We are all selfish and I no more trust myself than others with a good motive.—Byron

In primary school, we used to learn things ‘off by heart’. I do not know From Blossoms off by heart yet, but that is how a poem that is so joyful about living life should be held. I want to bypass the neurons processing printed text and carry the poem inside me, like the peach. I want to know it off by heart.

From Blossoms

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

by Li-Young Lee

‘It is sadistic love I have for you Fisher said to his possessions. All I want in life is my violin. And the Three Essential Pens. I want you naked! he shouted at his apartment.’
Just finished Todd McEwen’s Fisher’s Hornpipe. I left my bike at home deliberately so that I’d have extra subway journeys to finish it. If you’ve seen Withnail & I, about which I can be very tedious indeed, it may be enough to know that eponymous Fisher is a cross between Withnail and, well, I. It also reminded me of Beckett’s Murphy, which contains my favorite opening line:
‘The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.’
Fisher’s Hornpipe is out of print (I have a borrowed copy). As I raced through it, I made mental lists of friends to press it on once I buy my own. I have to be careful; it could damage the friendship if appreciation is insufficient. Jason can take it, certainly. Claire is mordant enough. Mark lent it to me, so he’s in the clear. Caitriona, Dan, Joy, Paul, Liza: you have been warned that a book report will be due.

THE SEVEN STAGES OF DRUNKENNESS
I All topics found humorous
II Linguistic play
III Overcompensated daintiness
IV Shouting sadness
V Out of body experiences
VI Severe inert reverie
VII Passage into the epiphanic stream

Here is Fisher’s assessment of my race, formed as he is tossed out of a Boston bar midway through stage IV.

’God the Irish thought Fisher drifting up and down the frozen boulevards. With their Guinness their Jungian music their raven haired white skinned colleens and their soft lilting voices they are put on this earth to put us to sleep and lull us toward Death! To charm us into a stupor and then hit us over the head.’

Suddenly my life has meaning.

A rose by any other name
In Tibetan Foothold, Dervla Murphy mentions a female Boddhisattva, Pol-den Lha-mo, Abbess of a monastery on the shores of Lake Yamdrok. Her Sanskrit name, translated into English, is ‘The Adamantine Whore.’
I’m sure that’s just what our own lovely St. Kevin thought of St. Bridget when he flung her off a mountain for tempting him.

Vice
I’ve fallen into another bad reading habit, now that I’m taking the subway more regularly. Fifty pages from the end, I realize that there isn’t quite enough left to get me through a day’s commute. So I start another book. In the last month, I’ve cliffhangered:

A Cook’s Tour
The manuscript of Max’s new novel
Lolita
The Art of Happiness
On Writing

I’m not counting the books dropped less than halfway through:

The Hobbit
Adventures in the Screen Trade
No Logo
The Blind Assassin

This is a poor show. Each of these books was enjoyable: I just got panicked at the thought of anything less than an abundance of pages remaining (and, okay, I got excited about the next one). As a child, I skipped to the end of each book halfway through to find out what happened. It was a disappointment to learn that not all stories ended with a thrilling climax that tied up all the plot points. But that doesn’t justify abandoning my charges so recklessly now.

Tibetan Foothold
I did manage to finish Dervla Murphy’s Tibetan Foothold today, however. My namesake and countrywoman deserved no less. In 1963, she cycled from Ireland to Delhi and from there made her way to the Tibetan refugee camps of Northern India, where she pitched in for several months. She fell in love with the ‘Tiblets’—cheerful, uncomplaining, affectionate children. We romanticize Tibetan Buddhism so much that her skeptical but loving perspective brings balance. I’d just finished (ahem) The Art of Happiness, which was interesting but somewhat unsatisfying for being ‘as told to’ an American shrink, whose new-agey style made it hard to get to the Dalai Lama’s twinkly wisdom underneath. Dervla Murphy met the Dalai Lama in 1963, and her impressions show a very different man:

‘Where someone of His Holiness’s stature is concerned, there are probably as many different versions of the man as there are people who meet him; unavoidably one has one’s instinctive personal reactions. One also has certain preconceptions and it would be untrue to say that I met the Dalai Lama with an open mind; all my conversations with those who knew him had led me to expect an outstanding individual—not necessarily likeable, but certainly a Personality. Instead, I found myself talking to a simple pleasant young man, who has the gracious manner and lively humour of the average Tibetan, but who failed to impress me by any unusual qualities—apart from a total lack of egotism, which by our standards is remarkable enough in the circumstances.

On meeting some High Lamas one spontaneously recognizes them as deeply religious men, yet with the Dalai Lama I had no awareness of being in the presence of an ascetic whose life centered on things spiritual. This is not to imply that His Holiness’s life is otherwise centered; it may merely be that he is as yet too immature to convey such a feeling to others.

However, half an hour’s conversation convinced me that here was a ruler whose chief concern would always be the welfare of his people—though unfortunately, he showed no sign of an intellectual ability equal to the enormous task of solving their present problems. But I was also becoming aware of a certain tension in the atmosphere. I felt that the Dalai Lama was constantly on his guard, that he was unsure of himself in dealing with foreigners, and that he was continually attempting to gauge my reactions to him. One can only pity the vulnerability of this sensitive young man, who is so often exposed to the relentless scrutiny of a world either politely sceptical or impatiently contemptuous of the values which he represents.’

Later, her attitude softens:

’And this morning provided another pleasant surprise when I had an audience with His Holiness and found him much more relaxed and approachable than during our last meeting sixteen months ago. He seems to have matured a great deal in that brief time and to have gained in self-assurance, as though he has at last been able to come to terms with his strange situation. The impression I had today was of an astute young statesman in the making—yet when we came to touch on religion he spoke with an easy sincerity that was immensely moving and quite unlike his tense, watchful manner at our previous meeting. He looks considerably older now, and very much thinner—but very much happier.’

‘Four decades have passed since the Dalai Lama fled to India, and those anxious and demanding years have not been made any easier for His Holiness by the Western media’s adoption of Tibet’s God-King ( in tabloid-speak) as one of their Cold War heroes. In this role, the Dalai Lama was all the more useful because of his appeal to young Westerners earnestly seeking ‘eastern wisdom’. This is not to suggest that His Holiness lacks wisdom, compassion and genuine spirituality. But what I wrote recently about Nelson Mandela could equally apply to him: ‘In President Mandela the media have an ideal hero, someone whose image needs no touching up. Yet every leader deserves some criticism and may be rendered less effective by a media canonization that stifles it.’

Doughty Dervla is sobering. I admit to being drawn to the Dalai Lama for a self-help fix more rigorous than Mars and Venus on a Date. I’ll also admit to wanting to pull back the curtain to expose the wizard. ‘But what’s he really like?’ The earnest shrink who relates The Art of Happiness spends most of the book reassuring us that for the Dalai Lama there is no Miller Time. When I mention that I’m reading the book, Paul, unprompted, writes:

‘The thing that interests me most about the Dalai Lama is his ability to live his role. There is no inner child, no thing he’d rather do. I asked Tom about it, whether the Dalai Lama was ever some guy and not the Dalai Lama, and he said that there’s no one that isn’t the Dalai Lama in there. He doesn’t seem to need to get away and play video games. That focus appeals to me; in a world of people trying to choose for their entire lives, the person who chooses and takes the consequences is indomitable. And probably happier.

Plus he eats Yak.’

Murphy quotes Carl Jung: ‘I have serious doubts as to the blessings of Western civilization, and I have similar misgivings as to the adoption of Eastern spirituality by the West.’ She speculates that her own ‘…involuntary hostility aroused by those who adopt alien philosophies is probably mainly due to a basic suspicion that they are guilty of attempting to escape from their inherited responsibilities.’

Well, she may be right. Or it may be that these days we inherit no spiritual framework at all, and must patch something together if we feel the need. And what’s so wrong with peace, love and understanding? Except that it doesn’t get your country back.

How lusty a swinger
John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, is excellent for passing the time at work. Unless, as I did, you get caught with Signior Dildo on your monitor. Sample verse:

‘The Countess of Falmouth, of whom people tell
Her footmen wear shirts of a guinea an ell,
Might save that expense, if she did but know
How lusty a swinger is Signior Dildo.’

Samuel Johnson said of Rochester:

“in a course of drunken gaiety and gross sensuality, with intervals of study perhaps yet more criminal, with an avowed contempt of decency and order, a total disregard to every moral, and a resolute denial of every religious observation, he lived worthless and useless, and blazed out his youth and health in lavish voluptuousness”.

I can’t decide between Rochester and the Dalai Lama as my moral compass this year. Today I lean towards R., but it’s Friday.

Logospace?
If cyberspace is where you go on when you’re on the phone, where do you go when you’re reading a book? I’m hoping there’s a word for this precious state that isn’t a graceless neologism.

A love letter
Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn is Sim City, and I am God. It is the closest neighborhood expression of self I can imagine. The canal. Halcyon. The writers tapping in every cafe. The old Italians playing bocce. The brownstones. The bridges. Sparkys pub. Sahadis grocers. Caputos bakery. Staublitz butchers, with their coveted I [heart] my butcher baby doll tees in the window.

—Pull yourself together and stop drooling, woman!

Sorry. That is all.

Poetry alert—hit Back to cancel
Paul is chug-a-lugging Yeats these days, and yesterday sent me He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven. This isn’t one of my bike-yelling poems, but it’s a favorite nonetheless. In return, I sent him Auden’s In Memory of WB Yeats:

‘You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth…’

It turns out that yesterday was the anniversary of Yeats’ death in 1939. Fitting, I suppose, that two Brooklyn bloggers would exchange his lines as small gifts between technical projects. This is the modest immortality that Patrick Kavanagh hopes for in Wet Evening in April:

‘The birds sang in the wet trees
And I listened to them it was a hundred years from now
And I was dead and someone else was listening to them.
But I was glad I had recorded for him
The melancholy. ‘

‘Do I contradict myself?
Very well, I contradict myself
(I am large; I contain multitudes)’
It is difficult for a European to accept American individualism as an unambiguous Good Thing. ‘But it’s selfish!’ we cry. ‘And lonely! And what about universal healthcare?’

However, today I feel in the mood for some Whitman, whose barbaric yawp silences my inner Eurotrash so that, like Molly Bloom, I assent joyfully. This is a good poem for the start of a century.

‘I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

Houses and rooms are full of perfumes—the shelves are crowded with perfumes;
I breathe the fragrance myself, and know it and like it;
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.

The atmosphere is not a perfume—it has no taste of the distillation—it is odorless;
It is for my mouth forever—I am in love with it;
I will go to the bank by the wood, and become undisguised and naked;
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.’

The Economist is worth the subscription for the ads alone.

YEMEN
Tugging the future by the forelock!

or:
SLOVENIA
[Insert pic of blonde in tight business suit]
We’ve got some really nice figures!