I want to share with you a podcast I listened to from Public Radio. The guest was Gordon Hempton, an acoustic ecologist, writer, and producer of recorded quiet. Not silence, mind you, but quiet. I suppose collector of sounds would be an apt description of him as well.
Quiet, as Hempton points out, is becoming almost impossible to find on Earth. He defines a quiet place as one in which it’s possible to find natural sound, uninterrupted by noise, for at least 15 minutes.
Hempton’s recordings of natural sound are very nice. I’m listening to one as I write this post, of surf pounding down a secluded beach in Washington State. I found it on Amazon.com, a 99 cent Mp3 download.
I am profoundly impressed with the man’s insights and enjoyed the interview very much.
When he notices the change of light, he puts down his brush and looks up. He spent all afternoon painting, and the sun is setting fast. He is finished finally, just in time. His hand is getting numb and there’s an ache down his back, along the left shoulder blade. So he rinses his brushes in warm water, and watches how the light plans to go on without him.
The sun falls beyond the river, so that shadows move up the side of the gray barn. The last rays hit the eves from which he knocked an empty swallow’s nest with a pole. The building looks angry at his going, sad for his weakness.
The threadbare jacaranda in the field beyond the barn takes the dying light into its inner branches, becomes a skeleton. Before he can start the truck and drive away, it is haunted, beyond all hope.
* * *
Some nights, it just takes too long to get home. No matter where you start from, how clear the roads and whether, you just can’t get there fast enough. He stops at the market, buys a frozen chicken pie and creamed corn. He waits in line behind a woman writing a check, like she was transcribing Sanskrit from weathered stones.
He loves the night, when the world is drained of its color. All the heavy gradients, brush strokes, vast pallets of green and blue and brown recede to a diffusion of rippled pen and ink. He keeps the lights dim and settles in to watch old movies, surrounded by his walls of quiet swiss coffee.
At two past midnight, the angry gray barn with blue trim and languid shadows, appears in a dream and demands to be red again. Deep brick red, white trim, hinges and hardware stoveiron black. It wants to stand on the hill in the sleeping hay all night, then command the sun to rise, compel the threadbare jacaranda to leaf out for full summer, put on purple flowers and clash with the cobalt sky. A barn to make the crows wish for clothes like orioles and cardinals and jays. A barn to fade with happiness – tomato soup with too much milk – in time to lean against its many rust-red parts, and die on the hill. Gaps between the sagging boards will give the wind a place to sing.
* * *
He leans against the fender of his truck at dawn, drinking black coffee, watching the gray barn and the tree as the sun comes up and washes over them. This is what the customer wanted: a barn to atone with the landscape, make peace with the hill. “I want it to blend in, look smaller, farther away,” the farmer said. “My wife thinks it’s ugly. Paint it gray.”
Now he leans against the truck and thinks this may have been a sin, though not his first and maybe not his alone to bear, this time. An ugly decision, a thing not itself. But why should a barn get to be what it wants if he can’t? What he wouldn’t give for a proud brightness, a rich red rightness, and a solid hill, room for animals and a tractor, nails driven in posts for hanging tack and tools.
Dammit, it was four days honest work and money earned. There’s half a gallon left of Driftwood Gray. He leaves the can on the farmer’s yellow porch, along with his bill for the job.
A little over a week ago, I went for a walk and listened on my iPod to someone reading the last part of The Wasteland, What The Thunder Said. I thought to myself I will go home and write a poem. Something is stirring in the wind. But the stupid wind turned and blew it all away, whatever it was. I hate it when that happens.
So nothing good has been rescued from the horse latitudes this week. I’ve been very busy in other ways, and we’ve had some good rain and a fallowing sea with fair winds will come again. Until then, here’s some great poetry.
I’m working very slowly on a small flash fiction piece about color. It might be finished soon. So here’s T.S. Eliot, reading from The Wasteland: The Burial of the Dead and A Game of Chess.
I should have been posting a poem every day during April, you know. And not necessarily my own, because it’s Poetry Month. But as the Bokononists say, busy busy busy.
Then again they sway home
to dream
bright gardens of fish in the early night.
When people ask us where we get the inspiration to let language run free, it’s from reading lines like that by guys like Logan.
This poem has been paddling and honking around in the back of my mind for 25 or 30 years. It’s confessional – almost literally – and transcendent at once; visual and metaphysical and 20th century fearless.
We had weather here this week that was fierce by the standards of the Santa Barbara coast. It put me in mind of this poem, which I decided to post.
There are two audio options for the reading. The first is with music fore and aft by JS Bach (Ah, Bach), at about one minute, twenty seconds.
The second without music, just me, at 46 seconds.
I would very much appreciate knowing which you think is preferable. If music (public domain source, by the way) doesn’t add value to the presentation, I’ll stop doing it.
Between Storms
Sad, how the clouds gather again
against the small hills
for reasons I cannot comprehend,
and how I stand here watching
the last boat carrying men
from oil rigs in the cast iron sea.
Sad, how all the gulls are home
asleep, having eaten all day,
how I see the shadow of the clock
on the water, its hands turning
from island to harbor
to the tender sand beneath my feet.
So sad, how finally I am rising up,
falling in a long arc
into the mountains of darkness.
This poem has always had a peculiar feeling for me, because I first read it when I was younger than fifteen, and many years before I discovered William Stafford for myself.
Someone – probably my parents – gave me an anthology of poems when I was maybe thirteen or fourteen. I remember it had pictures too. I didn’t even take note of the poet’s name but I remember this poem.
Years later, out of college and trying to teach myself poetry using the thinking and reading that I’d been taught to do, I found William Stafford again and learned his name. I was at one of the last readings that he gave, in the summer of his death.
But this poem – Fifteen – has never fit in my mind along with all the others Stafford wrote. Because it alone belonged to that other time; another life, before I turned fifteen.
It’s not every day I get to share words of kindness and wisdom from the Dalai Lama. He doesn’t post every day. I checked.
We need the message of compassion as often as he – or anyone else – feels inclined to impart it, especially in the country where I live. Maybe also in yours?
If each of us can learn to relate to each other more out of compassion, with a sense of connection to each other and a deep recognition of our common humanity, and more important, to teach this to our children, I believe that this can go a long way in reducing many of the conflicts and problems that we see today.
I came across these 10 good tips on writing well for business. This is from a 1982 internal memo by David Ogilvy, a famous businessman.
His ideas apply to creative writing too, I think. I studied business writing and rhetoric in college, as well as creative writing. I believe all writing skills inform each other.
I’m going to follow his list by repeating it with my thoughts. Because, you know, I’m a writer and it’s my blog. I have to do the heavy lifting around here.
Metaphor 