death. His relationship with her.

 

I imagine, as he waited on his step last week for the ambulance to arrive, he knew what was coming. I imagine he recognized his old friend and her scythe and greeted her as he had so many times at so many cemeteries. They were old friends after 600 graves. But this time she removed her hood, letting her locks fall off her shoulders, and she looked at him with those clear eyes that saw him for who he truly was. Behind her stood the muses and Walt Whitman and his father and she extended her soft hand and Walter reached up and left his pain and his legacy, behind.

...continue writing

Here is an unpublished post from 2017. I find it interesting, from my desk in Vegas, my New Western home...

I haven't written a blog in a long time--it's something in my nearsightedness. I always told myself I would write when I travel, when my eyes are wider open, more sensitive to detail, more willing to see beauty. But since my last entry I've been to Malmö and Prague and Copenhagen--twice! So what is it? Writer's block? No--I've written a musical since then. Laziness? I honestly don't think so.

I think I have turned inward lately--a real important travel on the byways of my heart and atmosphere of my mind. I looked outward so intensely and cherished every sense and something quite natural occurred: my eyes were turned within. The universe holds my galaxy holds my solar system holds my planet holds my continent holds my environment holds my body holds my organs holds my cells holds my DNA holds my atoms which are universes. A chain unbroken, from infinity to infinity. Eventually looking deep will draw me out again, but I am not there quite yet.

And I have learned quite a bit, especially about those particularly profound things, like love and who I am, when I stop being what I thought I was. I'm doing things for myself now, slowly, because it is important. And I've learned about wellness and the absence thereof, and how it's all tied together: physical, emotional, psychological, spiritual. If you are sick in one place, the infection will spread.

I read a lot of good books and looked into eyes, universes of their own, eyes I could have never stopped looking into, but had to. I have come to understand real heartbreak, abandonment and betrayal and also connection, acceptance and loyalty. I have grown into myself, as a tree, stretching ever higher and ever deeper, one with the other.

In one direction I travel back into the East--the China of my youth and the orientation that has led me here. In the other direction, I dream of what horizon I have yet to reach.

I am not in soil I can stay in forever. That siren's voice is calling again, and I am willingly waiting for a sail to hoist into the wind. To distant shores--terra incognita.

The proverbial Occidental. 

...click here

It's a gray morning in Pittsburgh--a perfect morning to sleep into and let achey bodies rest. We've ridden across Pennsylvania, my friends Nick and Carter and I, in the attempt to make it to the West Coast. Ridden--not driven; I'm talking bikes. Hence the achey bodies. 

Today we spend our time in the city before moving on towards Chicago. We may not make it across, in fact it's likely we won't, but the beauty in life and adventure is not always the destination, but the journey we take in her direction. The sunset is beautiful, but only unreachably so. 

There are stories upon stories and people and sights, but little time between pedals, and even less internet access. I encourage you to go to this blog for the time being (www.westwardwithoutwalls.blogspot.com), where we will be posting as much as we can to keep you informed of our travels. 

...yield properly

I had the chance to fly Portland to Portland, and in doing so to cross five weeks of roadtrip in one day. This ability to travel by plane has erased all need for Lewises and Clarks anymore. However, I suppose it provides opportunities for adventures Sacagawea could never have taken them through. Either way, by bookending the country in this way I thought there would be some fun or poetic excitement. There was no excitement. There was one long day with two connections, three explanations of safety procedures and many hours in waiting rooms. Fun…

But it was poetic. On one flight I sat next to a wonderful lady who was taking a poetry course and used to teach English and had daughters who should do theatre and we had a grand time looking at her and her classmates’ work together. 

The next flight I got to switch to the exit row because it wasn’t full, which means more rooms for long legs and wide shoulders. Yes! The flight attendant swung by and asked, as is procedure:

            “You are sitting in an exit row. Have you familiarized yourself with the safety procedures featured on this plane and are you willing and able to assist the flight crew in the event of an emergency?” Honestly, I didn’t even let him finish.

            “You haven’t met anyone more willing and able. I am fully prepared to tell women to ‘Take off your heels before you jump!’” He looked at me quizzically. “You know, so the slide doesn’t pop.” I pointed to the no smoking symbol with a heel in the middle instead of a cigarette and he laughed and said perhaps I should be a flight attendant. It is a definite bucket list item.

Leaving Portlandia was great because I was anxious to get home. All that time in a van moving ever forward makes one long for a bit of consistency. But it wasn’t all celebration. Portland is a great city and I wasn’t there for too long. The locals called it the city of bridges for assumable reasons but I felt like it was the city of pedestrians (there's a bridge for that, too). Never before have I felt like, as an automobile operator, I was driving on roads that belonged to those on bikes or feet. There was no chaos, people were not leaping into the road or jaywalking, but it felt as though the design, the DNA of the city wasn’t meant for me. I was always yielding the right of way to someone else. But that changed as soon as I parked and walked to Powell’s Book Store where I meandered my way through four floors of stocked stacks to the drama aisle and found myself some gems.

I also swung northwest of the city to a beautiful coastal hill-topping town called Astoria, where the Columbia river meets the Pacific Ocean. Here there is a real sense that the country has come to an end, as if the river carries with it all the exhoes of experiences and peoples of the mainland and meets the great unknown distance. There is no more land to walk on, no more Westward to go. I visited a couple of friends there and they took me to see a lighthouse over the 3-mile bridge to Washington, the trendy downtown and the house where the Goonies was set in. It is a gorgeous town that felt very much like home to me. 

There is much that feels like home here, actually. Green with pine, coastal, bricked buildings and lighthouses. The same kind of folk roam the streets, tattooed and fluorescent, young and aware of their youth. This is different than many of us who are young and let it pass by in the pursuit of a middle aged life we don’t know we’d trade for youth once we got. I am wooed by this relaxing self-awareness that shucks off the pressure tall buildings and corner offices press down upon us as we saunter under their manmade shade. The Portlands both express this, but perhaps Oregon does it better; we are too close to New York City and they are bunkmates to cool California. Either way, I yielded all my apprehensions about leaving, any unfinished business and all my frustrations with this air travel and accepted that I was headed home. Another time I would visit again, I'm sure. This time I will cross the country, and it will only take one day.  

...light up

 Some Santa Barbara

California is indeed a menagerie of climates and atmospheres and moods. I didn’t see the entire south-north stretch, but I got most of it from Los Angeles through Sacramento and up to the Mount Shasta area before leaving the state for Oregon. I believe the Northwest really begins in the roots of Shasta. Though Sac and The City and L.A. and Santa wherever each have a unique feel, they are certainly all California-y. 

Some Hollywood

But as soon as the flatness starts rumbling again and that white capped mountain shines brightly in the distance, things begin to change. The pines come out in force, and rivers dig gorges into earth again and rocks thrust into the sky in a frozen excitement loom over the winding man-made highway. This is the Northwest.

But before I was there I was somewhere between the Southwest and the West.

Some Vegas

It seems like so long ago, now, when I was standing in Las Vegas looking up at sights I’d only seen in movies and feeling a bit cardboard, like I was in one of those movies, as a prop or scenery perhaps, that those facades would all be torn down when the final take is completed, to be replaced, that the illusion of three-dimension was accomplished by skilled artists and master magicians. I couldn’t do anything but stand and look around—besides, there isn’t really anything to do if you aren’t checking in somewhere and gambling. Perhaps that isn’t completely true—it felt that way—for it wasn’t void of excitement. No, there was electricity in the air—not just what was lighting up the whole strange colony—and everyone was in love. Couples meandered, took selfies and laughed, sometimes stumbling, and that joy was infectious. This is the city of sin, right? Well I didn’t have much time to indulge in many of my vices, so a cigarette had to suffice. I lit up, looked around, left.

Some San Simeon

After the long descent through Apple Valley the great state of California greeted me and I managed my way into L.A. Good thing for GPS; without it navigating the inverted labyrinths of roadways would have been impossible. Southern California was not without its perks—namely congenial weather—and the traffic wasn’t even so bad as the rumors purport. But you do drive everywhere. I know I drive everywhere in my own hometown, but the driving is thicker in L.A., or something. You want to wipe it all off like sweat, but it sticks too well. It may be some illusion—if it is, it is besieging—but everything seems so far away and takes so much energy to find and at the end of the day you wonder if you spent more time behind the wheel or away from it.

Some Los Angeles

It was a kind of relief to leave the valley and traverse the beautiful coastline up through Santa Barbara and then to Monterey and Carmel and Solinas and then to San Francisco (aka “The City”). The coast surprised me, actually. Thinking it similar to the golden shores of Miami, which is maybe the case in the L.A. area, it was oftener steep drops into crashing waves, like Icarine mountains that finally realized it was too hot and decided to go for a swim, somersaulting into the Pacific. As I went it proved to be a continuous (really) collision. North of San Francisco the coastal road was so windy I slalomed my way north feeling like a test driver avoiding orange cones in one of those commercials.

Some Carmel

But the Bay Area should not be passed over without mention. It is much larger than I ever anticipated—I’m not sure why—but just as hilly. The City is brimming with an energy, artistic, historic, diverse. The Spanish heritage is revived in authentic taquerias, and new and used bookstores speckle the strips of shops on roads filled with so many people dressed conspicuously that they are swallowed in a sea of eclecticism, like all those beautiful lights blinking at the same time in Vegas where the gorgeous marble statues go unnoticed. There seemed to be quite the “immigrant” population—all friendly—Easterners who abandoned their home for a Western one settle in the most Eastern city of the West. Honestly, Frisco’s a regular New York or Boston, in feel. But the city’s veins run west, and that attracts we who want something different, but the same, sort of.

Some San Francisco

So, I suppose it is like any other city in these regards. And maybe I liked it because all this time out West makes me long for home. Maybe that’s what’s nice about Oregon: how East it feels—they have a Portland even!—and no matter how close to the sunset I get, my heart is in his rise. Isn’t that what I loved about Santa Fe? How like morning she was, clear and fresh and crisp? Isn’t that what I left in Vegas and L.A., the cities who wake and live in the electrified dark?

The New Yorkian skyline of The City (not to mention the arrogance—our city is best) is familiar so far from familiarity. I lighten up.

Some Northwest

How good to bookend the trip, from one Portland to the other; from one pineland to another; from East to West. It makes me think how we really are all one, all United Statesian. Being at Pacific’s scratching fingers I am no farther from Atlantic’s reach. I stand on her shores and look far into the distance, to the Cathays and Tartars I may never see, may not even exist. Isn’t it true? Far enough West brings me still farther East after all. 

...do it tomorrow

All I kept saying was rad. The people, totally rad. The weather, the view, totally rad. The activities, professions, museums, performances, all rad. But what an outdated word for New Mexico! It is no longer the 80s, Simon; no one’s saying rad. Except me in New Mexico, apparently. But I couldn’t help it.

The Midwest is back there...ahead is the South West

Before I left I had a feeling I would like the South West, and I did. It began the moment I crossed into the state…something in the air shifted, perhaps. We were no longer in Kansas—thank God—and Oklahoma was behind us too. We were officially in the South West. The landscape responded immediately, as if to greet us from a deep sleep. First there were the easy, deep breaths in rolling hills. Then the mesas—glorious mesas!—rose in first movements and fresh eyes. That kind of love only morning sees gently grew into mountains in  the seated position, eyes rubbed with clouds. And that sun, fully awake, smiled at me and said ‘hello’ in a ‘good morning’ kind of way.

Omega Bridge outstide Taos, NM

Our first stop was in Taos, an artsy spiritual town unsurprisingly nestled in the heavens. In every direction you can see for miles and miles and then up even higher to surrounding peaks. In one corner lies the land of the Pueblo Indians, the other has a shrine to poet D. H. Lawrence, and in between are the shops and restaurants of tourist-fed wares and well-fed tourists. Indian artifacts and artwork, cowboy garb and southwestern spices were in the windows of shop after shop. But it is becoming with a view. Maybe even quaint. 

Easter sunrise in Arizona

At the Taos Diner II we interacted with genuine gals more concerned with contact and communication than orthodoxy, and I enjoyed every bit of it, from the off-color jokes printed on their menus to the casual way they poured coffee, to the matter-of-factedly way they denied service when the power went out. We sat and drank coffee until it went cold or the electricity came back on and told stories of bears in the mountains. Outside the restaurant the cook toked on her cigarette and laughed with the neighboring businessman about the situation.

It is the land of mañana, apparently, so this is par for the course. I met a transplanted New Yorker who told me that first when he explained the difference between “the way it works” in the North East and South West. Cowboy poet S. Omar Barker (aka Ol’ SOB) said it this way:

Mañana is Spanish word I’d sometimes like to borrow.

It means “don’t skeen no wolfs today that you don’t shot tomorrow!

An’ eef you got some jobs to do, in case you do not wanna,

Go ‘head an’ take siesta now! Tomorrow ees mañana!

Le Canyón Grande

But I like it this way—not so fast paced and crazed, with less stress clinging to us like our wintery garments.  I like that it is markedly different in the South West. The character is distinct from other state clusters. Maybe that's why I'm on the West Coast and finally getting to this haphazard post. Santa Fe is growing on me. Or maybe that’s why everything was rad—because it wasn’t cool, like California, or wicked like the North East. It isn’t awesome or tight or right-on. It’s just, totally rad.

…get the hell out of dodge

It’s been day after day, it seems, in deceptive listlessness. Like plains rolling into farms rolling into fields—the experience one has crossing Kansas—these recent weeks have been monotonous, though anticipatory.

My travels back from Nicaragua went as anyone’s would. I was able to spend my final hours on the stoops of the Ometepan locals, a joy I often miss on the fenced porches of the States. It takes a certain kind of life to end the day sitting outside, peaceably, watching children pass, conversing with neighbors, content with stillness. In Palestine they understood this secret pleasure. So too did those in Nepal and Jordan. I was reminded of my sweet life in the West Bank as I tried to speak Spanish, both jokingly and seriously, which are hardly different to the local. I sat through dusk into darkness; the volcano silently faded into the navy night and a host of starlight broke through the sun’s waning cover. Paradoxically, the conversation was light, but the contact much deeper, like Michelangelo’s God touching Adam. These moments of connection are so delicate, intricate, even beautiful, and they occur wherever we are able to really meet with someone as ‘other-worldly’ as a Nicaraguan, or United Statesian or wherever-ian.

However, I had to say adios beneath hopes of return and a smoky volcano. I rode the ferry across the choppiest waters I’ve ever experienced and I marveled at the fact that we docked. For a moment there I honestly had no idea how or when we’d stop and what we were going to smack into and from where I will jump to save myself. Good thing I don’t have an iPhone to get wet—I thought (yes, these are my concerns). Luckily the plane ride was smoother.

The PoeMobile gearing up for departure

Home was freezing, my back peeled completely from a burn and I discovered I had developed shingles across my side. So when folk asked me how was Nicaragua, I found myself replying with a kind of love-hate paradox. But I didn’t have time to dwell on it, really; it was packing time! My father were to be off to the West on another leg of the Dead Poet Tour—this one exploring from Santa Fe to L.A. to Seattle. And there was much to do.

As I write this, on our way to our first stop in Taos, New Mexico, we are in the windy, cold, precipitous tedium of Western Kansas. The phrase “get the hell out of dodge” was first said in reference to Dodge City which we just passed through. It makes sense. Three titillating days of sunshine in Kansas City and Wichita spoiled us. Now all I am hoping for are the sunned clay homes, mesas and cacti of my imagined Southwest as we chase the horizon.

Westward Poe!

Ever westward. Towards occidens, the setting sun. It is a historically poetic direction in which to explore. Eden was in the East, and so lay our beginnings. From our exile until Lewis and Clark, until now, even, we have been headed West. It seems it is as Kerouac says, the east of my past with the west of my future. It is in the west our days end, unreachable but chase-able. And so in the hand of Discovery is the hand of Dusk, and they are inseparable.

So let’s get the hell out of dodge and head westerly. There’s nothing here for us anyway.