From Scratch

Ah! The rains pour down

their balm for the earth,
and in the night, cold
brings on a freeze
that will break
the buried seeds,
when spring finally leaps
out of the womb of winter.

Morning is announced
by a blazing sunrise.

This calls for
Celebration!

Warm the ovens;
oil the pans;
bake ye the bread of life!

Start again from scratch:
chopping onions,
adding herbs,
roasting roots and meats,
tossing a mild salad;
in all things,
be the salt
you sprinkle
with care,
the sugar added to balance,
and test the flavors
as you go!

At last,
fill all the glasses
to their fullest
from any flagon
stayed upon you
[setting aside the best for later]
and place baskets of apples
on the candlelit table.

The time has always been Now!
But, see, you are ready:
Fling wide the doors,
with welcome
and with Love.

Warm embraces of greeting
will lead us to the table,
where we may
fill our hands with
the blessings of this day,
and delight
in the bounty
we all share
that is Life.

© 2010 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

Sudden Storm

Clouds burst overhead,

yet wind floods the vision,
blowing rain sideways,
and the world flows away.

At last,
washed away,
we fall off the edge,
only to float upward,
improbable
as that seems.

Laugh,
it’s all we can do
when we find ourselves
on vertical planes,
horizons having
become extinct
in our wake
and our waking.

Laugh,
and look around,
and discover what you are:
a missing link,
a wave of laughter,
or a crazy music,
propelled omni-directionally
through a gold-lined, purple cloud of rain.

© 2010 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

Threads

Dangling threads command your attention.

They wait for you to weave them,
first inward,
then outward
on your spiraling strands.

It never will be done;
the weaving goes on forever.

Hard work,
even tedious;
But what you weave is a garden,
the garden of your soul,
in which you grow yourself,
and the places you’ll go
will glow
with all the colors of your dreams.

So, let those threads command!
The Kosmos awaits your reply:
what are you waiting for?
Weave, weave; for God’s sake, weave!

© 2010 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

Reflections on Social Networking by Computer: Living From Our Smallness

If you have not read it, I highly commend to you an article (in the November 2010 issue of the New York Review of Books) by Zadie Smith, entitled Generation Why? 


The article offers some review and commentary on the much discussed film The Social Network, and also includes some bit of review and context from You are not a Gadget: A Manifesto by Jerome Lanier.

Zadie Smith amazed me by putting into print a lot of the discussion I have been having (with myself in my mind, and with peers) about being part of the "Facebook Generation". The title grabbed me, first of all: why? Is all really about networking? What do we get from sharing what is often most banal of our daily existence with our list of friends?

Not much in the way of substance seems to be my answer and Smith's.

I don't ultimately think this lack of substance is horrible, but I do think that if one seeks deeper and more integral relationship with family, friends and other travelers on this grand journey of ours, the first place one can count on not finding that is on Facebook.

Once again, I can feel the outcry "Luddite! Luddite!"

Not at all, not at all. No, not so.

Here are the things I really like about Facebook: I have been able to reconnect with people I knew in High School and elsewhere. There are people that I really wanted to keep in touch with, and it was a shame that we all lost track of one another when we went off to university, got married, moved away, such and so on, etc. I love being able to see what people have done in their lives. It is marvelous to be able to "chat" with people in other parts of the world. To share recipes and jokes. Possibly the biggest plus is to get the earliest report of some critical national or international news happening from someone closest to the scene.

But, as Ms. Smith points out in her article, all this had been possible before Facebook, and is possible now through various other computer options. While Facebook is touted as being all about networking, it is really all about taking our "personal information," mostly in the form of our likes and dislikes, and forwarding this to various parsing agencies that will, over time, bombard us with offers based on them. In other words, it is not about promoting brotherhood and sisterhood, but about promoting sales.

If you are a member of Facebook, you don't have as many choices as you might think you have for controlling the your personal information, and what is available reaches a wider audience than you would imagine. You might not want to have everyone be your friend, first of all. And you might not want to have some of the quips you share with pals be shared with absolutely everyone you know and all the people they and their friends and family know. But that happens, and we have no control over it. We are at the mercy of our most unguarded moments on the internet. And it is can be hilariously laughable, such as this very funny BBC satire of Queen Elizabeth as Facebook member.

Hilarious. Laughable. Okay, now what?

The internet was invented to be a tool for the free exchange of information, but, to some extent there is nothing free about it, and what is being exchanged is our personal dignity. Why? Because all of our cute (or not so cute) little quips and quirks live on and on, even after we have departed from the internet or, indeed, the world. Zadie Smith recounts that the FB "wall" of a murdered British teen had notices from people to the deceased, as if she was still alive or would be checking her FB account from the grave.

I have not seen The Social Network, yet, and I am not sure that I particularly want to. Yes, I am sure that the portrait of Mark Zuckerberg is slanted in a particularly vile way, and I am equally sure that Zuckerberg is the kind of geek that lives from and through his computer.

There is a smallness about boiling the human brain and heart down to binary code in "if-then-else" language parsing. I have not read You Are Not A Gadget, by Lanier--but I plan to, based on what Zadie Smith has shared in her NY Review article, and what I see in an excerpt made available by the publisher through the New York Times. It is clear the book is a reminder that being is much more than the sum of parts. Here is a quote from Lanier's book: "Information systems need to have information in order to run, but information underrepresents reality."

Facebook can only ever show an extremely limited portion of our reality. It boils us down to the smallest we can be, for as many people as want to view that. This is not where revolutions will be fostered, or world peace, or very much, indeed, in the way of achievement. Marketing and sales are likely all we can expect of Facebook. And what we share there, discreet or indiscreet, will be "carried forward" into whatever fad the next computer generation cooks up, networking or otherwise.

We'll never be able to live large or deeply on Facebook. And, thankfully, we don't have to live on Facebook at all.

Rain in the Desert

Drops fall from the sky;
infinite views of life that glitter
as small globes of resonance,
while they land and find place,
pooling in community to be
common with one another,
one in another,
ad infinitum.

Each a message,
together a manifesto,
a movement gradual
that gathers swift momentum,
swirling from puddle to pool to rivulet,
thence on to stream and river,
then rolling on into ocean.

This is love;
without this wet and wild kiss,
there is no life.

© 2010 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

Mandoline

Plectrum moves across the strings,
finding melodies
in imitation
of songs ancient and modern.

She does not sing the words
--that would be superfluous:
life is the music,
the words are the life;
unbidden, they float on the melodies
of their own concordant accord,
weaving the world into being.

The player smiles,
knowing this.

There is even no need to make music:

We are the instruments,
all of life is the music,
if we would but listen
to one another;
within and without,
we should be able to hear it
playing our hearts.

© 2010 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

Dreaming

The desert has been so wide,
no thought has been able to take root.

At once, a passing thought did tread,
only to die for lack of food and water;
relegated to delusion by way of miraging masquerade
for lack of moisture that might explore a truer shape.

Loneliness and wondering;
Loneliness and wandering.

The sun carves deep shadows and dries them
into the shape the arroyos take.

Thirst—
drought—
death…

Lightening—
storm—
flood—

Motions of notions,
so thick the whole earth could not contain them,
and caught, as I am, in this flash flooded desert,
I can barely grasp a single thread,
much less find my feet long enough
to follow any path that might be drawn.

Follow!  Follow us!  Follow us all!
taunt the silken strands of thought,
but I cannot stem their tide and bide,
and so caught in their merry pranking pools,
I drown.

© 2010 Elisabeth T. Eliassen