The Heron

A poem I wrote last week:


There is murder in your neck
A coiled and hissing viper
How you hold it, tensed
In tendons, you stalking
Dripping heron, with the
Patience of a priest
Pacing the cloister

The red release of
Springing sinew is
The holy flash of
God-light on the nave

There will never be
A calculus to
Capture every contour
Yet preserve the very
Violence of your curve

Spring is Back

3-19-2010 Spring is back. Funny how our Winter penance can so easily and so suddenly recede in the tide of the years turning. What were we so sorry for? What Summer crimes of indifference or indulgence led us to believe that the sun would abandon us? That it would throw up its hands at a hopeless cause, for once and forever (only once would be necessary) sink beyond its solstice and never return. But it is rising again, its faith in us renewed, consenting to one more year of risk. Chances for love, peace, freedom.

There is a time in life when youthful spring naivete passes into a summer of early adult argument. A time when the awe and wonder at the raw block of the world gives way to the artist's desire to give it shape. To discard from life what seems unnecessary, what interrupts the ideal curves of the lives we might lead in earnest.

Isn't every Spring and following Summer a repetition of this? A synechdoche of the soul's passage into adulthood? Why else would we idle the early spring hours away in whatever patches of sunlit grass the day presents us? By June we will remember our work, the sun's warmth will have lost its novelty, and all the arguments over our pastimes' vintage will be in full swing.

And what arguments, what overstepping statements or wines drank to excess will fill our Rosary this year? Regrets to be fingered in the long dark of our next wintering cloister.

'The Wind' or 'Embrace the Random'

3-1-2010 Why do you curse the wind? A leaf so brightly colored should feel each toss intensely, passionately, thankfully. The fickle lift of every gust is made electric, ecstatic by the emptiness it emerges from, the silence it retreats into.

A calm and ordered life is insulated from real passion, is a retreat from risk, is the erection of a windbreak. Take care not to lead your life into such stale rooms; dead air and musty carpets.

The unspeakable immensities of joy, of potential, of greatness you sense the presence of in so elusive and tentative a world are only possible at the mercy of the unknowable, the irreproachable wind.

'Historicity' or 'Holy Shit, There Went My Life'

3/4/2010 - Historicity is a beast that sleeps in us all. It can be a lion or a cur, depending on when we sense its stirring, what preparations we make for its impending rise, the nightmarish stretch of limbs we never expected to recognize.

What awakens in me is the surest knowledge that we are, and have always been our own best hope for fashioning a better world and a life worth living. Our odds are long, but not unbeatable.

Can we create, actively sculpt, a culture from the raw materials handed down to us? Can we be lucid enough to sift through the wreckage of the Old Order and salvage our parent's love? Our parent's compassion? Are we not their wager against the incumbency of their mistakes? What will we risk that our sins not visit upon our children?

Right now we are stuck, passively awaiting our culture to appear around us. Too many of us are not even looking. Worse yet, many of those who are have lost their capacity to choose or to believe in anything. The rampant pathology of our snickering milleau is the senseless play of symbols, the erosion of all metaphors. Our sarcasm is so pervasive that comedy/tragedy is an increasingly meaningless distinction. Art is now admired, lauded, for its influences, its antecedents, rather than its statements or its insights.

I hope this for my generation: that we find the real living value of the semantic freedom we've inherited. That we root in it and grow however we can. That we be the bright, new phalanx that breaks the lines of complacency that await us in life's bitter fields. That we, knowing our opponent plays a masterful Sicilian, not open with a gutless and altogether lamb-like e2-e4. That we not drift so easily into such a comfortable silence.

Welcome!

I finally did it! I succumbed to the pressure and started a blog! I've been thinking about it for a year or so and, having weighed all benefits and detriments that came to mind, decided in the affirmative. 'Why now?' you may ask, 'why now after all this time?' Well, I'll tell you...

I have many thoughts. Too many to keep track of, really. Good or bad, generative or inhibiting, most of them stay in my head, undeveloped, unexplored, embryonic. A while back I became frustrated with the volume of thought I felt slipping from me and started keeping a sort of journal. In between the priest-black folds of a number of moleskine pocket journals I started probing, compounding and expanding (and yeah, occasionally inflating) whatever thoughts seemed worth recording. The purpose of this blog is to start letting some of those thoughts out of their cloister.

I take the name of the blog from (surprise, surprise) Thomas Pynchon's first novel V. 'The Whole Sick Crew' is a group of friends, associates and laze-a-bouts that share a common detachment from or incongruency with general society for their particular skills, attitudes and philosophies. As a movement, they are ineffectual, unmotivated, and spend much of the novel arguing or partying, often concurrently.

Simply put, I have invited you here because I consider you all part of my 'Whole Sick Crew.' The people I love to fruitlessly converse with about a whole gallery of irrelevancies. If you were ever curious about what bellows may be working my bloated head when you weren't there to act as pressure valve, then further reading may (or, more probably won't, but might be good for a laugh) be worth your while...