God does not wear a seat belt

A Guide for Spiritual Tourists" by Hannah Faith Notess is a mere scribble of a poem, a set of lines unmarred by an phrase of distinction or music worth singing out loud. It is as poetic as a pounded flat iron. But it has other merits, which is sociological. Not so much the overworked clash of culture theme as it is an accute gaze at the sheer shallowness and folly of those who think they can find wisdom if they hurry just a little bit faster.This poem is an anti-epiphany, or one that works in a strange twist of perspective; this is a piece of journalism breathlessly enumerating the spiritual blitz going on as tourists seek to have an epiphany, a clear vision of things unobstructed by the ego, as if they can be ordered up like pizza.

This poem captures what I suppose one would belatedly call the post modern moment, that situation where one finds themselves rushing through alien environs , trying to match captions from tour books to crumbling facades and blistered artifacts, coming away with dizzy sensations that one mistakes for spiritual uplift but which is, physiologically and psychologically, no different than having weathered an especially abusive ride at one of many elephantine theme parks.


It told us whether to cover our heads,

where to remove our sandals.

It told us not to wear shorts if male

and if female to be careful.It said Speak slowly please. That's too expensive.

Drive slowly. Stop here. Please call a doctor.

It said to tip the man guarding the shoes.
Pastiche, bricolage, and congenital looting of historical and cultural archives are the hallmarks of the post modern dilemma, a situation where one may breeze through the past and appropriate what the what and decorate their cosmology with the exotica that’s stricken their fancy the way clueless decorators would festoon a house with any odd thing they like, with no relation or reason. There is here that uninflected monotone that comes across in the newsreaders who intone news headlines. Everything bleeds together and becomes a dizzying swirl, which seems to be this poems bragging point. The guidebook, with its broken phrases and the distanced descriptions of the temple and its artworks and caretakers, has a skimming quality that is all tour bus. One feels herded, poked to move along.


Inside, rows of sandstone saints

with extra eyes. Or a black-tongued woman.

Or a rosy square with pigeons and a bath.

Or a cupboard of scrolls. Or a gilded man,

cross-legged or on a cross. Or tree limbs

coiled with flags. But always incense,

worn pavement, smoke-stained walls.This is a poem about witnessing life and not having any result nearing what one may rightly call an “experience”. What’s been seen is mere gloss and glance at best, there is nothing from the stop that indicates that anything has resounded. And the poem stays there, unworried about the likelihood that the metaphysics of this whole thing are based on nothing more than whim and giddiness.


As recently as twenty five years ago one could have described, straight faced, this situation, the touristy rush through another culture’s spiritual domiciles, as an existential moment, with the similar depth-less abyss of non-being looming just the same not far in the dark. The difference, of course, is that the existential poet brooded and pondered the severity of the spread of the lack of the innate significance of things, and worried deeply about how their actions either bring them closer or drives them further from achieving an Authentic Existence. Not that the issue was ever resolved, but it was a fertile premise for a good amount of novels, plays and poetry, especially poetry, some of it good, most of it dreadful, but all of it, I think, painfully sincere. The postmodern moment, the postmodern poem hardly seems to care what anything means, is fairly undisturbed by the incessant pilfering that is it’s chief aesthetic method, and in turn wallows in the absence of Big Ideas under whose broad umbrellas we find security and reassurance. It is the mentality of consumerism , of identifying impulse acquisition as a sort free-play of unchained semiotics.


The mashing together of concepts and images from disparate sources, the universal conflating of what were formally exclusive concepts is entirely the point. Institutions and their symbols are emptied of significance in this kind of marketplace. Comprehension is frowned upon, the equivalent of a buzz kill, while the glancing giddiness of crash-and –snap tourism is preferred. It’s not that what was seen in the temple remains a mystery, or inscrutable , as it were. The poem , like the attitude it bears witness to, does not have extra layers of dread and loathing formed around it because of the emptiness at the heart of what it talks about. The poet is perfectly happy to let the poem be something of an uncaptioned snapshot of a mindset that is too looped on it’s own giggling and ogling to be bothered with anything as presumptive as learning.

Another Bite from Jenning's Apple

Part of my problem with Edison Jenning's poem might just be the form, which is prose with it's long lines; one expects a linear discussion where associative leaps are amply contextualized for sense making. Jenning's lines, though, leap all the same sans the framework, and there is compression rather than the breezy moment I think was being hinted at here. Here is the poem with line breaks, just to see how it reads and realigns its signifiers. Does it sing or does it still drone? Does it result in the epiphany the author sought to isolate?

Though livid
and salacious,

supermarket Red Delicious
don't deserve the name.

But after bagging

two or three,
I think of old-stock Staymans

that grew behind our house
in weather-beaten,

bee-infested rows no one ever pruned,
and all we had to do was reach.

I must have eaten bushels' worth
while balanced in the highest limbs.

With one hand full of apples,
the other swatting bees,

I watched swallows tip
and skim the tree-rimmed

skies already hinting cold,
the windfall left ungathered,

the fallow years that followed,
and now this bag of garish fruit

my memory grafts to vintage
among the rows of grocery aisles

that green to fields of praise.


An epiphany that works is supposed to come out of the blue, preferably with no foreshadowing. In the literary sense, divorced from the Christian festivals from which the term is borrowed, the word connotates a sudden rush of insight, a breakthrough of some kind, springing from the mundane and the banal. It leads into the notion that "God is in the details", a safe haven for the agnostic writer who feels significance in things beyond appearances yet who doesn't want to credit a divinity for the unexpected wisdom.

Winding up with something not-quite Jenning's original poem might well be the point of all this; I wouldn't exactly call it a waste. There is something to be said in the cliche that how you say something is as important as what you say. Packaging does alter content. What we've managed to do here is to make something that reads drab and insulated into something that goofy and air-headed.

I think longer lines sink this poem's hope of being an effective epiphany. Since an epiphany is said to come in a flash, suddenly, without warning, something akin to William Carlos Williams' lean lines and business like images, are better apt to convey the sense that one has broken through the fourth wall and is actually getting what's beyond the limits of language to convey.

Ghost Rider Blows

Nicholas Cage continues his uncontested position as Hollywood's worst actor by continuing to involve himself in wretched movies. The most recent atrocity, Ghost Rider, came my way via NetFlix, and it's the most abysmal comic book adaptation I've had the misery of sitting through. In brief, Cage plays a stunt motorcyclist who ,having signed a pact with the devil as a youth, finds himself transformed into the Ghost Rider, who might be considered Satan's bounty hunter and all purpose enforcer and bone faced goon here on earth. That's as much a summary I care to punish myself with by remembering the particulars. Cage's ever-ready Elvisisms are present, but they like the jittery, jerky spaz- attack elan that at least made his past evocations of Presley (as in Face Off and Gone in Sixty Seconds)memorable enough to be made fun of. In Ghost Rider, we seem to watch him as if he were posing for an oil painting; the camera lingers on that face, wide eyed and bug eyed and locked in an inward driven stare that's locked on studying his likeness on a psychic driver's license. The additional flourish of having him, as Ghost Rider, applying the Kirby Hand , ie, the dramatic reaching out toward someone being addressed, fingers splayed dramatically, and holding the arm in position while he monologues the usual virtues of what happens when good versus evil is, doubtless, based on the study of various frames of comic book illustration. This might have been an artful resource,a stylistic tic put to marvelous use by Warren Beatty in his film Dick Tracy, which managed to honor the drawing style of Tracy creator Chester Gould while having the images move fluidly along, briskly, cleanly. Someone here forgot the movies have to move. Even the makers of the other wise horrible Incredible Hulk understood that much.

THE PROBLEM WITH WOMEN IS MEN

Ah, the Seventies, where every grace and freedom gained from the previous decade turned to poison and cant, a dance of bad habits we couldn't seem to break. Let me say right here that this little nightmare is based on actual facts of my life, back in the day , in my late teens , early twenties when sex was the greatest thing in the world , and it was my right to have it with any woman I desired . I thought what I considered my good looks would make zippers drop all over the beaches and alleys of La Jolla and Pacific Beach in the city of San Diego. I was an asshole trying to do everything catechism taught me was a sin. It wasn't pretty.
_______________________________________


Liquor store lights enlarge the facts of the night.

Gimmee a pack of goddamn Camels she says,gimmee a fuckin'pack of camels or you can dry hump against this telephone pole.He tries to kiss her but she turns away, looking into the liquor store at the rack of smokes next to a cash register decorated with permits and checks from dead bank accounts. The lighting made the inside of the store radiate through the windows and the swinging doors, pourin over into the parking lot where the payphones and news stand appeared to be devoured by an encroaching sea of wicked india ink.
Bunny heart,he says, how about some MD 20/20 or a coupla quarts of Schlitz, maybe? After we get some, we can go to the high school and hang out at the dance, the band is Gnarly Beast,
they play lotsa Deep Purple like it's right offa the record.
Her eyes burn through him the way the store sign burns through the night.There was no light in her pupils, just round puddles of unforgiving black under an angry, dark set of eyebrows. He could a pain in his jaw.

I told you,she says, I wanna pack of Camels and then
I wanna go to the beach where there's a party I heard about.
What's with your beer and wine?
Ok, Camels, he says, but how 'bout maybe Camels ”and• some MD20/20? Go sit on the sand, smoke some, get a buzz, later, well...
Oh fuck it, she says, alright, get both, then we'll go.
I love you, sweet meat, he says.

Don't call me that,she says,how much money do you have?
Five bucks, hey says, oughta cover it. Sure about the beach?
Beast kicks out the jams on that Deep Purple.
He tries to kiss again and cram his hand down the front ofher jeans, but she turns again, pushes him back with one arm andswats in the groin with the other.

You dense fucker, she says, all I want is pack of Camels andyou're off doin' something else. I'm going to the beach by myself.
She turns and walks up the street, walking near the storefronts to avoid the street lights.He thinks,go ahead and walk away, bitch, Deep Purple rules and you don't even know, you're just a chain smokin' Deb wannabe anyway, fuckin' bitch.
He limps away, cutting up a service alley toward the highschool,where he knew he'd find some of his bros in the lower student parking lot leaning against car hoods , feigning thehoodlum poses of guitar heros under the yellow corona of a streetlight.A pain shoots through his crotch and stops him in staggering.
Goddamn bitch, he mumbles and comes to a complete stop
in front of two door garage at the end of the alley. He squints his eyes on a sign nailed to the wooden garage door, letters dancing through a vibrating haze of pain and real mist, shit,my goddamn nuts ache, he thinks, leaning closer to the sign for
no reason other than conquer one obstacle, what's this shit say? "NO PARKING," he reads, and then blacks out, collasping between two trash cans formed from the toughest rubber.

Bergman and Antonioni

Two prominent film makers pass away in the same week, and I care not a wit for either. The work of either Bergman and Antonioni are what I'd imagine would be the in flight movie on jetliner to Hell.That scenario would be proof enough of a cruel and punishing God,since I know I'd wonder what set of deeds I'd committed that were so heinous as to warrant this severe a treatment. Humorless, witless, static, depressed, didactic and incorrigibly arty rather than artful, the films of both these sticks in the mud were popular at a time when a generation of art majors and movie critics eager to up their intellectual credibility all managed to convince themselves that movies were the last great medium for self expression. It became Art with a capital "a", "Culture" with a capital "cul".

And most certainly, the medium ceased to be movies, a medium where image , angle, editing and rhythm worked with craftsman synchronization to move a narrative forward and instead became film or, more pretentiously, Cinema. The implications were obvious; movies no longer about movement, but rather about time and the micro-cosmically morphing moods and perceptions within the elongated takes of self-annihilating characters trapped in dank terrains. The movies dragged, in other words; cameras stopped dancing with the actors through the sets, but rather became stationary recorders of some one's view of a empty alleyway.

After a time the long takes, the dead pan visages, the exotic marginalia at the edge of whatever plot line there is became mannered and conventional; it seemed more to do with reputations having to be lived up to than a fresh take on a storyline being crafted. Typical of contemporary criticism's attempt to explain problematic artists and the tedium of their work is the adage that such projects force audiences, viewers, readers, et al, to confront the elements an artist is working with and to re-examine their own assumptions. The presumption here is that the audience's attitudes prior to witnessing a Richard Serra monolith, Christo's grotesque wrap-jobs of public buildings, or in the matter of film, the films of Bergman and Antonioni, were wrong, pre-existing, inauthentic. Maybe even dangerous to one's health. The artist in this regard becomes something akin to The Perception Police, enforcing codes of seeing, ways of reading, psychologies of listening, and it's not all that far from mirroring a totalitarian spirit, at least in miniature. Once the audience member was on the artist's turf--the movie theatre, the gallery, the concert hall, what have you--he or she had given permission and implicitly demanded they be bullied, harassed, made uncomfortable, lectured to rather than spoken with, berated for a failure of wit rather than invited to investigate new ways of thinking.

"Forcing" an audience to deal with issues or ideas they would rather avoid--the eternal emptiness of the soul one discovers once the surety of a loving God is undermined being the issue here--is one of the cardinal conceits critics have used to justify the problematized stylistics of the difficult directors they champion, and for me the phrasing is a tacit admission that there's some amount of failure by the director to convey a set of narrative concepts through image and sound. It's an elitist claim, I think, and is handy way to side step a considered defense of the style and jump right into the next nest of literary conventional thinking one can claim is the result of the director's visual approach.

"Existential" questions have been a bedrock part of character and plot development in literature for centuries--go no further than Hamlet or King Lear or Faust (either Marlowe or Goethe), and as such that whole issue of being and becoming, of achieving genuine authenticity , has fairly much been absorbed by film makers since the medium was first used to portray fictional narratives. Audiences are well used to having to confront existential situations and spaces in the films they attend, and consider the whole issue pretty much a given. It is not a daring or cutting edge theme for either Bergman or Antonioni to have used in their work. The real issue is about style, and whether one prefers puffed up artiness over a subtler , crafted artfulness when one picks a director with whom to confront their despair.

"On the Road" turns fifty

I was fifteen when I read “On the Road”, and sure enough, eager to appear hip and ahead of my times, I embraced Kerouac’s slack sentences and cartoonish evocations of hip style. Somewhere in that fifteen year old brain,though, I suspected that the adventures of Dean Moriarty et al were stupid, very stupid, and all the talk of things God, zen and pulse-racing were the products of someone who was trying to write their away of some deeply rooted dissatisfactions with their life. The fifteen year old was right, and the lesson to be learned from the herded worship of Kerouac’s deceased essence was to not to say I liked something merely because it was a fashion. Kerouac’s books sell, of course, but it’s marketing, not quality that keeps bringing in new readers. The dreadfully wooden prose of Ayn Rand sells famously as well, and in both cases we have examples of adults pushing adolescent agendas to readers who need an image to attach their forming cosmologies to. It’s youthful spontaneity for Kerouac’s cause, hooliganism disguised as spiritual practice, and it’s a bullying appeal to the genius of the misunderstood little man for Rand. With any luck, those enamored of these two dreadful writers grow up and refine their reading tastes, but many do not, and consequently perpetuate the flimsy , sub cult contrivances that constitute both their reputations.

Ezra gets a Pounding

Ezra Pound disturbs me more because I find too much of dense, as in brick, and abstruse, as in elusive for the sake of being hard to follow .This is distinct from abstract, a quality where there is an actual idea being deployed and which, in turn, can be parsed by a reader with due diligence. There is no argument with how important Pound is to the reformation of literature and advancing the Modernist aesthetic, but some one who was so obsessed, in theory, with reconfiguring language arts so that a new generation of readers can have fresh perceptions of reality and discover means with which to change it, Pound seemed seduced by the legend he was making for himself and delved headlong into his admixture of projects without a sense of how his materials and sources would come to make a generalized sense of themselves.It seems obvious to me that he reveled in the difficulty of his work. His innovations as poet, for me, are worth studying in line with his critical pieces, but beyond their importance in establishing a time line, the language , the style, the attitude has not traveled well through the decades. He seemed like the brilliant critic and tireless promoter of new talent who put himself in competition with his fellows, ie Joyce, Yeats, Eliot, Stevens, Williams, et al. Pound believed that art was the chief process through which a particular priesthood of painters and poets can perceive the world, and it was the artist who could correctly provide the inspiration and spiritual means to change the way reality was constructed and lived in. He was attracted to strong leaders with pronounced visions of a Better Future, was attracted to the notion of violently blowing up the artifacts of the past in order to forge a new order from the ground up, and it was apparent to everyone that he aligned himself with such leaders. He wanted to be considered one of those who would show everyone the way to the new dawn, whether they wanted to or not.

Frost , although over estimated, is an acceptable minor poet and a canny careerist, neither of which are offensive to anyone who understands the need to make a living.