This Business of Poetry, Part 4: Peak Experiences, the Abyss and Everything Between; Writing as Meditation Practice

Last time, we talked about experience and awareness, as well as how the poetic mind engages with experience in reflection.

This time I want to make it crystal clear that every kind of experience is fair game for the poet. When everything is not “coming up roses”, that may be as good a time as any to think and write about what is happening in your life. Peak experiences are fabulous, if short lived in the scheme of things and infrequent; one peak experience may have to do for a lifetime. We may experience many more moments of pain, sorrow, horror or otherwise abysmal moments; writing about these can help us through crisis and toward healing.

Rumi is the best selling dead poet ever! The ecstasy of his revelatory conversational relationship with Shams, and the agony of Shams’ departure were the food that fueled, during the next twenty or more years of Rumi’s life, no less that 27,000 lines of poetic text and additional prose, recorded by amanuenses.

Carlo Gesualdo, an Italian nobleman of the late Renaissance period, is known today for two things: he was a murderer, and he wrote some of the most tortured chromatic music for choirs to sing. Those pieces that were secular undoubtedly settings of texts he wrote. Here is an example of one from Volume IV of Gesualdo’s collected madrigals for five voices:

Io tacerò

Io tacerò, ma nel silenzio mio,


La lagrime i sospiri, 


Diranno i miei martiri. 


Ma s’avverrà ch’io mora, 


Griderà poi per me la morte ancora.



(I will keep quiet, yet in my silence, 


My tears and sighs, 


Shall tell of my pain. 


And if I should die,


Death shall cry out for me once again.)



In van dunque, o crudele, 


Vuoi che’l mio duol e’l tuo rigor si cele. 


Poi che mia cruda sorte 


Da la voce al silenzio ed a la morate.



(Thus in vain, oh cruel one, 


Yearn you for my pain and your harshness to be hidden. 


Since my cruel fate 


Gives voice to silence and to death.)¹

I get the feeling Gesualdo wasn’t a fun guy to be around.

Emily Dickinson could write of pain:

Pain has an element of blank;

It cannot recollect

When it began, or if there was

A time when it was not.

It has no future but itself,

Its infinite realms contain


Its past, enlightened to perceive


New periods of pain.

But she also of  an envisioned joy:

Me! Come! My dazzled face

In such a shining place!

Me! Hear! My foreign ear

The sounds of welcome near!

The saints shall meet

Our bashful feet.

My holiday shall be

That they remember me;

My paradise, the fame

That they pronounce my name.

The point I make is that life’s joys and pains can most assuredly be commemorated in your writing, from among an infinite combination of words. All that is needed is the courage to explore the landscape of your dreams and feelings and experiences. And it does take courage.

After tragedy, some people find they cannot express themselves. I know I have difficulty; the writing that results can seem stilted or desultory, unfocused. This may be due to depression or a feeling of numbness. The Canadian writer, Mordecai Richler said, bluntly,

Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing: it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustrations that it creates.

Maxwell Perkins, who was editor for Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe, put it this way:

You have to throw yourself away when you write.

There is truth to this; while you write, you are committing bits of yourself to paper or to a digital screen. There is an element of self-emptying to writing that may ultimately be medicinal, but it could be difficult to arrive at that point. I cannot cite any document or study that will prove what I say; all I can tell you is that I have experienced this for myself.

How do we process our joys, tragedies and terrors through writing? Well, it cannot be too obvious that we need to write. You need to write something everyday in order to see results and completions over time. Author Ann Lamott puts it this way, in her wonderful book Bird By Bird:

Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.

Elsewhere, she also said:

If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act—truth is always subversive.

The hardest part of writing is letting go (or committing) so that you can “throw yourself away,” as Perkins suggested, even if what you are letting go of is what you love the most or has given you the greatest pain.

Writing must be practiced just as any other skill is practiced. How do I do it? Well, to start with, the size of my purse is dictated by whether it will hold a simple composition notebook; I tend to haul one around with me all the time. It has a pencil stuck inside it. I write everything in the notebook: dreams, meeting minutes, ideas, shopping lists, ideas for poems and actual poem drafts. This is my practice, anytime, anywhere. You never know what will happen; every place can offer inspiration, and anything you write down could be further developed later.

Simply put, writing and refining what you write is the practice—and the meditation. Whether you end up with anything you would want to publish is not the point.

________

¹ English translation by Matthew Smyth

______

Next time:  Practice and Meditation, continued—10 Poems That Have Changed Your Life

Spend Money To Make Money

You must spend money to make money.

The saying is so old that it is a cliché. It was penned by the best-known poet and playwright of ancient Rome, one Titus Maccius Plautus, who was from Umbria. They called him Plautus, for short, which means something like “Flatfoot”. He might have been a village clown, but he had made and lost money in business before taking up the pen.

His New Style Roman comedies were written at a time when Rome was a very strong Empire, a time in which political satire was frowned upon, much less any kind of public movement like the modern Occupy Wall Street. Plautus was got his licks in by employing proverbs and paradoxes in his writing, his plays are more or less social commentaries.

These times in the United States are not unlike the times in which Plautus wrote his comedies. While we aren’t ruled by a despotic emperor, our government has become rigid and has tuned itself to serve big business, rather than the needs of average people. The populace has by turns been trained either to be complacent or ruled by irrational fears. The least have to pay the most to keep everything running. The greatest pay almost nothing; and in the current world financial crisis, the rich do very little to create what is needed most: jobs for the least so that they can keep everything running.

You must spend money to make money.

This holiday season, one of the latest in a series of discoveries of crime and corruption is a debit / credit hacking scheme in which alternative computer boards have been surreptitiously placed inside self-checkout stands located in fairly large number of California chain stores, one of which is located in my town. Customers’ accounts have been hacked and there are claims pending. Some of the banks are waffling about dealing with the debit card claims.

U.S. Banks and the credit card industry are making money hand over fist. There has never been a time in which the industry has had more power and less regulation. And yet, the industry is reluctant to help clients who have sustained losses due to debit fraud. While other countries have gone over to “smart cards” with encrypted chips and enhanced PIN technology, the U.S. banking and credit industry continue to make the most of old magnetic strip technology. This older technology is much less secure. In essence, the hacker remotely records the account information and PIN number from the magnetic strip swipe and creates a duplicate card, which can then be used fraudulently.

You must spend money to make money.

Investing in upgraded technology is the cost of doing business. Is this not what we have been told? The industry, however, is not investing in its business or its customers. In fact, the industry charges its clients the cost of doing business by way of hidden and escalating fees.

Plautus also wrote:

You're asking for water from a pumice-stone.

The industry is making no move to convert to chip and PIN "smart card" technology. Why? Because the cost of doing business is upwards of  $9 billion.

Plautus again:

The poor man who enters into a partnership with one who is rich makes a risky venture.

That the industry needs to start investing in the security of its customers is obvious, but don’t look for it to happen soon. Banks and merchants will have to upgrade or replace all payment terminals. Banks, will have to spend significant amounts of money to roll out smart cards to customers.

So, what do we do to protect ourselves? The banks lamely tell us to make all of our transactions be the credit type, as our PIN numbers cannot be accessed during such transactions.

The Secret Service is investigating these hacking schemes. Good luck with that! 

In the meanwhile, holiday shoppers and buyers beware! 

To quote Plautus once more:

Dictum sapienti sat est.


A word to the wise is sufficient.

_____________

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9176936/Smart_credit_cards_arrive_in_U.S._finally

https://www.infosecisland.com/blogview/5472-Old-Credit-Card-Tech-Facilitates-Skimming-Fraud.html

Smurfs or Serfs?

The digital electronic age seems to have reduced interactions and conversations either to cute quips or punchy invective. As a result, human beings seem less connected and more isolated, not to mention more misanthropic, as the days wear on. It is more the rule than the exception to see parents and children, at restaurants and other public places, interacting with video games or text messaging, rather than with one another. Small gangs of youth roam the streets, seemingly as social packs, but they are all glued to their individual gizmos. One wonders what holds such groups together. Professional people go to meetings, but rather than pay attention to the facilitators, they do a lap dance with their cell phones, texting jokes and nasty comments; everyone is committed to being a comedian. Studies have been done that show people to be spending less time than ever doing actual work, all because they allow themselves to be distracted by internet shopping, gaming, social media and the like.

It is a wonder the world still goes round.

Is it possible that all this distraction figures into the monumental dysfunction we seem to be treated to at the highest levels of government? Well, personally, I think that there have been too many mini-scandals involving men in public office, cell phone photos and Twitter. It is a wonder that any business gets done in the House and Senate, not to mention in state and local government. Certainly, we see less action to inform or shape or protect “We the people” than to effect stalemates, whereby no progress can be made in any direction, unless it serves big business.

The preamble to the U.S. Constitution reads:

We, the people of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Which of the important words in that preamble have been adhered to and supported in during the recent US debt ceiling crisis? Easier to list the words that do not correspond in regard to recent decisions:  Union, Justice, Tranquility, Welfare, Blessings, Liberty, Posterity do not figure into most of the decisions made recently, but maybe in little ways for as long as the 50 years since Eisenhower’s speech about the Military Industrial Complex.

No Union: our states are color-coded and many now do not welcome outsiders. Some states even take pride in their prejudices and racism. People bicker about so many little things that no one has time or energy left to have real discourse about the big issues. Much energy is placed in obfuscating the truth about issues and in vilifying people who are seeking the truth, but less energy is placed in thinking and action that leads to improving everyday living for all people.

No Justice: particularly if you are a person of color, have gender issues, or are a woman of child bearing years or a child or are an elderly person of any identity whatsoever and unless you have money to pay for high-powered attorneys, unless you can spend hours doing the rounds of the circuitous phone systems at government offices or their privatized fee and penalty collection agencies, at banks, credit card, health care and insurance companies, you are likely to be cheated many times in your life by people and institutions that believe themselves to have no responsibility and no accountability to the public.

No Tranquility: There is a war going on at home, and you can actually see it and hear it happening all day long in most communities. Impotent anger rages in the streets among the disenfranchised, disadvantaged, disillusioned, disjointed, jobless, and yes, also among the most average, even law abiding of us. Fear is taught from the highest levels of government to the lowest villager. Fear makes people uneasy, disinclined to share, likely to guard an “us against them” attitude. Big Business teaches that cheating and chiseling are the best and most ready ways to achieve success, and so it is really no wonder that our jails are full and that we cannot fully trust our neighbors as we might like. We are given so many choices that are non-choices, it is a wonder we can make any decisions at all. Electronics were supposed to make life easier, but because they all have proprietary systems and cords and software to negotiate, we lose hours in frustration and troubleshooting. Cellular phones are a mixed blessing: the lag time of voices has us yelling “what?” to one another, if we try to talk at a normal pace; coverage is not always available; messages get lost in black holes, only to appear in the voicemail box weeks later. Add to these complaints the constant hum of electronic devices, the blaring and thumping of music from cars and pumped into restaurants, loud and unguarded cell phone conversations, the angry chorus of leaf blowers on any given day of the week, and the sum is a complete absence of tranquility. Is it any wonder that we retreat to the solace of mindless television, iPod earbuds and comfort foods guaranteed to lead to auto-immune diseases, adult onset diabetes or morbid obesity?

No Welfare: We are constantly told that we must fend for ourselves, that we’re on our own, and that we don’t deserve to benefit from government programs, especially not if we have paid into them for years. Our public schoolteachers are styled by lobbyists and lawmakers as being gold diggers. Our unionized workers are vilified for asking for decent wages and benefits. Basic healthcare is described as being too expensive for a national health program to sustain. The liberal arts programs are being dismantled from our universities—being replaced by Research and Development that benefits companies, not people; graduate students provide cheap or free labor to corporations that will make billions of dollars from their hard work. Museums, music programs, elder care, family planning, jobs training, national parks, all of these and more are threatened because we are told that they are too expensive. The beast of government is being starved “for our own good” so that we will be more freed than ever to spend money we don’t have, and no one is minding the store to see that transactions are legal or fair.

Fewer Blessings: It becomes more and more difficult to count the blessings realized as a result of our Constitution and harder to see a National practice of humanist personhood.

Strange Liberty:  Women are not free from discrimination or free to decide their own sexual health, and they do not get paid at the same level as males. Partnered gays, lesbians and transgender people are mostly not allowed marriage (although this is slowly changing for the better) and other rights that married heterosexual couples share. Consumers are not free to dodge taxes and regulations like corporations can and do. The public has license to spend liberally, but with no guarantee that the products they purchase have been fully tested and are safe to use. Racial and religious and other bases of discrimination are practiced everyday in this country, even though it is against the law—this is apparently a liberty. The banks are free to interpret what truth in lending means. Insurance companies are free to deny coverage. There is a lot of free information available on the internet, but fees must be paid for the most reliable information. Public employees and officials feel free to act like complete doofuses and dolts, with impunity.

Posterity: Living for the moment seems all the rage. The reason to preserve such things as resources, education, national parks, cultural heritage, historical buildings and institutions that provide services, food, jobs, hard and soft goods and joy would be so that these could be available for future generations to enjoy. Our government tells us that it costs too much to preserve a quality of and dignity to life even for a single day, but that we should instead spend any amount of money for instruments and soldiers of death, these to be used against other people in other countries, people who should have rights, just as we should have rights, in the name of freedom. Where is the posterity in that?

This brings us to the one that was not listed…

Defense: Not for the mother, the child, the elder, the weak, the infirm, the destitute, the disabled, the naked, the friendless, the isolated, the ill or the hungry, but for the right of unaccountable capitalist enterprise to take advantage of all of these, everywhere in the world. The slaughter of innocents by means of carpet bombing and attack drones, mainly in the support of rapacious corporate greed is bad enough, but death by indifference is even more egregious—especially against our own nationals, on our own soil.

$$$

The little blue Smurfs are back! The movie is in theaters now. I am sure that, being a mother of two children, I will have to see it.

Most people don’t remember too much about the Smurfs’ history or their way of life, within their cartoon villages, populated with mushroom-shaped houses. The Smurf way is defined by sharing and cooperation, and place. By place, I mean that every individual has a valid contribution to make toward the maintenance of Smurf lifestyle, and service is rewarded not with money, but with the necessities of life, as well as a certain assurance of dignity.

This, of course, sounds highly political, not to say utopian, and smacks of the ugly term communism—but, of course, there has never, ever been any communist government in any country on the face of the earth, not ever. Neither communism nor socialism has never existed. What historically has actually existed, erroneously labeled as communism or socialism, is something called authoritarian socialism, which is to say military dictatorship, which is to say anti-humanist slavery.

The Belgian creator of the Smurfs, the cartoonist Peyo, was by all accounts apolitical.

Smurf rhymes with Serf!  How funny! What would Smurfdom have in common with Serfdom? Well, the answer is, of course, nothing.

Feudalism has been dead for a long time, now, hasn’t it?

The wealthiest in our country do not pay taxes and their funds are sheltered in banks offshore. Our government refuses to make taxation equitable for the average wage earner, or to protect average wager earners from being taken advantage of in the marketplace. A case in point is the bank bailout, putting money from the U.S. Treasury into the pockets of the very individuals who contributed to crashing the world economy by means of unethical lending and investing practices. Banks do not charge fees of people or businesses that maintain large accounts, but they nickel and dime the people who have the smallest accounts and, therefore, the most to lose. The U.S. government, in essence, paid the banking industry for perpetrating fraudulent and illegal business practices, some as unfair fees, to the tune of billions of dollars annually, paid by serfs like you and like me. The dubious business practices continue.

In Das Kapital, Marx observed that the “dissolution” of serfdom in England actually meant that the serfs were cut lose from their feudal relationship so that they could “be free” to sell their farms and work anywhere as a wage slave “divorcing the producer from the means of production”.

From Das Kapital, Vol. 1, Chapter 26:

The industrial capitalists, these new potentates, had on their part not only to displace the guild masters of handicrafts, but also the feudal lords, the possessors of the sources of wealth. In this respect, their conquest of social power appears as the fruit of a victorious struggle both against feudal lordship and its revolting prerogatives, and against the guilds and the fetters they laid on the free development of production and the free exploitation of man by man.

Now, remember: this is not something Marx created; this is what he observed about capitalism. This actually (and frighteningly) closely resembles the actions of modern corporations, large and small, that layoff workers and hire, instead private contractors. This improves the bottom line in many ways, the primary of which is that the corporation need not be responsible to the worker by providing health, pension or other benefits. Marx observed that labor dues levied to the feudal lords did not go away; these dues were replaced by state taxes.

Serfs may have been “freed”, but they were taxed and charged fees, sometimes to the point of losing their property. Then, as in Marx’s case study, and now, more and more legislation controls more and more average people, big money interests less and less, to the extent of allowing monopolies to occur, even though they are theoretically illegal.

Fees, in the benign form of local parcel taxes and building permits, are added to the average person’s burden. Yes, we have to vote for a lot of these these, but sometimes our local officials just decide to add things without asking. A friend of mine told me that if you have to pay for a permit to replace a dishwasher in her town. In my town, the city has decided to underground all power wires, charging each property owner $5,000.00 to do so, whether this undergrounding is desired or not. No one voted to be protected from dishwashers or to unsightly wires.

Could this ultimately describe a sort of modern expropriation, where we are charged fees until there ain’t no more in the old bank account? Could all of us “freelancers” and “consultants” be mere serfs, having to provide our own supplies and maintain our own equipment and pay for our own health insurance in order to work for large companies that have no respect or loyalty for workers?

This is unthinkable.

But, once again, I ask you to think on it. This question should be pondered, long and hard, by all workers, everywhere.

Am I a serf?

I’ll tell you what: looking at the disparity, sometimes I think I would rather be a Smurf.

**

Marx, Karl. Das Kapital, Vol. 1, Chapt. 26. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch26.htm