Dear Fonzie

Battersea; Atheism over Agnosticism; Rosalie; Pink Floyd; Don't Kill Yourself

2011-06-23T12:24:00.000-07:00

Dear Bleaders,

So what's shakin'? Same old around here. I've been named one of the 25 most influential living atheists. To which I say, "You call this living?" No, but seriously folks. It is super fun, and brings new readers (hi new readers!) but oddly does not come with a large cash award. So I remain beholden to poetry for my amusement. I thought today I'd try to unravel some thoughts on time travel, or rather, as it is more commonly noted, some thoughts on history.

There is nothing stranger you can do to your mind than to give it history. Take Rosalie, for instance. She is walking through a village early morning in England and looking at the charming houses and ingratiating streams. She walks a long time as the grey sky mists and clears to blue, and back to grey and misty. Rosie's okay and her good shoes are holding up too. She smells the world and feels it in her belly. Her mind is rattling around in there, wondering what it’s doing here, but the rest of her is feasting on the moment.

Now Rosie goes into a café and starts reading the big grey book on the counter beside her, a history of this same town in which she’s been wandering. The sky starts storming outside, inside they seem glad to have her, so she gets comfortable and lunch hours go by.

By the time the sky gets light again, it is already getting dimmer, past tea, before dinner, and she heads out to snake the streets home to her hostel. But now she knows everything about Battersea. Why is Battersea inland, for instance? Because it used to be on the coast but the sea was so brutal in its marauding erosion that the townspeople picked up and left, stopped in a quiet place just south of London and named their dry new encampment with the old wet name they’d always known. Much later Bertrand Russell would deliver, here, one of his most powerful and influential speeches on the purposes of man under the godless heavens.

As Rosie walks homeward the aspect of the natives changes. Now she everywhere sees the odd pluck it must require to lift yourself up and all your neighbors and redirect your browser to another world, inland, and name it Battersea again. Battersea forever.

The human mind, I think, has two modes: Present and Historical. Both are good. In the first you are an animal, in the second, just a god. The first smells baking bread. The second knows this is the same bread Henry the Fifth smelt just before he dealt his quiverblow against the fearsome French, who were all man and five times as many but their arrows, ahem, fell short. Englishmen now in their beds have wished they’d been there to see it for centuries now. Englishmen, for Chrissake, get out of bed already.

Let’s make the village a concept and do this again. Rosalie is an agnostic. She has heard the argument that no one can prove a negative and believes it. Then she wanders into a café and reads a big book on doubt as she waits out the rain. Now she knows that the term agnosticism was invented only a hundred years ago by Thomas Henry Huxley, and has no intellectual pedigree to speak of. Huxley made it up having read about Skepticism, which is a philosophically robust proposition that asks how we can know anything at all, given the limitations of our minds and our tiny, animal perspective. Skepticism is thousands of years old and has been brilliantly explored in every age. Agnosticism is the logic of Skepticism applied to only one question, the question of whether one particular people’s imagined idea of the supernatural actually exists.

To be sensible, either you are a Skeptic about all things, which allows you to be a profoundly interesting thinker but does not allow you to claim to know anything about the world; or you are a rationalist, which means you gather evidence, try to minimize your cultural bias, and make conclusions. If you make your decisions by rationalism, you can certainly say that an idea is not to be considered as at all valid if it has no evidence to argue for it being true. In Skepticism I have to allow that possibly all of life is happening in the dream of a cosmic elephant; in rationalism, I do not. It is philosophical nonsense to take Skepticism and apply it to one belief. In rationalism, it is possible to rule on the validity of a conjecture that has no evidence.

Huxley made up agnosticism because he wanted to leave room for people to be atheists but still keep a line of hope. But that is massively wrong-headed. When people confront the truth they get used to it and see that it is not so bad. So there is no afterlife. Big deal. Life is enough. When you are dead, you are so dead that nothing should matter to you about it. When you are alive, you’re alive. Every moment is so huge, there is so much of it, and we take in so little of it. You want more life at the end? You’re hardly using the life you have now. None of us are. We already have more than we can handle. Your job is to try to know the present and the past, to expand into the now, in part by knowing what was.

Some people get on a plane to change where they are but you can transform your surroundings as well as your inner world with just a touch of new knowing.

Having researched and written Doubt: A History and The Happiness Myth I find myself in a land unexpected. Richer and twisty. Aware of how an inland people still braves battering by the sea. History emancipates and reconfigures so the way home looks different than the way we’ve just been.

Russell’s speech (in 1927) was “Why I Am Not a Christian,” and it was published and republished and for several generations it was a downright sacred text for those flying their kite with nothing but wind and skill. For more on that and a thousand other inspirations, see Doubt: A History and The Happiness Myth.

It was, btw, over the Battersea Power Station that Pink Floyd floated their pig on the wing. On the Animals cover (1977). Life, friends, is boring. That’s why John Berryman drank so much, so much of the time. His mother was right too: Ever to admit you are bored means you have no inner resources. I admit now that, like everyone else, I have no inner resources. By contrast though, I have quite a lot of outer resources, and not always in the tankard. With history hissing gory about the storied past, and the smell of the bread, baking in one’s olfactoric imagination, it begins to be possible to still the spinning day down to something distillable, and store it, and become your own oracle.

Rosalie notices that everything has changed, but that she, in some ways, at least, is the same, and has kept her name. It’s still me. It's still Rosalie. It's still Battersea. It’s still you too, and since it is, you need to know your history. It makes the run from the gun to the sun a lot more fun.

Alright, I love you, as you know. Don't kill yourself and I shall return to encourage you again.

Love,

Jennifer

Game of Thrones

2011-06-13T10:35:00.000-07:00

Dear Bleaders,

I could eat a horse's heart.

As any years-long member of an art or science can say, as any partner in any longstanding marriage could say, as any smarty with a heart who has worked and lived in America in these last few decades could say, as anyone who birthed (or hardmade/hardwon child) and raised children could say, as anyone from a family can say - I have eaten the equivalent of a horse's heart, and I like seeing it done on screen by a stunning, blond blindsiding frontside Force-of-will kaleesi with eyes like my day's peak and piqued and picked and peaked high.

Oh Their God, the whole show is so good I can't take it.

I love ALL the characters, and also want to kill them all with my hands and daggers and swords, and also have sex with, um, most of them. Have a mug of beer with the rest. Maybe a little cuddle. A little play sword-fight with Needle. A smirking kiss from Mayor Carcetti? Chest butt with Eddwd. No leg ride wit the sweet recently disabled kid, Bran, I think, yes Bran (don't remember this line or name if you haven't seen the series yet, it might slightly spoil one small thread). I'd like a sewing circle with the redhead little princess to be. I'd like to slap Joffre and teach him how to make his elders a cup of tea. I'd like to have klingon sex with with kalisee and her horse chieftain. Learn medicine from that dirty sheep lady, she's got pot, you know she's holding at least pot and some pain pills. Trade barbs with the imp, he'd like me and when he tired me out I could probly outrun him. Glad the blond shrill prick got a metal hat. The fat king's makdes (spoilerminded tense mash) me feel bloated. Love Lady Cat. Love Needle girl. Love Sam on the wall fat coward but observant and smart. Love the wolves. Love the bastard. Love the whores, poetic. Think it's funny that Jamie and Cqueen are pretty much the only one's we've seen actually have a good fuck. Love the blood. Love the honest depiction of family as a snakepit of conquest and incest and horror and murder and soul murder, and also the place of loyalty, and trust, and fun, and hope, and companionate despair. Love the iron chair.

Game of Thrones.

Love,

Jennifer

Gorilla Poem

2011-04-30T09:16:00.000-07:00

This is a poem from my second poetry book, Funny. Most of the poems in the book have an old joke inside them.
Gorilla In a Darkening Room
A suspicion about oneself
in the midst of placid repetition
is a vehicle.

The suspicion is not a destination.

Obviously, the suspicion
should not be denied, but neither
should one believe it.

Let us imagine that life
in the arctic is going well for you,
though you are entirely alone
and the food is long gone; you’ve
made your meek adjustments.
The suspicion is a four-wheel drive
all-terrain vehicle that appears,
with keys, one dark day. My point is:
it is important that you do not
simply begin living in the car.

Drive. Our concerns are the anxiety
of not knowing
where we’re going,
and the terrific fear
of being given anything else to do,
of anything else appearing on our desk.
We tender resignation.
We succumb. We head back
inside and stick in a thumb.
It’s a not uncommon, it’s a common
error about how things get done.
How many gorillas does it take
to screw in a light-bulb? One,
but you need a lot of light-bulbs.

The gorilla regards
the crate of light-bulbs with excitement
but by noon, despair. My friends,
I admit, I can not
bear the anxiety of not knowing.

Outside, the African sky bleeds blue
and oxidizes. Indoors, the one
light socket opens herself
to her gorilla and waits for the perfect
turn. Did you really come here

to talk about love? Poor baboon.
This is no way to go about it,
of course, of course we need
to be more honest, to admit
the secret weakness, the shattered,
well, let’s move on.
You hear the socket coo:
My lonely gorilla, did they
punish you into perversion?

Under these circumstances
it is hard to be epic. The best
you can do is re-open the field
of possibilities and resist
rushing them closed. Bear
the anxiety of not knowing.

Resist summing up.
The secret weakness
wishes to speak! Nevertheless,
face it, nothing works.

It is winter in the African
jungle and I am
empty. Below me, on the ground,
a silverback looks out
at the bruised-fruit sky of a setting
sun and then back up at me.

There’s something about
fear of darkness in his attentions.
Crates of light-bulbs
everywhere and everywhere
broken bulbs. The terrible
graying gorilla is really trying
to figure it out now. He’s

looking closer. I want him
to figure it out, much as,
in the other metaphor, I want
to park the car in the first
town I come to, buy a house,
marry the village wine-steward,
and open a nice Chianti.

But you’ve got to roam.

The mango-papaya sky
at sunset in the jungle,
the aurora in the tundra.

Either way, be brave,
press the sky back into
the distance. Give yourself
a little room. Inside

the little room, dark now,
the gorilla sighs, the light-bulbs
sigh, the socket sleeps
and dreams about the rising
sun. So this is how the west was
won? This is how things get done.

pinkest

2011-04-30T09:13:00.000-07:00

An Adventure to Boston Began With Beluga

2011-04-25T16:19:00.000-07:00

pinker still

2011-04-20T12:41:00.000-07:00

yet pinker

2011-04-17T09:25:00.000-07:00

It is still cold, but remember winter?

2011-04-16T16:30:00.000-07:00

pinker

2011-04-16T15:35:00.000-07:00

Wind whirl.

2011-04-15T13:06:00.000-07:00

Cherry tree is about to flower. Watch This Space.

2011-04-15T10:25:00.000-07:00

light on leaf with hand on top

2011-04-15T10:21:00.000-07:00

is the world this shadow of an eye, or orange saturn winking in the sky. well, in the tree, but sky rhymed.

2011-04-15T10:11:00.000-07:00

Perhaps I should re-establish that I am an Idiot for rhyme.

Can't wait for spring to see colors in the trees.

2011-04-15T10:02:00.000-07:00

Afternoons are easier than mornings.

Other gardens nearby have wind chimes. They seem connected to my light chimes.

2011-04-15T09:58:00.001-07:00

It makes me happy.

2011-04-14T09:29:00.000-07:00

It makes me happy to see the button and the dirt from when it fell and stayed down a while and the way the metal star looks like it just now pressed itself into the flesh of the ball. The ninja waning, dino waxing, pearls and things I find outside particular places or having fallen off peculiar persons. I'm not sure who I was when I made this but I know I've made several since and by looking at it I can see that I existed and have listed what I saw by sticking them in clay with shiny things and hanging them in my tree. Like any sensible person would do in my situation.

Click this pic for an eerie silence! You too can empathize with a symbolic beast!

2011-04-14T09:25:00.000-07:00

Triumph of the Ninja!

2011-04-14T09:19:00.000-07:00

Tree Jewelry

2011-04-14T09:16:00.000-07:00

Courage!

2010-12-22T10:33:00.000-08:00

I've been saying things over at best american poetry.

My muse seems preoccupied by conjuring encouragement. I'm as surprised about it as you are, but for reasons beyond me, I endeavor to cheer up the miserable. And the nearly miserable.

xoxjmh

The moon eclipsing and wiggling around

2010-12-22T09:55:00.000-08:00

2010-12-03T12:08:00.001-08:00

See that purple dot towards the bottom of the shot? It's the New Years Eve ball in Times Square, already poised to drop. We went up to the top of the Empire State to check on the year. Apparently, it's winding down and winding up.

I've been posting about poetry and whatnot overhere. All the usual emotions on hot display. Go look.

xoxJennifer

A Nut

2010-11-19T11:22:00.000-08:00

A while back I saw a Charlie Rose episode with a bunch of neurologists talking about brains, and one guy said that our spectacular ones are the direct result of movement, of the fact that we move around.

Trees, he said, don't have brains and don't move around. All our insanely complicating thinking was, in its primary development, all about the body doing things.

This is a photograph I took of a squirrel on a tree. It is an unusual squirrel, in that it has chosen to hang upside-down, belly to the trunk of the tree, and from that entirely perpendicular-to-the-ground stance, eat a nut and look at me, your poet at large.

What I want us to do is to run our hands around the trunk of the tree and feel the rough organic of its room-temperature surface and the unyielding rock of its inside strength. It's big. It's quiet except for the susurration of its leaves above us. Now our hands circle the trunk and arrive at the squirrel, who in this mental visit behaves as if he's been paid. Squirrel is warm and soft, nothing like the long brown-grey column to which he somehow clings.

Now, our hands still on the squirrel, we catch the wee beast's eye. It is a wonderful way to concentrate the mind.

I just saw a recent interview with Christopher Hitchens who is suffering stage 4 cancer and his interlocutor asked, "Are you up to this? To a long conversation on life, death, and the universe, and all the big questions?" (as remembered) and Hitchens said, "Oh, yes. It's what I love to do. And, in fact, it is a wonderful way to concentrate the mind."

So here is the squirrel, a tiny long brown-grey column exhibiting physical warmth, hunger, and whimsey. Some time later, the poet at small sits at her desk and contemplates the photograph and everything not in the photograph, the inverted squirrel world. It is a beauty and remarkably cruel, with all its stages, from 3 and 4 to 1 and 2.

What do we for the moment conclude? The mind is made of movement. The moving mind is unconcentrated. The tree is mindless and concentrated. The dare-devil squirrel is resting and arresting. The mind arrested is a desperately needed rest. Not everyone is best off staying still by staying still. The mind, which is movement, concentrates and stays still, for some, in conversation with the world. Miserable? Shattered? Sad for a good man's bad news? Describe something carefully. The conversation's movement is the natural home and place of concentration of the mind.

Efforts to induce the effect of dapple

2010-11-13T15:26:00.000-08:00

Dear Fonzie Arises from an Accidental Era of Hiatus to Talk about Dapple

2010-11-01T10:04:00.000-07:00

Dear Fonzie,

It's hard to capture dapple. When I'm back at the rock with nothing but the idea "push against the rock" and the rock doesn't move and neither to I, I find out a lot about equal and opposite forces. When I'm back at the rock and I push with the intent of moving, I suppose, it doesn't move but I do. So there you have it: In the middle of this portion of your life, you find yourself confused about direction, in a bright woods.

The dapple hits the ground layer of leaves and moss which is up-buttressed by a skeleton of branches. It is pretty and hypnotizes. You are a bit cold. You miss the medications you used to use, but the wind shudders the trees and the dapple on the forest floor begins to shimmer and quiver, a bright shivering, and it calms you down.

You look up, the leaves dapple against the blue sky, with the sun slapping everything around. There are worse situations, as we love to point out at all times that we are not pointing out that there are better situations. Embrace the face of it though: You are lost in these bright woods and it is chilly.

I mention all of this because I haven't posted in a good long while, wiling away my wiles against quiet, and people, and other paper, other spaces. Today though, I have reappeared with little or no planning or intention, just a decision to channel you some straight babble, like a talkative Visigoth, following out from the word "dapple," to which my thoughts of late have been continually returning, like someone in a dream or coma half-remembering what they need to remember in order to wake up or whatever. Dapple.

I've been trying to photograph it. As above noted, it isn't at all casually doable. The intensity of actual sunlight against actual deep shadow can't be flatly done or anywise is not usually doublable. Attempts prove that what looks like dapple in real life, leaf shadows on leafy ground and fences, doesn't look as dapply as leaves against a blue sky, which in real life is only dapple with a bit of human will helping to splay the sunlight through the trees.

Anyway, I think dapple might be effective as an elevated mood stabilizer.

Jennifer

From Faith to Being

2010-09-11T07:36:00.001-07:00

This is a very thought-provoking move, from faith to being. (I come in at the 35 min mark)

Picturesque Summer Photos

2010-08-18T09:29:00.000-07:00

This man was swimming and found something unusual.

He shows it to the lifeguards. What do we do with this?

The sandy Solomons decree that there is no way to match our lost and stranded dentistry with our toothless salty citizens. We can but bear witness and move on.

For more beachy photo goodness and a dream of middle memory see my latest post at Best American Poetry.

xoxjmh

Picture show

2010-08-04T10:01:00.000-07:00

My new picture show at Best American Poetry Blog.

Unloose change link

2010-07-12T10:52:00.000-07:00

This is a good story nicely told.

Fonz in Vegas

2010-07-11T19:54:00.000-07:00

More Berry Business

2010-06-18T15:07:00.000-07:00

Wow I've never come down with bird photo fever before.

Gotta immortalize the feathered. Gotta getta betta look.

What else goes on in the berry tree.

2010-06-17T14:45:00.000-07:00

What goes on in the berry tree.

2010-06-17T13:47:00.000-07:00

Red Bird District II

2010-06-11T14:09:00.000-07:00

I just took this picture of my Red Friend sitting in the berry tree, Brooklyn. Isn't he fine?

New Device For Cleaning Up Children From Park

2010-06-08T20:45:00.000-07:00

Too many kids on your lawn, or on the Great Lawn? Just rig one of these up, give it a roll.

(Really this is at the just opened fabulous new part of Brooklyn Bridge Park, right at the end of Atlantic Avenue. It is really a kiddie wonderland. A big terrific water feature play area, climbing region, swath of swings, realm of sand. Well done, all those who done it.).

More notes from the Red Bird District

2010-06-07T08:21:00.000-07:00

Would you like to see his beady little eye? Click and see.
I am a red bird standing on a pole, I am so fancy.

Code Translation through Transliteration

2010-06-03T07:52:00.000-07:00

Father’s port of deck: The ray’s sun, whether from

real eye in sun or pro-tech sun.

We moo, truly pledge due East. Other.

Our lives are our fortunes, as is our sacred honor.

Go Outside; garden jewelry

2010-06-02T07:34:00.000-07:00

Dear crazy and near-crazy Bleaders,

It is a beautiful day. Go outside. Going outdoors helps the crazy and fast. Your brain can tell your arm to move and it just moves, no delay, but you walk out of your bright room and down the basement stairs and it takes a full half hour to get full night vision. Why so slow? It’s chemical.

The rods in your eyes use the chemical rhodopsin to absorb photons and thereby perceive light. When a rhodopsin molecule absorbs a photon, it is split into two: a retinal molecule and an opsin molecule, which then slowly recombine. When your eyes are flooded with bright light all your rhodopsin is turned into retinal and opsin. If you then put yourself into the dark there is no rhodopsin and you just have to wait for your retinal and opsin to recombine into rhodopsin. (The retinal, btw, is derived from Vitamin A., hence all sorts of things you've heard of.) There is no rushing the rate of it.

Anyway, about your crazy. Your crazy is contained in the room you are in. The room in which you loiter. When you step outside, outdoors, into the wide open upness (if urbanly not side-to-side), your crazy expands immediately to fill the immense space and almost none of it is left in your head.

Crazy taken outside does not act like an eye going from lightness to dark, but rather like an arm being asked to swat a fly off your picnic. It’s not a slow influence towards sanity, it is Jack stands up and gets out of the box. Climbs out of his little metal cube, regards the winder with some wry distaste, shudders, walks away.

Out of your boxes, crazies. It is not sufficient to imagine leaving the house, which is why I did not take a picture of the sky for you, I thought you might imagine gazing upon it to be sufficient. There are mechanical factors involved, beyond what you can factor. Stand up and get out there.

Love,

Jennifer

Mr. Googly-eyes in light and shadow

2010-05-29T10:27:00.000-07:00

Mulberry Madness

2010-05-29T10:23:00.000-07:00

The mulberry tree is ripe and berries are falling like mad, like crazy, like mania. Millions of berries on the grass. Birds are going wild for the one's in the tree, knocking down tons for us. Eating them, right from the grass and low hanging branches makes one feel like a bear. I am one. I feel like a bear.

It's on.

2010-05-29T10:08:00.000-07:00

Oh little green globe, how the immense blue bowl of the sky and I have missed you. Welcome. Soon I will eat your little face off.

Turn red and meet my basil and my fresh mozzarella from the Italian butcher on the corner.

I will eat you all.

Pink lies. Like white lies, but a little redder.

2010-05-27T13:02:00.000-07:00

Dear Bleaders,

Me and the kids made this white spherical objet d'art and I hung it in the tree I'm always hanging things in, and then a month goes by and the rose bush blossomed such that a rose was right there next to the objet and my mind delighted in the confusion this caused my eye-brain. So to make it delightfully worse, I made a rose out of clay, painted it pink and hung it in the tree near the rose bush and objet. Then I took a picture of it and I sent it off to you.

Love,

Jennifer

Bridgacoaster to the Isle of Staten

2010-05-27T12:54:00.000-07:00

Fake Science - Coffee

2010-05-25T11:56:00.000-07:00

Find out more Fake Science.

Red Bird District

2010-05-18T10:12:00.000-07:00

Poetry Brothel Tonight

2010-05-16T11:55:00.000-07:00

Dear Bleaders,

What did we really learn from Eliot? I mean, we learned a tome, but all of it was wrong. So what singular gem that holds up did he leave us embroidered in braille on his trouser hem? This center piece in the puzzledox parabox of the universe I'm in (you're in here with me. watch your hands. redheads and my husband aside): There will be time.

There will be time.

Life is long.

There will be time, there will be time.

Redheads, real or imaginary. If you want some of my honey, bunny, better paint your head red.

At Poetry Brothel's I always bring presents for redheads. A polished stones. A pearl. An Advil. Whatever seems appropriate. It's a trick to get them to kiss me. Sue me. I like them. Real, dye, or imaginary.

There is going to be a Poetry Brothel tonight at the Back Room. Maybe you like life a little dirty. Maybe there are crumbs of poetry down your shirt even now. So you'll join us tonight, we will be high not on life but on essentially legal substances, being used in ways slightly at odds with their stated directions. Poetry will be said that will hurt your poor ape heart and bruise your knuckle-eyed head. How could we have lost so much and ended up aloft in bounty, riding what used to be the purple sage but is now a delightful settee? I do not know, but I am glad that it is you and me. Seriously. I don't care if anyone shows up, but I do hope you drop by. I am going to lounge around lasciviously and tell people important secrets.

I love you. Don't kill yourself. For those of you who can't make it, I'll see you in your dreams.

xox

JMH

ps ok i wrote this post for the Best American Poetry site and then put it here too, and having done so i have to add that the Fonz, also, can kiss me. yes, i know he is fictional. haven't we discussed this? seriously though come tonight and drink and have poetry with delightful people. it is always different and always, in hindsight, perfectly reasonable.

Ode to a Nightingale

2010-05-10T09:16:00.000-07:00

When you study the history of science you find out things you might not want to know. What you find out makes it difficult to believe the things everyone around you believes. Because people believe a lot of things and you have learned that most of what people believe, in any time period, in any place, is a kind of nonsense.

Look. After germ theory was very well discovered, explained, and used to change real outcomes in the real world, it took a good four decades to convince people. Some of the most trenchant deniers were the most educated people. We can look back now and see.

Maybe you think doctors and nurses would all say: "Thank goodness, finally, something that actually works!" Instead, the new theory felt so threatening to everything these people had spent their lives doing, teaching, writing, and believing, that it was too painful to turn away from all the details of the medical world before bacteriology. The world just had to wait for them to die off. Florence Nightingale radically changed the world through a belief in cleanliness and order, through her work, for the first time in the history of history, armies did not lose more men to sickness and infection than to sheer physical damage. Yet when germ theory came around she denied it. For decades. Died still wittily deriding the idea.

The role of self interest as a real loud voice at the table of truth, even in these most obvious examples, goes unnoticed by the person trying to figure out the world (isn't everyone living in the world trying to figure it out?).

Think about the things we have invested in too much to reconsider. Consider first the cases in which we are right to do this. We have invested a great deal in learning to use the English language. Whether or not the writing on the wall is in Chinese, it makes good sense for us to stick with what we’ve got. There are cases where we should start changing and are ready to do so: We’ve got a lot invested in books, and we are trying to step back and see what changes might be bearable. Oil. Big agriculture. Those of us interested in reconceiving the world do manage to do so in some impressive ways, no question.

Still, it is worth saying clearly. There are things we believe that are not true. There are ways we behave that are holdovers: We keep jumping over where there used to be a pothole.

After a while, a person asks her or himself, Where is different? Where is life? And in those moments it is useful to remember that one answer is: To the right of where you always go. Under the puddle into which you do not want to step, and then to the left. Where you are strong, instead try weakness. It can be salutary to self-suggest that everything youve saids been sort of wrong.

Surrounded by Michelangelos

2010-05-08T09:52:00.000-07:00

Want to know what i looked like the other day?

2010-05-07T09:21:00.000-07:00

Dare-link Fonz and Sweet Bleaders,

I have decided to make some Mental Movies. This is the first one. Don't click play on your computer, click play by tapping a finger. Here is the movie. It lasts fifteen seconds. This woman (me) eats her glasses. That's it. Go.

Did you do it? Isn't that a funny movie?

I'm going to watch it again! It's different every time. In fact, it keeps getting longer, as each time I see it I see what I imagined before and often a new image as well: me biting a lens like a potato chip, drawing in a frame arm like a noodle, plucking off the two small nose rests, like berries, and popping them into my mouth. At last, nearly blind, I smile at the camera's lens, which, of course, now fears me, but shouldn't, as I am utterly sated by my recent feast.

Love,

Jennifer

poem on the quick

2010-05-06T08:34:00.000-07:00

Poem of May 5, 2010

Fireworks and fertilizer

in Time Square

an SUV where no car should be

smoking a little.

A vendor sees, tells a cop

on a horse.

The other way it might have played

was that the bomb

went off and fifty-seven people

died, millions heartbroken.

All of them wished so hard

it hadn’t happened

that the world bent back

like a twig and snapped

to this world,

where it didn’t happen.

Have a cocktail or something.

I’m going to drink champagne.

Fireworks and fertilizer

and a man on a horse.

It's very strange.

--Jennifer Michael Hecht

garden jewelry VI

2010-05-04T09:55:00.000-07:00

Being in a tree

2010-05-04T09:43:00.000-07:00

I made this being and I put it in a tree.

May the fourth be with you

2010-05-04T09:15:00.000-07:00

Happy Star Wars Day

2010-04-29T08:40:00.000-07:00

One day they woke up and realized they were not taking pills for anxiety and depression but for anger. They were all furious. They stopped taking their pills. Their anger was huge and would not dissipate. They started screaming and screaming. Eventually, with all the screaming, the anger did dissipate. They felt better. They did not feel anxious anymore. Who could feel anxious after all that? They did not feel particularly depressed either, though about a third of them still wished they were getting more sex.

Picture of sunny morning posted on rainy morning.

2010-04-26T04:15:00.000-07:00

A mouse awakened me at five am. Was she playing dice? Sounded like a mouse playing dice. Got up and looked behind where it sounded like it was coming from. Yes, mouse evidence. No mouse, no dice.

More Pantoum!

2010-04-20T07:11:00.001-07:00

This is a freakishly long post for me, but i think you might find it amusing. I find it amusing. I am going to read it again right now.

Fonz,

Dude, I'm supposed to be writing this book that I'm writing and I'm just done with the hour of looking around the internest that starts my day and I find, instead of turning to Stay (my book in the writing), I'm turning to you to talk about pantoums. Why? Because you are handsome and cool.

You might guess pantoum was a minor cousin of the sonnet, all Elizabethan or whathaveyou, but, my freuds, it is not.

The pantun is a Malay poetic form.

Malay is a family of languages that goes back to the 7^th century BC, in and around Indoanesia.

The pantun began as a tuneless love song, a completely oral art form. People started writing them down in the 15^th century.

The pantoum is derived from a particular type of pantun, the pantun berkait, a series of interwoven four-line stanzas.

This pantun has four-line stanzas with an abab rhyme. It is recited according to a fixed rhythm that works in Malay so long as they keep the syllables of each line between eight and twelve.

Here’s Katharine Sim* on the form. Read this despite the resistance it excites: “The pantun is a four-lined verse consisting of alternating, roughly rhyming lines. The first and second lines sometimes appear completely disconnected in meaning from the third and fourth, but there is almost invariably a link of some sort. Whether it be a mere association of ideas, or of feeling, expressed through assonance or through the faintest nuance of a thought, it is nearly always traceable.”

* How much do I love the title of her book? It’s like jeeze we just learned the pantum, give us a break! No but seriously: Katharine Sim, More than a Pantun: Understanding Malay Verse (Times International: Singapore, 1987).

The pantun is highly allusive, dependent on shared knowledge of a symbolic code.

Here’s one, translation by Sim:

Tanam selasih di tengah padang,

Sudah bertangkai diurung semut,

Kita kasih orang tak sayang,

Halai-balai tempurung hanyut.

I planted sweet-basil in mid-field

Grown, it swarmed with ants,

I loved but am not loved,

I am all confused and helpless.

---

Isn't that great?

Sim tells us "Selasih" (meaning sweet basil) means "lover" -- because it rhymes with kekasih (the word for lover); and the last line, "halai-balai tempurung hanyut" literally means "a floating coconut shell at sixes and sevens."

Other frequently recurring symbols are:

flower and the bee = the girl and her lover

the squirrel (tupai) = a seducer

water hyacinth (bunga kiambang) = love that will not take root.

[I’ve never actually looked into this Sim book, I’m “translating” all this from the English yet nearly-impenetrable wikipedia entry on the Pantun.][I bet I end up buying the Sim book.]

Anywhy, how did the pantun get to be a big form in Europe in the 19^th and 20^th centuries?

Well, a linguist called William Marsden, published a pantun in his Dictionary and Grammar of the Malayan Language in 1812. It was delightfully sexy and when minor poet Ernest Fouinet read it he was inspired to write his own, unrhymed French version of the poem, which came out so good that Victor Hugo published it in the notes to his book Les Orientales (1829) and after that tons of French poets wrote what was now called “pantoums.” This went on for a hundred and fifty years. Want to see the poems that got all this started? You have to click on this link! A Famous Pantun.

Oh Their God wasn't that delish?! Many youths have I admired,/ but none to compare with my present choice. It's hawt.

Okay so fast forward to like, fifty years ago.

You know the way the villanelle, today, is still primarily connected with “Do not go gently into that good night”? Fifty years ago, the pantoum was Baudelaire’s “Harmonie du soir,” though it is a particularly irregular version (the stanzas rhyme abba instead of abab, and the last line, which should be the same as the first, is original). If you go look here, fluersdumal and read the English translations you’ll go WTF? Why would that be so beloved?

Click here to see a google search page that will tell you all you need to know, don't bother clicking any of the links: Look. See?

"Un ostensoir est un objet liturgique de la religion catholique, également appelée monstrance."

An "ostensoir" is a liturgical object in the Catholic religion, also called "monstrance." Ha! Now do you see why the poem was so much fun?

Harmonie du soir

Voici venir les temps où vibrant sur sa tige
Chaque fleur s'évapore ainsi qu'un encensoir;
Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l'air du soir;
Valse mélancolique et langoureux vertige!

Chaque fleur s'évapore ainsi qu'un encensoir;
Le violon frémit comme un coeur qu'on afflige;
Valse mélancolique et langoureux vertige!
Le ciel est triste et beau comme un grand reposoir.

Le violon frémit comme un coeur qu'on afflige,
Un coeur tendre, qui hait le néant vaste et noir!
Le ciel est triste et beau comme un grand reposoir;
Le soleil s'est noyé dans son sang qui se fige.

Un coeur tendre, qui hait le néant vaste et noir,
Du passé lumineux recueille tout vestige!
Le soleil s'est noyé dans son sang qui se fige...
Ton souvenir en moi luit comme un ostensoir!

— Charles Baudelaire

Harmonie du soir
teej
encensoir
l'air du soir;
Valse (waltz) mélancolique et langoureux vertige (vertigo, pronounced verteej)!
encensoir;
fleej
Valse mélancolique et langoureux vertige!
Le ciel est triste et beau comme un grand reposoir (altar).
fleej,
Un coeur tendre, qui hait le néant vaste et noir! (a tender heart who hates the vast black nothingness!)
Le ciel est triste et beau comme un grand reposoir; (the sky is sad and beautiful like a giant alter)
Le soleil s'est noyé dans son sang qui se fige. (feej!) (the sun is drowning in its blood which is congealing)!
Un coeur tendre, qui hait le néant vaste et noir,
vestige (vesteej)
Le soleil s'est noyé dans son sang qui se fige
And then this freaky last line which is what the whole poem was for, all for the word: Ostensoir!
Ton souvenir en moi luit comme un ostensoir!
The memory of you is brilliant inside me, like one of those huge gold starburst things that are part of the ritual at the altar of a Catholic church. This is particularly wonderful because the word for the huge gold starburst things is Ostensoir! which rhymes with night and darkness (soir et noir) and has the synonym of Monstrance, which sounds like monster. Ostensoir which must mean eastern night. It is an "ornamental in which the consecrated host is placed for veneration."

Do you see how much fun all this is, in the French? It is bloody and gross and sexy and sounds fantastic.

And what else was fun? Well what else was fun was what the pantun started out as, which is visible hilariously through this hilarious text over at the Classic Encyclopedia.
It's from the Encyclopedia Britanica 1911 and it is sooooo great. I have to quote it in full here. I really want you to actually read this whole thing. It is funny. All I have done is put in some paragraph breaks to encourage you to keep reading:
PANTUN (PANTOUM), a form of verse of Malay origin. An imitation of the form has been adopted in French and also in English verse, where it is known as "pantoum." The Malay pantunis a quatrain, the first and third and the second and fourth lines of which rhyme.

The peculiarity of the verse-form resides in the fact that the first two lines have as a rule no actual connexion, in so far as meaning is concerned, with the two last, or with one another, and have for their raison d'être a means of supplying rhymes for the concluding lines.

For instance:
Senudoh kayu di-rimba Benang karap ber-simpul puleh: Sunggoh dudok ber-tindek riba, Jangan di-harap kata-kan buleh.
The rhododendron is a wood of the jungle, The strings within the frame-work of the loom are in a tangled knot.
It is true that I sit on thy lap, But do not therefore cherish the hope that thou canst take any other liberty.

Here, it will be seen, the first two lines have no meaning, though according to the Malayan mind, on occasion, these "rhyme-making" lines are held to contain some obscure, symbolicaj reference to those which follow them. The Malay is not exacting with regard to the correctness of his rhymes, and to his ear rimba and riba rhyme as exactly as puleh and bulek. It should also be noted that in the above example, as is not infrequently the case with the Malay pantun, there is a similar attempt at rhyme between the initial words of the lines as well as between the word with which they conclude, senudoh and sunggoh, benang and , jeingan, and kdrap and karap all rhyming to the Malayan ear.

There are large numbers of well-known pantun with which practically all Malays are acquainted, much as the commoner proverbs are familiar to us all, and it is not an infrequent practice in conversation for the first line of a pantun- viz.: one of the two lines to which no real meaning attaches - to be quoted alone, the audience being supposed to possess the necessary knowledge to fit on the remaining lines for himself and thus to discover the significance of the allusion.

Among cultured Malays, more especially those living in the neighbourhood of the raja's court, new pantun are constantly being composed, many of them being of a highly topical character, and these improvisations are quoted from man to man until they become current like the old, well-known verses, though within a far more restricted area. Often too, the pantun is used in love-making, but they are then usually composed for the exclusive use of the author and for the delectation of his lady-loves, and do not find their way into the public stock of verses.

"Capping" pantun is also a not uncommon pastime, and many Malays will continue such contests for hours without once repeating the same verse, and often improvising quatrains when their stock threatens to become exhausted. When this game is played by skilled versifiers, the pantun last quoted, and very frequently the second line thereof, is used as the tag on to which to hang the succeeding verse.

The "pantoum" as a form of verse was introduced into French by Victor Hugo in Les Orientales (1829).
--
Isn't it amazing how condescending and yet admiring and knowledgeable the entry author is?

And then, as if that were not enough, in the 20th century, Americans get their hands on the pantoum and OTG, they run it into the ground!

There's no limit on its length and Americans just intuited that we could hammer in a hell of a relentless (thanks Amy Holman for the insight and word, yes, relentless!) work song, blues song, sorrow chanty.
Look at a few of these Donald Justice Pantoum. Carolyn Kizer Pantoum. Oy.
And of course, back to song. I am going to like it here.
Want to hear it? Go to 1:23 Here for the song.

I am going to like it here
Like a port in a storm it is
All the people are so sincere
There's especially one I like
I am going to like it here

And that, freuds, is the pantoum. Next up...the larch. The Larch.

Love,

Jennifer

Pantoum!

2010-04-19T08:19:00.000-07:00

Hi Fonz,

Are you in the mood to talk about form? I just finished reading The Anthologist, having had it recommended to me by the flawless Amy Lawless, and it has moodened me to offer my own toot oriel, in verse, by example.

Let us begin just left of the beginning, with the Pantoum. What the? Did she say Pantoum? My frikken spellchecker never heard of it! It's underlining it in red as if to say, Give us a sonnet! Give us a villanelle! [Go look at the Pantoum on wikipedia. No Don't! Unless you want to kind of laugh. Read the first paragraph it is all hinky.]

I'll just explain the Pantoum:

Four-line stanzas with abab rhyme.

Every line in the poem is said twice.

Last line of the poem is the same as the first.

Sounds nice right? The pattern is wacky, though, it’s this:

After the first stanza, the first line of each stanza repeats the second line of the preceding stanza. And the third line of the stanza repeats the fourth line of the preceding stanza. Also, in the last stanza, the second line repeats the heretofore unrepeated third line in the first stanza, and its last line repeats the first line of the first stanza.

Fonz, the truth is, the spellchecker is right, it's not the greatest form. Some forms have their device just right, and the Pantoum, like the sestina in my green-house opinion on the subject, is a B class form. But that's what makes it such a challenge, especially here in the twilight of our ridiculous youth and the bright dawn of something grayer. I meant to say, especially here in the sticky-wicket of a new century. Can we pretend sticky wicket means dense Dantesque forest, out of which one wonders, am I ever to be delivered?

Here's what it is. Here's one from me to you. Where did you come from Fonz? It must be hard. So much pressure, so many expectations. Living with someone else's family. Banging on things to make them work. Urinals in your office. (Thanks for that insight Joelle.)

Right, well, back to the poem. It was first published in McSweeney's 31. Actually, I change my mind. I love the Pantoum. It floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee.

Circus

My people were existential thugs.

At circus, monkeys in derbies rode us.

Muttering, Life, in a full-bodied shrug,

at circus we swept up the sawdust.

At circus, monkeys in derbies rode us,

while the great rode feathered horses.

At circus we swept up the sawdust,

the dove’s debris and patrons’ losses.

While the great rode feathered horses,

humming to Pegasus, Oh Peggy Sue,

we’d unglove, debrief, and pocket losses.

Tanneries are what my people knew.

Brushing Pegasus to strains of Peggy Sue,

catching acrobats. Shadow of a big top,

tailor’s tales of what the ball-gown knew.

Sequins and confetti on a rag mop.

Catch an acrobat’s shadow on the big top

muttering, Life, with a bruise. Shrugged

sequins; drooped confetti like a rag mop.

My people were existential thugs.

Next up... the Larch. The Larch.

Love,

Jennifer

Further adventures of "Forget about gym guilt, says poet"

2010-04-07T09:49:00.000-07:00

Dear Fonzie,

The cherry tree is bloomin' blooming.

Here in this just up BAP post below I talk about our culture's weird relationship to physical exercise. In my book the Happiness Myth (which I mention two times below, no wonder when i took Amy Lawless's animal personality quiz I turned out to be a hawk), I also talk about our culture's weird relationship to sex, and you, Fonzie, figure prominently in the discussion. Maybe I'll write about that here sometime.

Anywhich, read this, tell me what you think. Stay cool.

Jennifer

A Short, Packed, Serious Argument Against Gym Guilt [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Darlink Bleaders,

Today I'd like to be less fanciful than I usually am here and deliver what I hope you will agree is a short, packed, serious argument against gym guilt. I've touched on this issue here before, largely as a way to train our minds to see our own culture with some historical perspective. But it is a very important subject in its own right, and I'd like to take a moment to give it a decent hearing. I've spelled out some of this before in my book The Happiness Myth, but I like how things turn out when I write them up just for you, dearest Bleaders, so here goes. Please respond with any thoughts, questions, or comments, either here, on facebook, or by email. k thnx.

Against Gym Guilt

Through studying history, I came to believe that gyms are occupying precisely the role they did in Ancient Sparta and in Fascist Germany. Being obsessed with bodies is actually a pretty rare thing in human history and we’re in lousy company.

Let me show you what I mean.

Why do we go to the gym, according to us? We want to look good. We want to feel good. We want to live longer.

Wanting to look good is pretty universal, but meaning “gym buff” when you say “good looking” is a very historically specific choice, almost as weird as the bustle or hoop skirt, and requiring a lot more effort.

Wanting to feel good is universal too, but note that if many sane people don’t want to go to the gym and indeed, do not go to the gym, than any definition of feeling good has to be looked at very closely. Yes there are ways to enhance mental and physical health by going to the gym, but there are other ways in which the gym can stress our mental and physical health (consider guilt about going enough and pulled muscles). If it feels good to lay on the couch and read a book or listen to music, it is hard to argue that the choice of going to the gym is definitely the one that most promotes mental and physical health. Sure, you should take lots of walks, go for a swim or a bike ride, or, say, clean your own house and sweep your own leaves, but no, you don’t have to go to the gym to feel good.

Wanting to live longer is the weirdest of the bunch. Many cultures focus on birth or death and some work themselves up into quite a froth about one or the other. It’s penises, penises, penises, over here, and over here it is giant chambers fitted out for the afterlife. The idea of focusing a huge amount of attention on keeping individuals alive for as long as possible is very weird. Most people in most of history have lived in cultures that enmeshed the individual in a lively web of meaning so that each person’s own lifespan was just not imagined to be all that important.

As I have said before, it doesn’t really matter how long you live. This isn’t theater, there is no way to miss the end. All bits of it are about as good as all the others and it is fabulous that we all got in and that we are here together. There is an eternity on either side of our little lives. Billions of years. It just doesn’t matter how long we are here. Pay attention to now.

But I can prove the silliness of this “gym for longevity” idea from another direction (before I go on to discuss what gyms are really for). The gym for longevity idea gets awfully weak if you consider, for a moment, what really kills us. Americans die in car accidents. Car crashes are among the top three causes of death for Americans forty and younger, and they remain in the top ten across our whole lives. Yet how often do we nag each other to stay out of cars? We try to hedge our bets with safer cars and laws about speeding, phone chatting, and drinking. But the culture does not lay in a monumental guilt campaign about staying out of cars (there is one for drunk driving, but that’s all). Why? Well, no one is interested in it. People have figured out ways to make money from gym guilt, so there is a vested interest. Also there gym guilt is about something else, something hidden that is none the less very real to us.

So what is the real story with gyms and gym bodies? What does the cult of exercise really mean?

Whenever it pops up in history it means the same thing. It always means: We are strong even though the peons do all the real work for us. We have special arenas marked as leisure where we get muscled at play.

Friends, we take the escalator to the Stairmaster. Why? What could a culture be doing when it pours its resources into making two such extraordinary machines?

If you are an average middle-class person in our culture, you leave the house for work in clean dry clothes and come home at night with clean dry clothes. This marks us as well off. We have an underclass (in our case immigrants, teenagers, and machines) to do our grunt work for us. While the underclass shows the neighbors that I can pay someone to rake my lawn, I grab a special bag of sweat clothes, clearly marked for leisure, and I take the escalator to the Stairmaster.

Friends, we are in the middle of an epic energy crisis. Yet we frantically encourage every able bodied man and woman to drive cars to a gym in the center of town where they are to hop on a machine whose name is the very image of effort going nowhere, the treadmill, and work hard for an hour. Then we make the treadmill electric, so we are actually draining power to do this. (All while the gas we need for the car gets us in wars, pollutes, and costs money.)

When we see this behavior in Ancient Sparta (where the population of Helot slaves outnumbered the Spartans) and in Fascist Germany, and we see the art of those two cultures focusing on the beauty of the toned but clean and uncallused body, we know what we are looking at. It’s more than shallow, it is military, it is deluded, it is oppressive, and a bit grotesque.

So if you love going to the gym, go to the gym. If however it doesn’t feel like your kind of place, you don’t have to go there, and you certainly don’t have to feel bad about not going there.

If you’d like to know more about this, read some of the back posts on my blog here, Jennifer Michael Hecht’s The Lion and the Honeycomb, and check out my book The Happiness Myth: The Historical Antidote to What Isn’t Working Toda y.

Well, give this some thought and maybe let me know what you think. Enjoy this glorious spring day. Good work staying alive since last week, let's keep it going.

Love,

Jennifer

ps took the above picture last night

pps Hi Chris Shea who I've never actually met! Lets face facts, I wrote this post because you picked up my "Forget about gym guilt, says poet" post for the Boston Globe online Ideas section, "Brainiac" and I wanted to tell you some more things about it. wink. if i may. (yes i edited these last lines here, yet left it as was on the bap blog, liking both versions.)

Happy Days.

Swiftly Happy!

2010-04-03T06:30:00.000-07:00

Swiftly Happy! [BAP rogue post by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Derlink Bleaders,

Spring has sprung! Not working for you? You a little ambivalent about pulling lilacs from the dead earth? Well this, as my five year old often announces, is your lucky day.

Just clink this lick, or click this link, and start from the bottom of the page, about one entry up, where he explains Face off Friday, where he asks people to send in righteous home versions of a chosen pop song. well, frankly, i don't know the rules, i was just one-horse golden sleighing around the internests when i found this among my many new and old friends' odd offerings. in this case David Rees. it is Awesome. it is the cure for what ails you. (if your not seeing this on april 2, 10, try this way in David Rees at mnftiu.cc)

just give this the 15 minutes it'll take, at the outside, in bits or all at once, and tell me you don't feel fine. it's the project people, and the project, and Rees' prose that makes me run to show you. go have little fun. gather the family. i command thee.

Love,

Jennifer

gotta do the thursday puzzle. however measured.

2010-04-01T08:13:00.000-07:00

Dear Fonzie,

However Measured [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Darlink Bleaders,

Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove.  If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer, an ever-fixèd mark, that looks on tempests and is never shaken. Why?

Should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises?

Love's not time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks within his bending sickle's compass come, love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, but bears it out even to the edge of doom. If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured and far away.

Let me not, to the marriage of true minds. Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises. Let me not admit impediments. Love is a product that follows from devotion. Love is not love -- you’ve got the wrong word there -- if what you call love alters when it alteration finds. 

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer, an ever-fixèd mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken. By definition it is the outcome of devotion. That’s why it is an ever-fixed mark.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks within his bending sickle's compass come; love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, but bears it out even to the edge of doom. Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises.

Bear it out even to the edge of doom. Let us step to the music which we hear, however measured and far away. If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

But he did writ and so did I and they (bard and Walden's warden) did love and so do I.

Love,

Jennifer

ps more soon xoxjmh

and that's all she wrote. more classic sonata crash-ups by jmh jenny to come. watch this space.

pps excellent work staying alive since last post, most of you. stay. stay tuned.

hey. whoa. okay stop typing genifur time to get dressed for therapy. gotta ride to the uppa wesside. do the thursday puzzle.

free your mind and the rest will follow

2010-03-28T11:48:00.000-07:00

Think drugged happiness isn't real happiness? It is. Drug happiness is among the varieties of real happiness, especially for the walking wounded. Read The Happiness Myth and let me know if you remain unconvinced. Thank you. That is all.

Homaha

2010-03-24T18:42:00.000-07:00

Dear Bleaders,

I’m supposed to be cleaning! I was given a specific task: straighten up the kid’s bookshelves for Jessie’s birthday party this weekend. But then my husband, who suggested this task, took the kids and went to Goodwill to get rid of some of the heaps of stuff of which we’re getting rid, leaving me alone to sneak like a thief back to my computer to write you guys a quick post.

I figure as long as I finish by the time he’s back, I’m good. So. What I want to tell you is pretty important. I spent the weekend in Omaha and now have another Homaha in these United States. What great people I met. Ridiculously cool people. Ridunkulous. And they gave me roast beast, and took me to hear Yo Yo Ma, and made jokes about Exit 420. If you don’t get it, don’t pay it no mind, but if you do get it, you get that it is good to know. I gave 6 talks in four days! One to a synagogue full of clergy, mostly Catholic priests, collared and mostly grey-haired. Some rabbis, some ministers, some visitors, a lovely woman who said she’d driven six hours to see me.

I told them that I’d come to tell them about Poetic Atheism. There is no God, but as Durkheim said a hundred years ago, what we thought was God, was the community. What we feel when we are gathered together, that there is something larger than us, that feeling is true. It’s us.

We can add to it that what we thought of as faith is love. We have to try to believe in each other, in our mutual misery and compassion.

The solace we have to offer one another is sufficient to our wounds.

Our feelings of meaning are sufficient to the definition of meaning.

There is no hidden world of meaning. The feelings of meaning are the meaning. It’s all true.

Human beings need community, meditation, and ritual. We need to come together and pray that we will do the right thing, that we will help each other, and that we are capable of helping one another. It’s a long shot, but it’s better than trying to believe in some third party and hoping that he will do the right thing.

Am I telling you that all this time you’ve been alone in the dark? Yes. Come sit with us. We're right here. Turn on the light.

We must look after one another. There is no heaven. We are all going to die, maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day, maybe two years from now, maybe forty years from now, maybe sixty. It doesn’t matter all that much. There is an eternity on either side, an eternity, so who cares? Life is not theater, you can’t miss the end. You are here. It’s wonderful. We made it into existence together.

We have to start coming together and singing, celebrating. Health Care, people! Gorgeous African-American president and presidential family! Now is the time to lift our voices up. We are all there is. We don’t have it for very long. We have it right now. America is a lot of things. I know. Tea party. I know. Beck, and not the good kind. But it’s okay.

We are here together. We can keep each other company. We can see that if this is the world, if our consciousness is what we have of consciousness, than what we feel and what we make is very important indeed. You’re sacred because you are, and it’s my job to support your awareness of the true and glorious reality that is. It’s your job to support this awareness in the rest of us. We are getting better at this. We are going to get even better. That's why everything is going to be okay.

Excellent work staying alive since last week, most of you. Let’s try to do even better next week.

By the way, on my way home from the airport we got stopped on the Brooklyn Bridge and there we stayed for two and a half hours, my whole little family and me, from around 12:30 am to 3 am, when they finally backed us off the bridge. Meanwhile we got out of our cars. We heard someone had jumped and saw boats and helicopters shining lights. Then we heard there was a woman who had climbed up into the bridge girders and was going to jump. John encouraged me to walk down to where it was all happening; given what I’d been writing about lately, I should just go down and see. So I did, there was a woman up there, a cop up there near her, I saw him hand her a cigarette, I saw him light it for her, I saw her talking to him, I saw her move her long, brown hair behind her ear.

Like I said, she hadn’t come down when we left, they’d turned us around to get out, but I felt sure she’d come down, she was talking calmly for hours, there were tons of people everywhere. We googled it when we got home but saw nothing of it. Then yesterday saw a report. She’d jumped. After we were home in bed. She’s in critical condition. A 41-year-old woman from Long Island. Like so many of us, or thereabouts. So forgive me, bleaders, for repeating myself. Stay, everybody. No more going off the deep end. Stay. Let’s all give up together, right here, right now, and have chocolate cake. But don’t give any to the dog, because chocolate isn’t good for dogs.

Concentrate

2010-03-16T10:11:00.000-07:00

Dear Fonzie,

I just posted this on the Bap site. Sorry I don't have a systematic approach, either always double posting or cross posting or whatever. Just felt like putting this here too.

Stay cool,

Jennifer

Concentrate [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear Bleaders,

I got the idea for this post while playing Bejeweled Blitz.

Have you ever tried meditation? Of course you have, right, if you’re sufficiently inclined towards transcendence as to read a poetry blog, you have in your life, sat quite still and tried not to think.

There is a great Eastern description of meditation, and here I liberally paraphrase, that says asking the mind to stay focused on one thing is like asking a monkey to stay perfectly still, if the monkey has been given coffee and vodka, is being menaced by a bee, is surrounded by good-looking jumping monkeys, while AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long” is being blasted at the monkey enclosure.

It is downright hilarious how hard it is to get the mind to settle down. Give it one minute, right now (at the end of this paragraph). Think only of your breath and count, with each exhale, one number. Count from one to ten and back again. As soon as you notice you are not thinking about your breath and one to ten, go back to one. Look at the clock where you are sitting, add two minutes to the time, whatever it is, then close your eyes and start counting breaths and thinking of nothing else. If you think it’s been about two minutes open your eyes and check – go back in if it’s not time yet. This way we’ll get you to stay in for at least a minute. Go. Okay, we’re back. Hard wasn’t it?

It is equally hard to remember, for a full minute, that you are playing Bejeweled Blitz. Matching the shapes is easy. There’s always a match on the board to be made and usually two or more. They are easy to see. The only difficulty is remembering to keep doing it, as fast as you can. A few matches in, you fall into a rhythm and the rhythm generally runs down. Every once in a while an accidental cascade puts a very fast rhythm in your head and you are able to match shapes fast for a good few seconds before again a part of your mind simply gets up to go check the fridge.

If you could remember you are playing, you’d win. If you could keep thinking of only the game.

At the end of each game, whatever your game may be, when your game ends, ask yourself immediately: What am I thinking about?

It will be something other than the game.

Ask yourself to put your whole attention on the game. If your lucky you’ll do it for the first three shape matches, then off most of your brain will go. There’s you landing wet at the end of a minute, laughing, having been treated by your brain to a short conference on what to bring to the PTA pot luck or the derivations of Pi.

We have developed in such a way that our brain’s default setting is multitasking. If you would like to do something well, all you have to do is learn to focus on that one thing. Stop thinking of other things while you are doing it. I showed a few lines of this post to my husband John Chaneski while I was just hashing this up and he said, “It’s like acting.” And I was like, wow yeah, it’s true. Good actors are just people who can remember, for a sustained period, that they are supposed to be being someone else.

Well, go concentrate on something. Let me know how it goes.

How do I love thee? I love the to the breadth and depth and height my soul can reach when feeling out of sorts with the ends of being and ideal grace and posting out of turn, on a Tuesday.

Love,

Jennifer

ps. Perhaps you'd like to read a book? The Happiness Myth.

pps Stacey I love when you talk to me in the comments! I'm not sure why I don't always manage to respond, but I just wanted to say I like it and am mulling over any questions you put to me there.

ppps I'm doing this this week. It is going to be fun. If you are in Omaha, come talk with me about the meaning of life, k? And come up and say hi.

Poeatree

2010-03-15T09:53:00.000-07:00

Dear Bleaders,

Here is a poem for you, chosen by my inner Brutus, on the ides of March. Et tu? Yes, me too.

Trotsky’s Hand

I

It’s like dreaming of someone
too much while you’re away
at war; then you come home
to his fingered hat or her

faltering hem-line and it’s
What the hell was I fighting

for? Just another example
of how biography works.
Your character has got
to have a narrative arc,

some drawbacks,
something irredeemably awful,

along with his or her strong
points, to be believable.
Yet we all recoil in disbelief
when anything of the sort cuts

a form into our real lives,
the life of the author. Don’t

despair! It’s just the demands
of narrative! Leda, after all,
probably never even thought
to fear anything like that.

Then one day, there it is,
the century actually over

and most of its artifacts
still entirely inexplicable.
This is no walk in the park
with spinach, Swee’pea,

I’ve got no idea where to go
for extra strength.

I guess that’s what
they’re selling.
It’s an incidental
that it cleans your laundry,

scrubs your teeth. What is of note
is that it is a source of extra

strength. Extra strength! Thank
God! That’s what we’re going
to need in case they all switch back:
the swan, the prince, the salt.

Even if you weren’t ever accosted
by a feathery god,

you take some heavy losses early on,
and that will leave feathers everywhere
for the rest of your life; as if
you were wearing an eiderdown coat;

you just walk around and molt.
As for the man in the tiara,

that’s a transformation
you never want to go through
twice, but do, coaxing every
so often your sad, damp, frog

back into his palace. Don’t
you like your scepter? Won’t

you wear your robes?
Lastly, salt. Well, who doesn’t
turn towards the sepia for a second
look; into the carousel-music

and the tortured plaster horses
of the past? But this sympathy

does not imply that I want
Madame Lot back here
knitting itchy sweaters.
Let’s just try to calm down.

II

When Stalin took power
he had Trotsky erased
from the photographs.
Sometimes, you can still see

a floating hand. Left behind.
So disembodied as to be

almost meaningless. We try
to ignore it, floating there
in history. We get to work.
There is something to be said for that.

You can’t really expect me
to roll around naked in a garden

letting Trotsky’s severed hand
float around my body,
knowing my body better
than any lover, his soft,

soft-focused, probing hand.
Yet, how can we do anything

serious with that thing hovering
overhead? A woman working
at a table in the park swats
away the tickling hand

of Trotsky, and intones
as if to all of history:

Not now. Trotsky’s hand,
abashed, moves on
to pick some flowers.
So much is gone that

what is left is inexplicable
without memory, and memory

is painful and very difficult
to explain. Which isn’t
to say I mind Trotsky’s hand

snapping its fingers
and flapping itself like a bird

above my desk or would rather
have him back, extant,
yammering about world socialism
and complaining about

the samovar: Is this thing cold again?
So, is this more of a lament

than a complaint? Sure.

But it is always there. This
burden of history is not a bird
but a hand, its wrist a tiny cloud.

It’s very quiet. It fills the quiet sky.

This poem is from my first poetry book, The Next Ancient World.

Something about the total cloud cover over Brooklyn this opalescent afternoon called out to me to show it to you. Not just for the thing in itself, but to re raise the question of what poetry can do that all else can't. A certain explicit everything, scientific care with artistic scope. That's what Edger Allen was doing up the oak.

Love,

Jennifer

Two New BAP Posts Pasted Here

2010-03-13T11:24:00.000-08:00

We Make Huge Mistakes In Perception [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear Bleaders,

Can we talk a little more about the gym?

First let me remind you of the weirdness of perception and the human capacity to be deceived.

Only about twenty-five years ago many adult Americans, most of us really, believed that if we could get past our moral compunctions about it, it might be great for us if we blew up the USSR with nuclear bombs. Sure there would be some danger to us, but we've tested bombs, you could strategically blow up what counted for the USSR and the rest of the world would live on. And as we saw it, only 25 years ago, the rest of the world wanted to live in peace, liked things sort of the way they were, or anyway were too small and weak to menace us in any way. We could bomb the slavs and suffer no more. Forget the defense budget. We could finally use our surplus food and energy to build schools and hospitals, homes, parks, and museums.

We completely missed the fact that people too nuclear-powerless to menace us could, in fact, menace the hell out of us.

We might have killed millions just because we didn't notice this rather obvious truth. Bombing the slavs into oblivion would not have made us safer. It was never true. That whole fantasy was mistaken.

You know what, I'm going to leave you with this and come back later to talk more about the gym. Just let's try to unhinge a little with this one. We make huge mistakes in perception.

Love,

Jennifer

Night Swimming

2010-03-07T13:05:00.000-08:00

Stare directly at the sun

2010-03-07T08:39:00.000-08:00

Dear Fonz,

Is it just me or is there something sort of sexy about this picture? Something sort of sexual. Stare directly at the sun. Feel anything?

I know the Fonz isn't real by the way. I'm not totally useless as Bubbles used to say on AbFab. There's even a real person named Henry Winkler who is inhabiting the Arthur's body and, with the grace of an uncle, leading it through the ages of life in Hollywood, whatever those may turn out to be or not to be. No, don't worry I'm not going to start talking about suicide again. Doo bee, doo bee, do; or not doo bee, doo bee do. Now *that* is what I call a question.

But dear Bleaders, I didn't have a blog for so long. I used to say, "I'd have been a great blogger if I were alive today," because the only explanation for my not blogging would be temporal misalignment, and when I finally did start in with this art of porthole hollering is when John Chaneski, my excellent and remarkably tall husband, pitched it to me as a epistolary relationship with my secret hero and delight, Arthur Fonzarelli. I will tell you why I have a special taste for the Fonz, but I will not tell you now. For now, we'll just go with the obvious. We all love him. We love him because he is cool. And a good listener. I feel when I am talking to the Fonz, just that extra bit of freedom to just say what I'm thinking. And drink what I'm drinking. And rhyme drinking with weekend. (Heh doesn't that make your lips feel funny?)

So, even though over at Best American Poetry Blog, where I also blog (mostly on wednesdays but lately i've gone rogue and answer to no law) I have come to know and love my audience as Bleaders, which I made up early on over there at Bap, I shall continue to speak both to you, dear Bleaders, and to the Fonz, who doesn't exist but also does, much like the rest of us. Anyway, I've reached some kind of satori Fonz, and am feeling extremely fine. Life is over, the factory bell has sounded, the orders are all in. Nothing left to do but notice all the huge piles of time all over the place each filled with millions of long moments. All the time in the world. Relax. Do something small and pleasant.

Love,

Jennifer

(adapted from a novel by Sapphire.)

Good dog.

2010-03-06T07:34:00.000-08:00

Dog arriving too late to save a drowning clown.

Mr. Pickle is sour, but he's always nice to Tessie

2010-03-03T16:38:00.000-08:00

Hi! Wouldn't I look great with a hat?

This is Mr. Pickle

2010-03-03T14:57:00.000-08:00

Dja get that? Mr. Pickle.

It's his birthday.

Gesture Suggestion for Depression

2010-02-24T11:35:00.000-08:00

Dear Fonzie, I just posted this on Best American. Love, Jenny

Prosper and Long Live [a gesture suggestion for depression by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

My Beautiful Bleaders,

I’ve got something to sell you about. It’s a show and tell.

It’s about signs and gestures and how we get new ones. Our world's top six might be: thumbs up, peace, thumbs down, rock and roll, and fuck you. Try them right now in quick secession.

I can use my face to flash you some quick information, as a flashed sad-face means bad news.

Great news for people with low self-esteem is: eyes wide and a shake of the head to suggest disbelief, mouth downturned, shoulders up, then… jazz hands.

We ought to have a simple gesture for thank you. The best we have is hands pressed palms together and a little tilt of the head, toward face-down. That’s easiest to recognize but any sign that needs two hands has limitations. You can ask for the check or for a bottle opener with one hand. I guess the bow of the head alone, with slightly lidded eyes, actually works for thank you.

I’ve been thinking about this. Say we had a gesture that meant: “I feel so terrible I can’t stop thinking about death” which specifically does not signal a breakdown of the normal social walls. I’m thinking of Spock’s "Live Long and Prosper" but upside down. You flash that at a stranger and if she is feeling bone awful also, she flashes it back, while someone having an okay time right then flashes back a supportive upright LLP. The symbol should be quick, deniable. If you want to start a conversation you have to try it through normal means and risks. What I am suggesting is just an unspoken semiotics of support.

Excellent work staying alive since I posted last. Now stay alive until I have an opportunity to encourage you yet again. At the latest, one week from now, but I feel all stealth posty, like I may sooner paste up un autre placard rather than later.

Love you,

Jennifer

ps Chewy words are tasty as nougat, no? Nu? Here's lookinat chewkid. wordy your mother. peas out.

pps Would you like to be Happy All the Time? Simply read this book: The Happiness Myth.

The Thesis Is that There Was a Beginning

2010-02-10T13:08:00.000-08:00

Poem commissioned by Yeshiva University at the Jewish Center Museum, delivered last week.

Jennifer Michael Hecht

The Thesis Is that There Was a Beginning

In the begin there was heaven and earth

but the earth was void and darkness had the sea.

When there was light it was good.

The waters gathered together and dry land appeared.

The waters swarmed with living creatures,

sea-monsters. On Earth, every creature that creepeth.

Fill the waters, fill the earth.

Bring forth the living creature, creeping thing,

I have given you every seed upon the face of the earth.

Finished, the host of them. Rested.

These are the generations of heaven and earth.

Good people of Yeshiva University

and the Jewish Center Museum

You ask me for a poem in conversation

with an art installation

on the theme of Genesis, as in:

In the begin.

There was light. It was good,

but there was also a lot of darkness.

The art I’m responding to is seven

TV screens, each showing one word

from Genesis in somewhat random order.

The phrase showing when I took a photograph

was: “The earth was an open living seed.”

In this flicker poetry, when a monitor

lands on the word “God,”

the serene black screen flashes bright-white

in your mellowed, museum eyes,

crashes in your soft museum ears.

The viewer tells the five screens

when to whirl words by, and when to stop

but hasn’t any control over the sentence.

You stand there like Captain Picard

and an ensign all in one, and tap the big

red and green buttons.

In the begin there is darkness,

then there is some kind of light.

Then a kind of darkness again.

Then light. In the end there will be

darkness again

and then light.

This flickering is like a candle

sputtering, pretty and frightening.

The earth was an open living seed.

There are millions of sea creatures

and millions of stars in the galaxy

and millions of galaxies.

There are billions of years.

Yet.

Yet it is uncharacteristic for us

to change our minds. Despite

how wrong we obviously all

must be, about so many things,

odds are, disagreeing as we do,

a lot of us are wrong a lot of the time.

Yet we rarely change our minds.

We get our actual hearts replaced

more often than we change our minds.

And our metaphorical hearts also change

faster than we change our minds.

Yet every generation changes,

tips a flip on what they grew up believing

then stick with that forever.

Yet we love life.

Ever answer a question asked by a museum

and a yeshiva?

I’m a poet and a minor-famous atheist.

Seven tv screens flicker chaotically the Bible’s

first eight-hundred words.

In the begin there was no beginning. When you

walk over to it, it’s already going.

Even the biggest bang Tangos somehow

with others, say, a former and another after.

When a screen flashes “God” and thunder

crashes, it is an interruption.

I was trying to think.

Hoping the text might be oracular

for me, hoping for ideas to help me.

We are Diaspora and post-garment district

which makes us both post-exilic

and post-textilic. Our late elders

wrote Russian as well as Yiddish

so we are also post-Cyrillic.

In the beginning there was darkness

and then there was light.

Later again there was that

darkness I mentioned.

Then that light again.

The young people speak of the light.

The older people darken, the sky lights.

We are in this together.

There are billions of stars.

There is darkness and light.

There are generations.

They begin in darkness.

They get light.

A kind of darkness returns.

By the waters of Babylon

and in Brooklyn.

By the waters of the Gowanus Canal

we sat down and wept. Born into

these ideas and flipped into those,

everybody’s an exile. Everybody

drums themselves out, sits at the edge

of the Hudson or the East River

and weeps for some lost temple,

wails on a turnpike wall.

Adam drummed out,

and Eve drummed out too.

All of us so tired.

With or without the holocaust.

An unusually ancient

people, within a century

of an attempt at our eradication

on a scale beyond scale.

It makes you sad. Ask

any Ute or an Inuit.

This is a very strange land

between Proxima Centauri

and the fat old sun, absurd even.

If someone asks you, frankly,

How can we sing in a strange land?

Answer by patting yourself down

as if to find a pen. It will keep you

from going up in flames.

I’m important, it matters what I do.

Everything I do matters only to me.

It’s in the Talmud somewhere –

A person should at all times have

a note in one pocket reading: You

are the most important person

and a note in another pocket that reads:

You are no more important than anyone.

Between these, there is land

where nothing matters.

Between passions, there is land

where nothing matters.

Between passions, there is a terrible

land, beautiful if you can bear it, but

you can’t, where nothing matters.

This is recovery. You are not dying.

Between passions, there is a terrible

land, beautiful if you can bear it, but

you can’t (yet) where nothing matters.

The older people speak of the light.

The young people darken, the sky lights.

The thesis is that there was a beginning.

Yet there was unformed void

and darkness. Then there was light,

then land, then animals, and sea creatures.

Dominion creeping over everything.

Male and female. Replenish the earth. Fish.

Finished, the host of them. Rested.

These are the generations of heaven and earth.

These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise.

The thesis is that there was an ending and the ending

was exile, the thesis is that something sweet

came before all the horror. Something Edenic

before the ash and flood.

How does it feel to be post-exilic, post-textilic,

and post-Cyrillic?

It’s not idyllic.

They were from someplace dangerous.

We are from someplace dangerous too.

A world with a holocaust in it is never

without it. I hate to break it to me

but it’s true. I want to do strange things

with you either today or tomorrow

it’s up to you as I am ready right now.

Everything changes and changes.

The air felt like his voice before he lost

his hair, sounded like your father

looking right at you and smiling.

Then you did something you shouldn’t have done,

ate something you shouldn’t have eaten.

You are always eating, aren’t you?

Voltaire’s Enlightenment was nice

but Spinoza led the Jews into light

a good two centuries prior.

Which set us on fire.

As Eve said to Adam,

“If this is the beginning

why am I already so tired?”

Museum and Yeshiva University,

there is a flicker poetry to the universe

and it had already started when we

got here. Yet we can star in it,

standing there like Captain Picard.

Our hearts on our sleeves like Commander Troi

There are millions of galaxies to change our minds,

yet we get our hearts replaced more often.

Leonard Nimoy and Bill Shatner are both Jewish;

the “live long and prosper” hand gesture rabbinical,

a secret sign a young Nimoy spotted in shul

when his father told him to close his eyes

and he peeked instead.

There they are on the bridge, Kirk and Spock,

sailing into the universe

where no one has ever gone before,

exile upon exile,

until nothing feels like home as much

as further exile, further out, further on,

ancient secrets furling secrets like fractals.

By the waters of the Babylon Turnpike,

we sat down and wept.

Two-thousand and ten used to feel

impossibly far in the future

but here it is. No one thought the Berlin Wall

would ever come down, not in our lifetimes.

There are people born

in the year two thousand and one who could already

beat most of us in a game of chess.

Everything changes, everybody’s an exile,

wailing on a turnpike wall.

Between passions, there is a terrible

land, beautiful if you can bear it, and you

can, where nothing matters

but that we look after one another

in the terrifying darkness and the weird

interruption that is light. Walls rise and fall.

The earth is an open living seed

and so is the mind.

This, such as it is, is our time on camera.

Our time on the screen.

Animals and every creeping thing.

Man and Replenish the earth. Fish.

Finished, the host of them. Rested.

These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise.

We are tired, but still, go forth and multiply,

live long and prosper.

These are the generations of heaven and earth.

winter

2010-01-31T10:40:00.000-08:00

Also

2010-01-24T11:29:00.000-08:00

Also, and by this I mean something different, suicide is the only widespread killer that can be avoided by talking, because it was talk that made us sick in the first place.

More here

Public Health Bulletin

2010-01-24T10:02:00.000-08:00

The reason suicide is the only widespread killer that can be cured by rhetoric is that rhetoric is what made us sick in the first place.

The More You Know... wink.

Post on Suicide

2010-01-11T12:57:00.000-08:00

I’m sitting here still kind of freaked that Rachel Wetzsteon killed herself. I was friends with her and I was friends with Sarah Hannah who killed herself a few years ago. We all got our Ph.D.s at Columbia around the same time (me in history, them in poetry) and were all three poets in New York City over a lot of years. The last time I saw Sarah was at the AWP just a few months before she died. My husband bumped into Rachel a few months ago on the highline, the new park on old elevated train tracks, he had the kids with him, they were all just up there walking around, looking at the flowers.

So I want to say this, and forgive me the strangeness of it. Don’t kill yourself. Life has always been almost too hard to bear, for a lot of the people, a lot of the time. It’s awful. But it isn’t too hard to bear, it’s only almost too hard to bear. Hear me out.

In the West, in the past, the dominant religions told people suicide was against the rules, they must not do it, if they did they would be punished in the afterlife. People killed themselves anyway, of course, but the strict injunction must have helped keep a billion moments of anguish from turning into a bloodbath. These days we encourage people to stay alive and not kill themselves, but we say it for the person’s own sake. It’s illegal, sure, but no one actually insists that suicide is wrong.

I’m issuing a rule. You are not allowed to kill yourself. You are going to like this, stay with me. When a person kills himself, he does wrenching damage to the community. One of the best predictors of suicide is knowing a suicide. That means that every suicide is also a delayed homicide. You have to stay. The reason I say you are going to like this is twofold. First of all, next time you are seriously considering suicide you can dismiss it quickly and go play a video game (or something else meaningless and fun, it’s when we try for meaning that we go crashing into the existential wall – the universe is absurd, to get along with it, you should be too). Second, and this one’s a little harder to describe, if you are even a tiny bit staying alive for the sake of the community, as a favor to the rest of us, I need to make it clear to you that we are grateful that you stay. I am grateful that you stay alive.

Since I started thinking about this, when Sarah died, I started thinking about how if I’m grateful that you haven’t killed yourself (even though the fact of it only recently came into my mind), then you are also likely grateful that I haven’t killed myself (whether consciously yet or not). I have found that thinking about this can feel like a multitude of invisible arms linking to support me. I can fall back into faith in humanity (which is hard to have, admittedly, but the guy I hope is good at least exists). We have to carry each other, like Bono says.

The truth is I want you to live for your sake, not for ours. But the injunction is true and real. Anyway, some part of you doesn’t want to end it all, and I’m talking to her or him, to that part of you. I’m throwing you a rope, you don’t have to explain it to the monster in you, just tell the monster it can do whatever it wants, but not that. Later we’ll get rid of the monster, for now just hang on to the rope. I know that this means a struggle from one second to the next, let alone one day at a time. Know that the rest of us know that among the faces we have met there are some right now who can barely take another minute of the pain and uncertainty. And we are in the room with you, going from one moment to the next, in whatever condition you manage to do it. Sobbing and useless is great! Sobbing and useless is a million times better than dead. A billion times. Thank you for choosing sobbing and useless over dead.

There are poets and other artists, psychotherapists and average Joes, who are thinking of your struggle and appreciating what you have managed to put up with. We are grateful. Best of all, practicing tuning in to your gratitude for other’s staying alive also tones up your ability to feel the gratitude that people are extending to you too, you start to feel the support of it, the invisible arms. Don’t kill yourself. Suffer here with us instead. We need you with us, we have not forgotten you, you are our hero.

Jennifer Michael Hecht

click post

2009-12-30T19:01:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year Post

In which I invent the term Fractured homophone.

2009-12-14T13:41:00.000-08:00

This two stanza poem, by me, "Ode to Bookstore and Dinner Out, in Spring," is a fractured homophone of the two final stanzas of Keats' majestic "Ode to Autumn." Ode to Bookstore and Dinner Out, in Spring The author haunts inside the stone store, brick and mortar. I look for her to find, caressing pages on a beige/blue carpet floor, her soft hair lifted by no window but by the wind of a door revolving. Others are found asleep, drowsy in fumes of coffee, as piped songs hook like twilight shadows of twin-stalked flowers crook an urban elder. Old New Yorker. A gleaner keeps re-shelving. Kids returning. Laden cart, each book confected by a press, with painted look, pimps my loyal roost. Each someone’s child. You’d think I rooster, hour by hour, but I run. Here is hungry Spring. When are harvest days? Don’t think of them, we have our corner diner too. Above dinner, tight clouds vice to a shatter or a fake. No way in this wet season to not begin to be. “See, son, rivers, Hudson, Seine, Tigris, mourn that human fish who hopes moss only grows north.” Over-thinking our clues to what lives or dies is frowned on by my cool-bodied gulls just born. Idol contestants sing; and now with treble soft your waitress whistles at a sketch of Lara Croft, as, outside, bluebirds dive bomb from the skies. Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;	15
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twinèd flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;	20
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barrèd clouds bloom the soft-dying day	25
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river-sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;	30
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Court Street Red

2009-12-07T13:48:00.000-08:00

Pictorial incantation, December 2009

Court Street Red

Stopped in dread

Court Street Green

Freedom dream

(repeat)

stampworthy messages from the beyond

2009-11-29T23:58:00.000-08:00

73333

Harvey S. Moon, Upen Deesk Eye.

2009-11-29T19:31:00.000-08:00

So far NY has said nix to frost so the tomatoes, blessem, are still growing. Not tasty anymore but as beautiful as any well-cared for parkinglot (have you seen A Serious Man?). Pictured here is a white yellow variety that in the flanken of summer was as delicious as the true fruit each of us was promised upon Edenic arrival, and behind it a little "sweet million" cherry tomato.

Above please fine the moon tonight enmeshed in branches and seen from behind tree jewelry.

Did you see Dexter? It was good. Scary.

accidents happen

2009-11-29T15:06:00.000-08:00

There are many kinds of people in the world, but I am not one of them.

Said the tree by the park in the dark. Instead, I am the misnamed Loch Monster. Neither Loch nor true monster, I do happened to be named Ness.

is this thing on?

2009-11-28T15:05:00.000-08:00

the cloud traffic was mild but steady. mostly new, more energy-efficient compact clouds and a few hybrids but anyway, a lot of em. in the distance, a bridge symbolizing a person who figures she might as well keep saying things. look at the posture on those sentries! you can't dismiss our civilization so quickly when you see the kelly osbourne grace of the deep lean away from all that face.

Happy Thanksgiving

2009-11-25T11:36:00.000-08:00

Dear Fonzie,

In the middle of the road of my life

I awoke in the dark wood

where the true way was wholly lost

I'm sure you too hear this first stanza of the Inferno sometimes in darker hours. I've been hearing it lately, enough even to recall and reclaim that some sun rays rise and point the straight within a page, and terror subsides, but I can't finish the sentence there because only a few stanzas on the jaguar comes and has spots and paces and won't let him pass. Still, at least you're moving again, if only side to side.

Friends, bleaders, Fonz, I am attempting an arise. But enough about me, how you doin'? I may be half vulcan half falcon (yes, I mean balloon boy), but I have feelings too. And when I go outside, yes, yesterday I went outside and I did it again today and intend a threepeat this evening to teach. So yeah when I go outside people look kind of miserable around the eyes. Some of them are sufficiently distracted as to not actually be miserable, and of course, some of them are neutral, and yes, I'm getting to it, some of the sweet bastards are actually happy and healthy. But it's kind of nice to be seeing these eyes that way, because either I'm projecting grief on minds that are actually at play in the field of their teams and dinner choices or I'm seeing what is really there but also not there, and either way it's weird and bad and good to be feeling especially empathic. So I guess Betazoid.

I've been down and out a few weeks, if you like your writers fluish, let's say that then, but the girl was more honestly bluishs. This though is a note to claim revival, the author awakens to find she is convalescing in a wonderful life. I have at least a sense of sun rays, and an intimation that I the jaguar can be outlasted.

I have a regular Weds blog at the Best American Poetry site and after having not posted quite regularly these past bunch of weeks, I managed happily to post today, so have a look if you feel like it.

Fonzie, I'm just not the type to jump the shark, but I was feeling awfully like a Triumph hovering over Jaws. I know it couldn't have been easy for you either, so much pressure, such ridiculous expectations, living in someone else's family, banging on things to make them work. I just want you to know that I admire your courage and sympathize completely with the anguish of it. I am holding you in cupped hands in my minds eye, and Fay Wray is holding me, and the ape's got her. Lois Lane has the ape, and Superman has Lois Lane. "You've got me? Who's got you?!"

Well, for what it's worth, I've got you and I think probably the Green Lantern has me. Because the Green Lantern lives by poetry and does the best he can. That's Fay above, of course. I considered the other easily available shots of her, but if you look you'll see that the idea of them paired with a blog post about an ice patch of depression makes them utterly terrifying.

So right Fonz, feel the love and take it one heartbeat at a time, but, you know, take it.

love,

Jenny

sky

2009-11-02T10:59:00.000-08:00

Here's the full moon sunset over Brooklyn last night. Did you see my recent Newsweek mention? I'm trying to write a book review for the American Historical Review. Haven't been free to talk in academic for a while, it's kind of nice and kind of newly foreign. It's hard to be a popularly oriented public intellectual, friends. In case you didn't know. Oh well, it's like everything, I suppose: pick a language and speak it.

kids are wild things, crowned teacher is max

2009-10-30T14:33:00.000-07:00

masked man

2009-10-30T10:20:00.000-07:00

Halloween Wants You!

nice bridge

2009-10-26T09:38:00.000-07:00

Tonight I'm going back to my old school to a memorial for a professor who was more a mentor to me than anyone else, and then we were friends, though we weren't in much contact, but here and there, over two decades. I've been asked to speak and am honored to do so, but feeling the weight of it. Anyway, nice bridge ay? Yesterday we went to the flee market they hold under this thing on Sundays. Man they got some good eats there, by the way. Many strange and misplaced matters, historical widgets and lost lots. Love bright sunlight on bric-a-braque ephemera.

fall under the bridge

2009-10-25T19:18:00.000-07:00

Autumn was blowing the willow around under the Brooklyn Bridge today, which was Sunday.

Yes He Does

2009-10-12T14:24:00.000-07:00

I've been encouraged to blog. But which of this basket of thoughts to uncrinkle?

Praps I'll just say I've been defending Obama's peace prize these last few days (in facebook status and casual convo), and except for all the thanks it is a thankless job. I don't usually bother weighing in on things (beyond buddies and 'book), but I can't help saying I think all this nope saying is the contempt of familiarity.

Every year they go in the room and try to pick a name of somebody who that year made the world peacier. It's supposed to go to someone who is fighting the fight that most people were saying can't be fought and changing the faces to maybe.

Sue me, I say Yes He Does.

undesign

2009-09-22T08:35:00.000-07:00

I was wondering what the world really looks like so I took some random pictures and so far as I can tell, I think this is what it looks like.

2009-09-19T08:25:00.000-07:00

Sonnet on the Ribs of Laughter

Those who find the sun in every sorrow

may yet cry thunderstorms when in their hiding.

Not rarely, who teaches hope can barely borrow

what it takes to make it through a day’s colliding,

that is why they talk so much of hope. Tomorrow

and today are both a moment in aligning;

joke is that the hawk-heart is a swallow

by night. Who hears the music also hears the sighing.

By night who sees light, by day so sees the harrow,

but never ruled by sun nor star as law abiding,

no, the bilious cloud that knows of sorrow

comes at its whim, as does its twin: the dove arising.

Be kind to us we singers of delight,

we sing because we sigh in day and night.

From my second poetry book, Funny.

uplit blooms in the eerie dreary

2009-09-11T12:41:00.000-07:00

This is something I am trying to establish for myself, but which often eludes me. At present all is well, as a wet wren is bothering my window sill.

Jump shots

2009-09-09T12:48:00.000-07:00

cannonball

plant fruit as fairy lights

2009-09-06T16:15:00.000-07:00

These unsheathed themselves out of green fiber and into being and like dark matter fingers they are expanding. Hope is the thing with eggplants that's pendent in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all.

both sides

2009-08-31T10:26:00.000-07:00

Same leaf shadow on leaf, looking from the outside in and then the inside out.

sky sighting

2009-08-31T10:22:00.000-07:00

This morning over Brooklyn.

A New Poem by Me (and WS and TJ)

2009-08-24T07:14:00.000-07:00

In the practical, it's not ideal to post a poem and then hope it finds a journal home, to post is to publish to a degree. whereas after publishing a poem somewhere, posting it is fine too. So for efficiency, why not only post poems that have been published, and save the sweet young things at home? Because sometimes something new gets stuck in my head and I just want to say it out loud and show it to friends so much that I sacrifice its future upon my desire. What desire? I wonder, and guess it is a desire for communion. Which reminds me of the subject of the poem.

A Marriage of Love and Independence

When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes

When in the course of human events it becomes

I all alone beweep my outcast state

necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands

and trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries

which have connected them with another and to assume

and look upon myself and curse my fate

among the powers of the earth,

wishing me like to one more rich in hope

the separate and equal station to which the Laws

featured like him, like him with friends possessed,

of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them,

with what I most enjoy contented least

We, therefore, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,  

for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name,

Haply I think on thee,--and then my state  

and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies,

(Like to the lark at break of day arising  

solemnly publish and declare, That these united Colonies

from sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven's gate;  

are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States

For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings  

That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

Queen

2009-08-23T16:03:00.000-07:00

Dear Fonzie

Battersea; Atheism over Agnosticism; Rosalie; Pink Floyd; Don't Kill Yourself

Game of Thrones

Gorilla Poem

This is a poem from my second poetry book, Funny. Most of the poems in the book have an old joke inside them.

Gorilla In a Darkening Room

pinkest

An Adventure to Boston Began With Beluga

pinker still

yet pinker

It is still cold, but remember winter?

pinker

Wind whirl.

Cherry tree is about to flower. Watch This Space.

light on leaf with hand on top

is the world this shadow of an eye, or orange saturn winking in the sky. well, in the tree, but sky rhymed.

Can't wait for spring to see colors in the trees.

Other gardens nearby have wind chimes. They seem connected to my light chimes.

It makes me happy.

Click this pic for an eerie silence! You too can empathize with a symbolic beast!

Triumph of the Ninja!

Tree Jewelry

Courage!

The moon eclipsing and wiggling around

A Nut

Efforts to induce the effect of dapple

Dear Fonzie Arises from an Accidental Era of Hiatus to Talk about Dapple

From Faith to Being

Picturesque Summer Photos

Picture show

Unloose change link

Fonz in Vegas

More Berry Business

What else goes on in the berry tree.

What goes on in the berry tree.

Red Bird District II

New Device For Cleaning Up Children From Park

More notes from the Red Bird District

Code Translation through Transliteration

Go Outside; garden jewelry

Mr. Googly-eyes in light and shadow

Mulberry Madness

It's on.

Pink lies. Like white lies, but a little redder.

Bridgacoaster to the Isle of Staten

Fake Science - Coffee

Red Bird District

Poetry Brothel Tonight

Ode to a Nightingale

Surrounded by Michelangelos

Want to know what i looked like the other day?

poem on the quick

garden jewelry VI

Being in a tree

May the fourth be with you

Picture of sunny morning posted on rainy morning.

More Pantoum!

Pantoum!

Circus

Further adventures of "Forget about gym guilt, says poet"

Dear Fonzie,

A Short, Packed, Serious Argument Against Gym Guilt [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Swiftly Happy!

Swiftly Happy! [BAP rogue post by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

gotta do the thursday puzzle. however measured.

Dear Fonzie,

However Measured [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

free your mind and the rest will follow

Homaha

Concentrate

Concentrate [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Poeatree

Other Part of Two New Bap Posts Posted Here

Gyms and Poets [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Two New BAP Posts Pasted Here

We Make Huge Mistakes In Perception [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Night Swimming

Stare directly at the sun

Good dog.

Mr. Pickle is sour, but he's always nice to Tessie