12.31.2004

Calvinism

I wanted to make mention, at least to myself, and to any and all deities who may be in existence and who may be inclined to lend an eye or an ear: I think Calvinism, as I understand it, which is to say not that much, is pure evil and an insult to humanity. This view is subject to change, of course, and I will make note of any and all changes to this view if and when they develop.

Sometimes I get angry at religious folk in general, and then I focus my anger on Christians, probably simply because most religious people I know are Christians, and sometimes I am absolutely forgiving of certain types of Christians, those of a more intelligent and loving personality who do not believe in eternal damnation and all that silliness, and direct my anger at Christians who not only believe in Hell but who cannot seem to contain the excitement they feel over the prospect of watching millions of people being swept into a giant hole in the earth by the beneficent hand of Jesus, whom they call the Prince of Peace.

At this present time, I can find it in my heart to excuse even these types, since they believe in the idea that a choice is given to every individual, and that the act of faith can lead to the salvation of every soul who wants it. Calvinists, with their ideas about predestination and the so-called "elect", can apparently find it in their hearts to worship a God who actually creates a great number of people for no other purpose than to damn them eternally.

Calvinists believe that God has selected who will be saved and who will not, and that the act of being saved has nothing whatsoever to do with whether a man deserves it or not. Salvation is seen not as an act of justice, but of grace. Faith is not something a person needs to attain on their own. Indeed, it is not something that a person can attain on their own. It is a gift from God. Conversely, and disgustingly, if God has pre-ordained that a person will not be saved, then there is absolutely nothing said person can do about it.

Through an amazing blanking out of reason and rationality, God is somehow absolved from all responsibility insofar as regards a person's damnation. He ordains, or decrees it, from the very beginning, and yet he is free from responsibility. People who are passed over, who are left to eternal separation from God and eternal punishment, are justly damned, and are deserving of their damnation, despite the fact that their damnation was pre-established eons before they were born.

Calvinists are full of shit. Either that or God is evil. But God can't be evil, by definition; and so Calvanism has to be wrong. Not only wrong, but evil, since it slanders God. These are opinions, not knowledge claims, and as such are subject to change.

Scary, though, that some of the present day's strongest and most influential apologists are Calvinists.

Happy New Year

12.29.2004

Stepping South

I never had much of a liking for the French forms, but the villanelle (yes, the vil has Italian roots, but I believe that it's commonly thought of as a French form) has always had a bit of a pull on me. I've never tried a ballade, or a triolet, or a roundel, for instance, but I made two or three attempts at the villanelle when I was in my late teens or early twenties. I think I still have them somewhere, but I won't bother to look for them, and neither will anyone else.

My wife and I were watching "Little Big Man", and afterwards I went online to look up General Custer. I told my wife that Custer was buried at West Point, where I was born, and I wanted to verify that. As it happens, I never found out where Custer was buried, because I got side-tracked. Photos of Native Americans have a weird sort of power over me. They always look so especially wise and dignified, and I am certain that a great many were exactly that, and much more. When I came upon the photograph of
Big Foot, the Lakota chief who was killed at Wounded Knee, I was truly stunned. For the first time, I was conscious of the thought: "this, if anything, deserves a poem. A remembrance."

The two repetends came to me all at once, and for a very brief moment I entertained the notion of simply letting them constitute the poem: an elegaic couplet. Then I pondered making a sonnet; but fairly quickly I settled on a villanelle. After that it was six days and dozens of drafts before I had something I could tolerate.

But that doesn't matter. The poem was received very well, as I mentioned before. Naturally, the very next thing I did after that was....write another vil. Why that happened I'm not exactly sure. I like the sonnet form a great deal more than the vil, but I've only written one sonnet since last year. I've written six or seven vils. It's like some kind of bizarre addiction, but it's stupid and pathetic.

Naturally, I don't dare post another vil for critique. It would almost certainly be trashed. I posted only one poem since "At Wounded Knee", at
Eratosphere, an unrhymed sonnet which got luke-warm comments. I was reminded of that line from Randall Jarrell's poem "90 (degrees) North", which goes something like, "No matter where I turn, my step is to the south..."

That's the problem with writing something people actually like: they expect you to be able to keep doing it. But maybe I wrote a decent poem accidentally. It could happen. Or maybe the poem stinks and those fine folks at the Sphere are crazy.

Nonetheless, I need to get these vils off my chest somehow, so why not here? No one reads my blog anyway.

*raspberry*

12.28.2004

Self-Interview

I've always had vivid dreams, and usually not very pleasant dreams, though not necessarily nightmares. My dreams, at least from about the age of twenty or so, were (and are) almost exclusively variations on one particular theme: that there is something unaccomplished in my life, something undone, something which I am in the process of doing but cannot complete, for whatever reason. The emotions I experience in my dreams are always of a patently negative quality: frustration, dread, isolation, alienation, and an over-bearing sense of my own hopeless incompetence.

Nothing difficult here: I graduated high school a year later than I was supposed to, due of a lack of credits, and also, more truthfully, due to a lack of desire to move on and become an adult. I was a late-starter (or never-starter) in almost everything I can think of. I didn't get a driver's license until I was twice the legal driving age. Whatever serious romantic relationships I had were undertaken when I was well into my twenties, though I had had a fair amount of fly-by-night encounters, at the usual stages, in the usual places. My dreams of being a musician have vanished, and my desire to make something of myself as a poet is on the wane.

So here I am, at forty, in fairly decent health, as far as I know. I'm happily married, the father of two boys, and have been steadily employed since 1989. I live close to my sister and my parents, with whom I have a warm and positive relationship; but over the past few months my dreams have become even drearier than before, and they are still nothing more than re-castings of the same old theme of failure and incompetence. I still dream, for instance, that I am in high school, trudging through yet another year. Except I'm not a teen in these dreams, I'm an adult: my current self, a forty year old senior who has yet to graduate. I can't find my way through the building. I have only a vague sense of where I am supposed to be, but no idea how to get there. The school becomes a labyrinth: dark, complex, and completely unfamiliar. I miss all my classes, wander around lost, speak to no one because they don't acknowledge me. I wake with an intense feeling of shame and regret.

Another variation of this tired theme is a kind of lost traveller dream. I am in a town or city somewhere, but the environment and the people are completely strange to me. I am with them, so I feel I should know them, but I don't. I have an overwhelming desire to go home, but have absolutely no idea how to go about getting there. Sometimes I'm walking. I end up at night going down some road which I feel is vaguely familiar: usually a road in upstate New York where I grew up. I feel I am getting a sense of where I am, but wind up utterly lost as whatever familiarity I sense in where I am dissipates, engulfed in darkness, to the point where I can see almost nothing at all.

I always thought that this dream was due to the fact that I never drove until I was well into adulthood, and always felt a definite lack of freedom of mobility: the queerness of the dream was certainly rooted in what were for a considerable time very real fears and concerns; but oddly enough, even though I have been driving for ten years now, these types of dreams occur just as frequently as they always did. Nothing changes in the dream except that I am in a car. Unfortunately, I have little or no control of the vehicle, and usually the headlights don't work. I find myself speeding down those same vaguely familiar roads, with trees looming in from either side. It's very dark, and I am driving blindly, recklessly. Hopelessly lost. Occasionally I find myself on a highway, desperately trying to figure out how to get home. I rise to the crest of a hill and things seem hopeful and familiar to me, but as I drive on the environment changes and I am god-knows where. I've lived in Arizona since 1989, and have done all my driving here, and yet I dream exclusively of the rural north-east where I grew up: mountains, trees, quaint old towns. My current family is hardly ever with me in these dreams. I am still the fearful and solitary person I was as a teenager.

Sometimes, in these lost traveller dreams, I actually do get home, but home is not home anymore (*smacks forehead*). The trailer park where I lived until I was twelve is bizarre and strange, full of strangers. The trailer I lived in is someone else's home, and as I go through it I realize too late that I've made a mistake, and wind up hiding somewhere while the people who presently live there come home. I feel like a criminal, as well as lost, abandoned, and utterly desolate. I sneak through the trailer, which becomes a giant house with empty rooms and long hallways, crooked stairwells, trying to find a way to escape; but the darkness creeps in until I can barely make my way. I stumble through vacant rooms, up and down stairs, through more vacant rooms, trying to find a door which apparently doesn't exist.

And this is often a dream in itself, without the lost-traveller preamble. I am home, usually in the house my family and I lived in in Mountainville, NY, from 1977-1988. There are "normal" moments, when I am with my brother or sister, or my parents, but these moments are fleeting. Soon enough I am by myself. Everyone else has gone out. The television pops off, the lights go out. I stumble around, fishing under lampshades, turning switches to no avail. None of the lights in any of the rooms will work. In reality, I would assume that the power had gone out, but in these dreams I fail to make the connection. In the dreams, I am sure that the problem is simply that everything has failed at precisely the same time. The television has simply broken: all of the lightbulbs in all of the rooms have given up the ghost, simultaneously. I feel a terrible sense of some malevolent presence. Something is doing this to me. It isn't just bad luck. It's being done on purpose. And every time I have this dream I am conscious of the same thoughts: this is it. This time it's for real. It's not a dream. It's really happening this time. Naturally these dream-thoughts eventually convince me that I am, in fact, dreaming, at which time I awake. I suppose I must have this dream at least three times a month, if not more. When I wake, it takes me some time to orient myself to the present time, to the present place. It might take me several seconds to recall that I have a wife and children, and that my brother and sister, my parents, are not actually under the same roof as I am.
* * *

Two nights ago (on the very night I wrote the above), I had a version of this "dark house" dream, but this time I was in a huge hotel. Of course, it wasn't a hotel at first. I think it may have started out as my old high school, and the beginning of the dream, which I have only a vague recollection of, might have been something along the lines of the "adult student" dream. The part of the dream which I vividly remember took place when the building had become a giant hotel. I was with my first family, I believe, but somehow I wound up becoming separated from them. I was in a hotel room alone, and naturally, everything began to become engulfed in darkness. There was a television on, as there almost always in these types of dreams, and this was giving what appeared to be the only light. I ventured out into the corridor, and wandered around some, but everything was so quiet, lifeless, and dark that I quickly went back into the room I was occupying, with the typical feelings of abandonment, isolation, and fear.

What was different about this dream was the fact that I knew what was afoot, and decided early on not to venture too far. I must have been conscious inside the dream that I wouldn't be able to find anyone or make my way, perhaps because I had only a few hours before been discussing this dream-darkness and it was fresh in my mind. I believe that I woke fairly quickly after realizing that I wasn't going to get anywhere or find anyone. Interesting.


Here's a poem-like item I wrote on the subject of my dreams:




SELF INTERVIEW

I.

Open the curtains, darkness, flip switches,
darkness, darkness so thick it hurts
there. In that here. An abyss.
You stumble blindly through the house
you grew up in. Yes. Always.
But you left years ago. Did you feel
No. I never felt completely secure there.
Alright, ask. The cause of all that?
How many times can I say it, yes yes yes.
Confined, lazy. All of those,
all at once. Absolutely no reason. But you
Absolutely no reason, because I could have
changed everything. I had no strength.
Now look out the window to the left
past the casements which I mentioned
many times. Old hunting cabin Dad
made over, no closets, frames put up
but never finished, had my own bed,
double wide. You were about to describe
the window. Not describe. Look out of.

Trees with soldiers in them. Remember now
these are dreams. My brother and I
would lay on the bed with invisible rifles
and pick them off, one by one they'd drop
thump thump on the ground, roll down
the slope of the hill like boulders.
You killed them. They weren't really there.
But in the dreams I have now, those trees
are dark and breed darkness, multiply
and weave darkness upon darkness,
in the winds outside the window they sway,
like monsters. Leviathans. Sure, I like that.
Behemoths, more like, land-locked.

But it's every night or every other.
The family is out, the cars are gone.
It's night time. Bang. Black-out. Always
the same. Silver horn of panic. Bile
in the throat. No lights. Paw under shades,
mildewy shades, can't find the switch.
Relax. Can't. It's always the same. TV
pops off, zoomph, black. No lights. I know
the power goes out, but in the dreams
I don't realize. I mean I don't make
the connection. It's not that the power
is out, it's that all the bulbs have given
up the ghost at once. Just my luck
kind of thoughts. You feel persecuted?
Victim of bad luck? Last one. Not so first.
Bad luck, bad juju. Or haunted? God yes.
You know I don't believe in the preternatural.
Not at all? No. But I'm afraid of ghosts.
Hear me out. I didn't mean to laugh.


II.

Towns I've never seen, on the bright edges
of cities no maps take note of. Gothams.
But these are real towns, full of teens
in convertibles tearing down boulevards,
not the teens I knew, but I'm stuck with them.
Handsome devils all, with perfect girls,
never lost, never abandoned. How do you
know they are not the ones you went with?
I don't recognize them, and I don't like them.
Can we move on? No. Like I said, cruising.
Finding parties to which I'm not invited.
Finding a girl. Losing the girl. Chasing her
through labyrinths, crowds always smothering her,
snuffing her like a taper. I found my wife kneeling
by a divan, giving some quarterback
a hand-job. About eight times my size it was, in
her tiny hand, tattooed, with buttons, levers,
bells and whistles. I'd been given the standard
issue. She seemed delighted. Who wouldn't be?

Waterfall. Pardon? Waterfall. Lights on a hill
in a ring, a sheer drop, tree roots hanging,
and a waterfall. They climbed through it,
brave, undaunted. I couldn't go through. I
could never get to the other side. Slopes. Floors
sloped. Driveways at impossible angles,
red-tiled floors I'm slated to mop, steep. Water
related to loss? Water related to inadequacy?
Of course. I'm afraid of water. I can't swim.
Tidal waves, submarines, collossal vessels,
everyone's smiling. A day at the fucking beach.
Tanned, smiling. When my toes can't touch bottom
I'm a dead man. And then they dive:
From cliffs to slender uprising columns
of stone. They somersault, swandive, jack-knife,
hundreds of feet, and always land upright, dead-
center. Balance, no worries. Turn and dive a hundred
feet lower, onto a narrower platform. Then they
look up dot-size and beckon with peachy arms.
They don't understand your fear? No, and
why should they? It's so damned easy for them.

III.

Looked for C-wing, but wound up
in cellars, or out side doors I never knew
were there. That were not there.
Rows of blue lockers went on and on
ad infinitum, an illusion, done with mirrors.
How would I find mine, nothing
I had was there, I'd long since forgotten
the combinations. A pink flimsy paper
with my classes clutched in hand,
no books. No familiar faces.

Hallways sloped like irregular hills
and at their mysterious ends small white
holes of light, mold, rot, dead teachers.
Biology lab, test tubes, bunson burners,
students I've seen full grown at gas-stations.
C-wing senior homeroom, for the thousandth
time, elusive door and flag and book stink.
No I have not done the assignment. I did not
know of the assignment. Let's go back to the
cellars was it? Bathrooms, but deep down,
low ceilings, stools with floaties, paper
wadded in corners. No stall doors and where
there are doors they don't function, won't lock.
The place is usually the same, not much
changes, and it's not so much fear as shame.
Where is that goddamm room, the seven
or eight searches between bells. Mile-long
corridors boiling with impossible girls.
In the back of my dreaming mind I think
I still don't give a damn, can't find the door.

12.25.2004

"Trust your feelings, Luke"

While I was watching a documentary on the making of the "Star Wars" films, it occured to me that George Lucas is certainly one of the world's true geniuses. As a "fallen" student of Objectivism, I made the obvious parallels between Lucas and Ayn Rand's Howard Roark.

Lucas had a vision of something he wanted to do, something on a grand scale, and he persevered through numerous set-backs and against immeasurable odds in order to bring his abstract vision to concrete form. He did this by refusing to buckle under to criticism, which apparently was coming from within as well as without, as many of the people involved in making the film, from the executive upper-crust to the actors themselves, obviously had very little confidence at the time that what they were doing would have any lasting impact or value. I've always said that Harrison Ford played his character in the first film as if he didn't have a great deal of genuine respect for the material, that his performance was sometimes careless and flippant.

Lucas said, in this documentary, that he had always been sort of allergic to the whole "corporate" thing, to the "establishment", so to speak, for want of a better way to put it; but, in the course of making his films, of becoming ridiculously rich and powerful, he had actually "become" the very thing which he'd always strongly disliked and wished to avoid. He drew a parallel between his life and the metamorphosis of the Darth Vader character. Anakin starts out as a fiercely independant yet dedicated Jedi, but over the course of time, he eventually becomes the embodiment of the very evil which he had once been sworn to oppose.

Some would say that Ayn Rand herself went through a similar metamorphosis. Her opponents, which are many, describe her as little more than the originator and leader of a dogmatic, secular cult. For anyone who isn't familiar with Rand's philosophy, the words "dogma" and "cult" were both anathema to her. Objectivists today are under fire everywhere, and are often refered to as "Randroids": they are accused of being the brain-washed followers of a cult leader. I don't agree with most of the criticism of Rand or of Objectivists, but I can't help finding the irony interesting.

* * *

I have no idea whether or not Ayn Rand saw any of the Stars Wars films. I believe (though I'm not certain) that she was alive for the first two. I suppose I should do a search on this before I say anything. I'm not aware of anything she may have said in regard to those films, but I would bet that she'd have found something to enjoy, but far, far more to dislike.

The Stars Wars films aren't original as far as the story goes. It's as old as the hills, even older than that cliche. Good versus evil, with both sides being clearly distinguished from the other. It's an ancient and familiar tale, told in a strange and exciting new world. Old wine in new bottles, to use yet another tired expression. I think Lucas's genius consists in taking such a time-worn, if time-tested, formula and managing to come up with something that could still move an audience in such a powerful way; and I don't think for a moment that the primary reason Star Wars succeeded was because of the special effects. I'm sure that they were a crucial factor, but I think more elementary and basic things factored in to an even greater degree: the simplicity of the story, the unambiguousness of the characters, the likeability of the players, the pleasing irony of the traditional morality play transpiring among starships, robots, and strange alien creatures, the effective contrast of synthesized, mechanical sounds and voices set against the lush backdrop of a full symphony orchestra. How could all that not work?

Well, there are a million ways that it might not have worked, and were it not for Lucas's vision, his dogged endurance and power to persevere, it would have failed. But that's not really what I want to write about. I mean, it is, but it isn't.

I suppose my brief brush with Objectivism will always have some kind of an impact on how I presently think. While I can still sit and be powerfully moved by Star Wars, as I just have been in fact, with my two sons on either side of me, it still bothers me that there is a giant conflict at work in that film: not the conflict of good versus evil, but that of rationality versus mysticism, of reason versus faith. In the old myths, set in times long before the advances in science and industry, long before the Renaissance, long before the Enlightenment, there isn't that great a problem when it comes to the suspension of disbelief. There's no immediate difficulty in believing that Odysseus is the son of a Goddess, that he lives under the hand of a type of divine providence, that his actions go according to some kind of pre-ordained fate or destiny. The same with the King Arthur legend. The story is set somewhere amid the dark ages, and so we have no problem dealing with "strange women lying in ponds, distributing swords" (Monty Python), or with magicians, sorcerors, witches, spells, fate, or destiny.

But in the Star Wars universe, technology is the order of the day. Only great knowledge and rational thinking, the unadulterated application of reason to complex, large-scale problems and challenges, could have brought about such a state of affairs, and yet in this universe there is not much that is new as far as the characters are concerned, whether in regard to their motivations and actions, or their titles and stations in life. Almost nothing has changed from the old myths and stories. There is a Princess, a farmboy, the mentor/magician archtype, an evil emperor, and his evil henchman, Vader, who is even called Lord.

During his apprenticeship, which is amazingly brief, Luke is old to "trust his feelings", and that his eyes will deceive him. He is not told to think, he's told to feel. The Force is pure mysticism, with no disguise whatsoever, except that it's stripped of any divine personality, and refered to as a kind of impartial energy, which can be tapped into and exploited either for good or for evil. Han Solo has what amounts to the only lines which come from the voice of reason, but the film works so well that we actually convince ourselves that his lack of faith is a grievous character flaw. In the scene at the end where Luke fires the shot that destroys the Death Star, it isn't his skill as a pilot or as a marksman that wins the day: it's his faith, his gut, his destiny-guided intuition. It's not his brain that deals the death-blow to evil, but his feelings.

Maybe this is where Lucas's true genius lies. That he could create such a moving piece of work with such obvious conflicts going on, that perhaps the conflict of reason versus faith is part and parcel of the conflict of good versus evil, or maybe they are one and the same, which is an unsettling prospect. Or maybe the message is simple: that as we progress technologically we tend to lose sight of the old virtues and values, and that our only saving grace will be whether or not we can get a firm grasp on them again, before we blow ourselves into stardust.

Merry Mind-games

Another Christmas come and gone, for the most part anyway. I hate to sound like a curmudgeon, or a cynic, but I'm particularly glad this year to be past that Christmas-morning hump.

Last night I watched my oldest son playing a game that he had gotten from relatives. We'd been out visiting for Christmas Eve and he and his little brother got to open a few presents. This game was one that you just plugged into the front of your television set, a simple little multi-game system for young children. He decided early on that he was having no fun at all with this game, got frustrated quickly, and suddenly burst into tears. "It's not fun!" he kept saying, as if in bewilderment. How could a gift from Santa Claus NOT be fun? It didn't make sense to him, and I think he was quite a bit put-off. He's at that age now where he still believes (or did, up to a few hours ago) in Santa, but is starting to consider all sorts of things a great deal more thoughtfully. His reasoning skills are kicking in, his ability to come to his own conclusions about the whys and wherefores of certain events in his life.

I'm no psychologist, but what bothers me is that I couldn't shake the idea that my son felt somehow slighted, even punished, at least maybe to some very minor degree, because he received a gift which he didn't wish for and which he didn't much care for. Consider it for a minute: from a young age children are told a great deal of myths, lies, fanciful fabrications, all of which they believe, at least until they are told the truth or figure things out for themselves. Leaving the religious myths aside, the Santa Claus story actually distorts the entire purpose of gift-giving, as far as I'm concerned. A gift isn't something that a person ought to earn, yet children are explicitely told that they will only get gifts from Santa if they are good. Santa has god-like omniscience, which is a frightening prospect, as well as near-god-like omnipresence, since he can give children all over the world their presents in a single night, as well as appear in several schools and stores at precisely the same time. Amazing guy, that Santa.

So kids buy the myth, because they are true innocents (despite the revolting and stupid concept of Original Sin), and so they make up their wish-lists and mail them off to the Big Guy. Then, come Christmas morning, when they find that things have not exactly gone their way, what might their bright little minds think? What if their parents had very little money and couldn't buy their kids what they wanted? What if what their kids wanted was impossible to find, or all sold-out, or simply didn't exist? What might these disappointed children think?

I know I'm putting too fine a point on it, but is it too far-fetched to think that some kids might actually attribute their being disappointed to the possibility that they deserved to be disappointed? That, since only good boys and girls get what they wish for on Christmas, perhaps they were just not good enough, or were bad in some way that they don't understand, that they somehow, in some way, failed to win Santa's love and approval on that Big Day?

These are just things to think about. I was not mentally damaged as a Santa-believing sprout, and I don't intend to wage any outrageous or paranoid war against Mr. Kringle. But I did tell my oldest boy that there was no such thing as Santa Claus, that his aunt and uncle, who love him very much, whether he's a good boy or not, bought that game for him which he didn't much care for, and that they had no idea about what he would like or dislike. He got it for free, and it was given to him in simple, unconditional love. He could take it or leave it. After I had my talk with him, he played the game some more and explored its possibilities, and realized that it wasn't so bad after all, or at least so he claimed. I'm inclined to think that he was more open to the game when he understood that it was simply a gift, not a slight, or a judgment.

12.21.2004

An oops unopposed

I forgot to mention that Timothy Murphy spelled my last name wrong in that thread I linked to before. He added the "e" which my grandfather removed on his coming over from Germany, or so I've been told, in the hope that it would make the name easier to pronounce. The form of the name with an "e" stuck in the middle is much more common, but still not common.

The shortened version of the name is pretty rare. And so I didn't make any fuss over the spelling which Mr. Murphy used.

Rhymes with "hourly".


A Villanelle, of all things

I'm forty years old and I've been trying to write poetry for almost a quarter of a century (that sounds longer than twenty-five years). I've written probably well over a thousand poem-like substances, and have destroyed nearly half of them. As far as I know, I may have written one decent poem. I would not have selected this particular poem as my very best, though I will confess that I put more effort into it than just about any other of my precious little "creations".

I posted the poem for critique on a poetry board which specializes in formal verse, and the initial thread received some thirty-plus replies, all of them remarkably positive, which flabbergasted me. I'd been posting poems, to a small handful of boards, for two years prior to this "event", and nothing even remotely similar ever occured. The original thread has gone off the boards, but the poem received a second life, thanks to Timothy Murphy, in this thread:

http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtml/Forum19/HTML/000260.html


Anyway, though I'm grateful for all of that, and particularly to three people: David Anthony, Timothy Murphy, and Rhina Espaillat, I can't help wondering about a few things. First, the poem has at least two cliches: one, the "quiet as a stone" bit; and two, the "run like lightning" bit. As for the first, I have no excuses. It's dull and lifeless and boring, but it rhymed, which makes it even less forgiveable. As for the second, I actually do have an excuse. I meant the phrase "run like lightning" to be taken literally, at least in the context of who the speaker is and in the context of the poem. In any case, it weighs in the line there and smacks of sentimentality as well as over-familiarity, and I would like to drop it, if I ever get around to making another revision.

But that's not what I want to write about. Even if the poem is good, even if I have managed to write something which might stand a chance of living on after me, however slight that chance might be, even if the poem were truly excellent, I'm still weirdly unexcited by the prospect. I was told that a respected journal in the UK would take my poem, that the editor had actually said as much; and yet I haven't taken that opportunity. Timothy Murphy suggested that I send the poem to The Formalist, which I did. It was declined, without comment. I was a bit bothered that I didn't get a comment, and the realization suddenly kicked in, about how damned subjective everything is regarding poetry, or the arts in general. And that realization brought with it the damning and deflating knowledge that formal publication is an underwhelming validation at best. In light of the Internet, formal publication is not the great slippery brass ring it once was. The poetry on my geocities site looks just as pretty as it does anywhere else on the Net. It looks official. It looks nifty. It looks spiffy and special. So what if no one reads it? And of the ten poems I've published in semi-respectable (or defunct) journals, I only included one at my Yahoo site. The other nine have somehow diminished in value to me, or I just don't like them, for some other reason.

It boils down to numbers. If three widely published and well-regarded poets liked my villanelle, there will be three (and goodness knows, a phuque-of-a lot more) widely published and well-regarded poets who think it stinks, or who will be perfectly indifferent. Who is right? Getting published is sort of like playing the lottery. Every person who likes your poem equals one ticket. The more people who like your poem, the higher your chances of winning the lottery, the prize being having a poem published in some respectable venue. At least, so it seems. The problem is, no matter how many tickets you have, only one can be a winner: that being the editor upon whose desk your ridiculously lucky poem has landed.

I have no idea if any of that made sense. Too much cough medicine. But I hope my drift can somehow waft its way out. I think what I'm really saying is, I'm just not an ambitious guy. I don't know if my villanelle will ever get published, and I'm not particularly concerned about it.

12.17.2004

Virgin Entry

I'm reminded of a novel I read by Greg Egan in which the characters are sentient software and can send copies of themselves all across the universe. These copies are identical to one another, and are each conscious as individual entities. I started a blog on msn spaces and, on a lark, started one here (obviously). My first post on msn bore the same title as this one, because that other entity thought it was clever, and, of course, so does this one.

I feel a kind of omniscience now, because I can see into the future and determine that my next entry here at blogger will be called, "sloppy seconds", because I will think that that is even more clever. Unless I grant myself the gift of free-will, in which case I will be able to title my second entry whatever the hell I want to.