My back porch rail is
a staging area for sparrows
planning their approach to
the feeder next door. No
bird-on-a-wire tightrope, it is
wide enough for half a dozen
of them side by side. So
it gives three of them
in a line time

to think
before
they dive

into the crowd,
snatch something
they thought

they saw
to carry
away.

There are always seeds in the feeder
in Winter. I give them pause.

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The tip of every branch
at the top of every
tree calls the way wind blows

to mind. One hundred
and eight mudras
dance trees

to light
leaves disperse
below a forest of them.

You’d think
they must bend
to desire, but it is

the power of the whole
song that moves them
more than hunger satisfied.

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I was on my way to the Point to take advantage of a bright Winter day in Chicago when I ran into a poet friend I hadn’t seen for some time. He was on his cellphone, so I didn’t expect him to be aware of my presence if I didn’t make a production of it. I considered shouting “Freeze!” (knowing we’d both enjoy the multivocality of that in Chicago in November) but, remembering the difference between “Steve,” “Steven,” and “Steven Herbert” when my mother said them, I opted instead to address him formally the way his mother must have called him when he was in real trouble as a kid  –  first, middle, and last name.

That worked.

He closed his phone and we laughed at the subtle reminder of just how long it had been. He was in a hurry and expecting another call, so he didn’t have time for a conversation. But he told me to check out his blog for big news about some contest he’d won and promised to email when he had a free moment.

“Gotta run,” he said. “No rest for the wicked.” And he was gone.

I went on walking and thought of other things.

When I got home, I turned the computer on and noticed that there was already a new email from him. He’d probably sent it on his Blackberry.

I was struck by how vividly it called my friend to mind  –  all over the place on the surface, bouncing in ten thousand directions, always on the move, but, underneath it all, a real presence so focused that it was unsettling, a voice composed of megalomania and self-effacement.

A poet’s voice, whatever the medium of the moment…

A link took me to his blog, where I skimmed and forgot details of the prize. Something about a poem in the spirit of a famous poet now dead  –  Stevens, maybe, or Dickinson, or Frost.

I followed links with no plan in mind, and one thing led to another.

There was a thread about the death of the book, and every time a book was mentioned, it glowed a different color to show that you could follow it to an electronic text or a page devoted to it at a virtual bookstore. Authors’ names glowed, too, and linked to pages and pages of biography, history, criticism, commentary.

I found myself quickly and hopelessly lost in it.

One page, it turned out, was on a site that simply gathered old texts scanned by random volunteers using imperfect OCR software (and, yes, I realize “imperfect OCR” is redundant, but where would story telling be without redundancy?). I mention the imperfection of OCR not so much as a criticism of the technology (which is improving by the minute) but as a sort of flag to signal a territory where relationships among copies of copies and knowledge of normative texts might be mapped. Where the scanner knew the text and took time to read the copy, corrections had been made. Where the scanner knew the text but did not take the time (or did not think she or he had the time to take), textual variants  –  including some that were quite plausible  –  were created. Where the scanner did not know the text, the taking of time did not much matter. In every case, imperfections of software and limitations of hardware (not to mention the remarkable tendency of human perception to see what it expects to see when looking at what it thinks it knows) virtually guaranteed a proliferation of texts.

And the one that stopped me appeared to be a case of a scanner scanning a text about which she or he knew nothing. No indication of where it was found, and, because it was rendered as a text using unnamed OCR software, no indication of the form, structure, or appearance of the “original.” Was it a book? A set of notes? A manuscript? Was it translated? By whom? Who was the author?

I was free to speculate.

I guessed that it must have been typed or printed by someone, some time, unless somebody had developed a program that could more or less reliably convert handwritten text into computer code. I made a mental note to google that later. But, in the meantime, I assumed this text must be at least a copy of a copy of a copy.

Of a conversation, if I could believe my eyes, in Greek.

“I must have done something to please the gods, Ion, else why would I meet you two days running?”

“I’ve been thinking about our conversation yesterday, Socrates, and I believe I was so caught up in the thrill of victory that I did not know I was being damned with faint praise.”

“Whatever do you mean, Ion? Damned? Faint praise? I certainly have nothing but admiration for your work.”

“No doubt. But asked to choose between being an artist and being divine in your mind, I should have chosen to be an artist.”

“There is great merit, Ion, in knowing what you should have known, even if you know it only after the fact. And therein lies the problem.”

“What problem might that be, Socrates, and wherein do you mean?”

“Exactly, Ion. We must make the problem clear  –  we must place it  –  if we hope to get anywhere in conversation. Perhaps we failed to do that yesterday, and that is why the conversation continues.”

“As it always seems to do, Socrates, as long as you are involved.”

“I imagine it will do so with or without my involvement, Ion. But let us attend to the problem in this conversation here, now, between us, and let conversation as a whole see to itself.”

“Very well. And where shall we begin?”

“In the middle, Ion, where we always are, and where we left off before. On reflection, you came to know that you were misled, as you put it, by ‘faint praise’ when you chose being thought divine by others over being an artist. And I implied that you were correct when I acknowledged just now that there is great merit in knowing what we should have known even if we know it only after the fact.”

“Yes, Socrates.”

“But, in doing so, I also suggested that there is a problem  –  and, since I can see no reason to doubt that knowledge is virtue, the problem must lie precisely in the after-the-factness of our knowledge.”

“Yes, Socrates.”

“And perhaps the choice between being divine in the minds of others and being an artist may contain some clues.”

“This is my thinking on the matter, Socrates. And, though I can’t quite put my finger on the problem, I became aware that there was one when it dawned on me that being divine in the mind of others didn’t amount to much, while being an artist…”

“A question, Ion. Is it between the artist and the divine alone that you are choosing, or is it between being and being in the mind of others?”

“Socrates, I think you would think me arrogant if I thought for a moment I could be divine anywhere other than in the mind of others.”

“Then it appears to me, Ion, that your primary concern is what you are in the mind of others.”

“Well yes, Socrates. What else could it be for a performer?”

“What else indeed. And that recalls a thread that may have been left dangling in the conversation yesterday.”

“What thread is that?”

“The thread that runs through the divine, the artist, and the performer. We have, I fear, assumed that thread rather than tracing it.”

“Shall we trace it now?”

“This, I think, would be the time, at least, to begin. The prize you won  –  what was it for?”

“You know the answer to that, Socrates. It was for my performance of Homer’s poetry. That is all I do, and I do it well.”

“And isn’t that the beginning of the road, Ion, that led to your choosing to be divine in the mind of others over being an artist?”

“Yes, Socrates. I suppose it is.”

“Perhaps, then, a second look would be in order.”

“Yes.”

“How is it, Ion, that you think you know you do what you do well?”

“Winning prizes seems a pretty good indicator.”

“Yes, it seems so. How do you come to win a prize?”

“Why, that’s obvious, Socrates. By winning the acclaim of audiences and judges.”

“And how do you win such acclaim?”

“For the audience, I suppose, it depends on whether my performance gives them a good laugh or a good cry. For the judges, perhaps it depends also on whether I make the audience laugh when Homer is funny and cry when he is sad.”

“For the judges, then, the ‘goodness’ of the laughing and the crying depends on your performance evoking the emotions Homer intended.”

“Yes.”

“Which means the judges must know Homer’s intentions.”

“Yes, I suppose it does.”

“And how do they come to know Homer’s intentions?”

“Well, now that you ask, I’m not sure that they do know. But they make a judgment to the best of their ability based on their knowledge of Homer and their knowledge of human experience.”

“So, Ion, the judges must read both Homer and the world?”

“So it seems.”

“And they must also read the audience, which, in a manner of speaking is reading you.”

“Yes, that seems to be the case.”

“So your prize depends on how judges who know Homer and the world judge what an audience reading you does based on what you do.”

“Yes.”

“And what you do follows Homer.”

“Yes.”

“And Homer?”

“Homer, I suppose, reads the world. And he reads it well.”

“Forgive me, Ion, but I’m not sure I understand what you mean when you say Homer reads the world well. How do you come to know that?”

“I know that because I know the world, and what Homer writes is true to it.”

“So Homer’s greatness consists in his being true to the world.”

“Yes.”

“And when you perform Homer, your greatness depends on being true to his being true.”

“Well, yes, that  –  and the audience being moved and the judges taking note of it.”

“Now, Ion, it seems to me that we have moved down a path very similar to the one we traveled yesterday. Homer responds to the world. You respond to Homer. The audience responds to you. And the judges respond to the audience, you, and Homer. It seems, as we concluded yesterday, that everyone in this sequence is doing something derivative, something that depends on someone else.”

“Yes, Socrates. But what of the gods?”

“Quite right, Ion. That was our point before, wasn’t it? The truth of the world lies in the divine, and it passes through us as the force of a magnet passes through a series of metal rings, growing weaker as it passes.”

“But, Socrates, that’s exactly what was troubling me as I reflected on the conversation yesterday. It seems to me that we allowed ourselves to be diverted from the questions that matter most when we chose to represent the force of poetry growing weaker as it grew more distant from god.”

“And what might these questions that matter most be, Ion?”

“It seems to me, Socrates, that everyone and everything in the sequence you described is doing something and that we judge the doing, if we judge it rightly, by observing its effect. The questions that matter, then, would be what, in each case, is being done, who or what it is being done to, and who or what is doing it.”

“So what you have come to know after the fact of the conversation yesterday is that the questions that matter are concerned with both action and passion  –  and with both agent and object.”

“Yes, so it now seems to me.”

“And how does that lead you to prefer being an artist over being divine in the mind of others?”

“Being divine in the mind of others is doing nothing, is it not? And it may be doing nothing nowhere if the mind of others is nothing other than something we have made.”

“Perhaps. But the fact of the conversation yesterday is the product of our doing, is it not? And that appears to be what enabled you to see something you had not seen before.”

“Socrates, I believe that is correct. And do we call our doing art, or do we attribute it to a god who does with and through us what she will?”

The rest of the text was garbled, the result, I suppose of a corrupted file. I wondered then if there was a server somewhere that contained uncorrupted files.

On reflection, I think not.

I tried to retrace my steps to my friend’s blog so I could bookmark some of the pages along the way I’d traveled; but I got tired of hitting my browser’s back button. The history had grown so complex that I did not choose the link I thought I was choosing when I tried to skip over a big chunk of it. I hit the back button again and couldn’t remember ever having visited the page at which I arrived. It was a total surprise, and I could see no connection with what I’d been doing since my morning walk. So I cleared the cache and thought I’d start over after a cup of coffee.

When I pushed my chair back from my desk, stood, and turned to go to the kitchen, I knocked over a pile of books that had accumulated over three weeks and half a dozen projects.

In falling, it knocked over a second pile. And so on.

Another series of hyperlinks.

Looking up at me from what was now two heaps on the floor that one would have thought had no rhyme or reason were Jack Kerouac’s Book of Haikus and a collection of early poems by Robert Frost. Wallace Stevens looked down from the shelf above.

first thought, best thought

…there are many things I have found myself saying about poetry, but the chiefest of these is that it is metaphor, saying one thing and meaning another, saying one thing in terms of another, the pleasure of ulteriority. Poetry is simply made of metaphor. So also is philosophy  –  and science, too, for that matter, if it will take the soft impeachment from a friend…

death is the mother of beauty

The phone is ringing, but I have no intention of answering.

(presented at the Midwest Modern Language Association Meeting in Minneapolis, November 2008, as part of a panel on poetry and philosophy)

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pine wash
aspen lines
white bristle

mockingbird
sings light sable
down mountains

song paints
silent lakes in
low places

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1.

As a child, she liked to hide
inside a pipe organ playing.
Doctors call what followed loss

of hearing. But everything
outside follows being
inside music now.

2.

An engineer
wanted a piano
he never played

out of his basement
after forty years.
Thinking himself

too old
to move it whole
now as he’d moved it

then, he took it apart
and moved it one piece
at a time.

He counted keys,
weighed the iron
harp frame he broke

to sell as scrap,
made a workbench
of the sounding board,

made a story
of passing time
unmaking music.

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Every small town
with its back turned
is a line of headlights

blinking red in answer
to a signal that marks
the passing of a train

making its way in rain
to Seattle, that marks
a city dispersed

across a plain
of dark cars, dark
houses, dark bars

under neon lights
that promise
exotic places

but deliver
local spirits
with noise

enough to make anyone
who happens in
believe they are not alone.

On the train, we think
we’ve made good time
when we see Pioneer Press

long before they told us
we would arrive.
Cellphones open.

Passengers call
to make connections.
I have been waiting for the bus

since Chicago. Lines of freight trains
remind us who owns these tracks.
Conductor tells a story about a collision

to keep us in our seats, but we all rise
to wait while tracks are switched by hand, and
we roll into the station just minutes ahead of schedule.

I stop to look at the full moon
but do not miss the bus.
My absence means nothing

to the train, which will
carry it while it goes on dividing
small towns into this side and the other

to the other side of sunrise
this side of Fargo. And the bus
would have been there with me

or without. No need to call.
In the Twin Cities, bus is
ubiquitous as god until the last bar closes.

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when you write If you died
today, where would you spend
eternity? “If you died”
with “would” suggests you know
I haven’t or won’t, but how? And if
I die today, how will my
dying be connected to my
spending of eternity? Does one
spend eternity the way
one spends time? Why then
would my dying change where
I would spend it? Or will
my dying? And can one
save it for a later time? Draw
interest? What would be the place
of spending time or eternity? Seems
it could be any place, and it isn’t
really spent. If one spent all of eternity,
would it be finally spent? And does time spend
itself if I don’t? Time, perhaps, passes,
but that does not depend on what
I do. And if eternity passes
the way time does, what sense
does it make to call it something other
than time? If it is not time, I don’t suppose
I am spending it, though it is present
in each place I am today,
alive or dead. Or should I say
the places are present in it? Are they
also in time? And is time in
eternity passing? I can not imagine
I will have to pass it when
I am dead. But that may be
a failure of my imagination.

In any case,
thank you for the puzzle,
which helped me
pass time if not eternity
in Tennessee today.

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What have you done? The voice of your
brother’s blood cries to me
from the ground.
-Genesis 4:10

The world goes on
the world goes
on the world
goes on

and on and on
but music
pauses,

not to mourn
our dead
but this

human presence
that cannot say we
without murdering its brother.

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(manifesto)

1

In practice,
theory is

a matter
of the body, not

metaphysical
subtleties

theological
niceties

an old philosopher
on his head–

2

the only
reason

power
to move

someone
something

somewhere
or other,

dynamite,
the right

machinery
in play.

3

Not thinking
like a mountain,

nothing to lose,
make nothing

happen — don’t do,
stand there.

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“Take Off Your Shoes: Between Religion and Ethics,” Santalka, Vol. 16, No. 3 , p. 37-49. (available for download in pdf)

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