A Different Muse

About a decade ago, I remember a sprite, a vaporous, mercurial spirit who sparkled and burst through the vestiges of Time accumulating fragments of ideas and skills, assembling them into paradigms and exploring new terrain in impish but serious navigation. She seemed to be on a mission, and somehow, I was fortunate to be a mentor that helped her while she explored some of her ideas and potential. For several years she would streak by my life with some new venture, a way of categorizing and analyzing new songs and recordings sent to a recording or publishing house, or inventing herself as a literary/talent agent with a fresh angle.

In a way, we inhabited the Village, but at different frequencies. She occasionally zoomed by my habitat leaving me some trace of her existence with an assuring "See you around the Village! ...Debbie" She probably saw me more than I saw her, because she was an invisible presence, a happening that was joyful, a charisma that often seemed to redeem the moment. But she was always flitting in and out of the picture like scenes of a movie, where the character is always lingering on the edge of the action, appearing when least expected, and vanishing suddenly without a trace.

I think maybe the last time she hurried by was in the Fall of 2000, when she left an artifact she was nurturing, a punk rock novel, Exit 25 Utopia by Steven Wishnia, under the auspices of Walking Bass Literary Agency. It is a striking commentary, well-done, and I am not sure exactly how this nimble dreamer related to this work, but I can see and hear that the novel echoes the spirit of her as venturing into uncharted doorways and sometimes sinister landscapes. A quick google reveals that she has metamorphosed into Muse Literary Management as listed in the PublishersMarketplace, but I can't tell how current this listing may be. However, these listings are not free, so perhaps she is still gliding through the Village and environs, piloting new plots and projects.

So just like the itinerant literary waif that I have imagined her to be, she erupts again into my consciousness when a few moments ago, the note she left with Wishnia's book tumbles out of the bookcase onto the floor. I can see her waving familiarly with an exuberant gesture as she dashes ahead, exploring her vision and her options with that enigmatic glance of optimism that always shaped a new and peculiar pathway.

The years have passed, and suddenly this note tumbles onto the floor like some wayward Time-Traveller, and I look into the shimmering empty space ahead searching for some sign of this mysterious muse.

"Are you still there?"

Einstein's Dreams

The deceptive thing about titles of things is that they can deceive you into thinking that you somehow have appropriated something into your being, that you know it. Titles are highly compressed tags that represent structures that are usually very complex. Once I listened to Beethoven's symphonies so many times that I knew every moment of those recordings, every pause, every print-through echo on the tape, every perfection and every flaw. I could no longer listen to these symphonies because the sound of these works were now fully and totally mine. Thus, I went through years of not-hearing, satisfied that the Beethoven symphonies were something that I possessed. Yet, sitting one evening at a concert where the Beethoven Fifth Symphony was performed, I heard it as though for the first time, with many insights into the work that had never occurred to me until that moment. Then I realized that these works must live in time, not in memory. In memory, they become shorthand references, but in the lived sound in Time, they exist as dynamic connections to the reality of their structure and expression.

Alan Light's book, Einstein's Dreams has been a similar experience. This book is made up of thirty "dreams" where Time is experienced differently. These glimpses of Time pass by like clouds, subtly changing shape as they move across the sky. It is difficult for anything to be tied down, fixed, or permanently anchored to the systematic flow of Time that seems relentless, but for Einstein might be like a flock of Nightingales, darting about in hurried spurts. Having read these dreams, I thought they were mine. As I would pass by the book, lying on a pile of books in my room, I would smile, convinced that this was some trophy that now lay polished and gleaming on my shelf of accomplishments that somehow gave me confidence that I was acquiring wisdom through the wisdom of others.

And yet, today I picked it up and started reading, and it was as though I was discovering Einstein's Dreams for the first time. Such books are made to be performed in the timeline of ourselves. They cannot reside as static landmarks, stacked like stairs for us to ascend them to some remote castle of conquest where we have acquired the insight of the authors. Remembering the itinerary is not the same as living the journey.

A Walk With Walt

In my research for Printing House Square, I came across an extraordinary post at poets.org of a walk with Walt Whitman which maps out a route to and through the square that would have been familiar to the poet as he pursued a journalistic career in his early days in Manhattan. None of his editing positions quite worked out, which comes as no surprise since the best chance of remaining an editor with a newspaper in those days was to be the printer or publisher.

The invention of the steam press completely revolutionized the newspaper business, setting the stage for publishing influential newspapers such as The New York Times, The Sun, The Tribune, etc., and also gave rise to Printing House Square evolving as a powerful fourth estate that became the self-appointed brokers of moral and political power.

Whitman's "walk" begins at St, Paul's Chapel on Broadway and Vesey on to Park Row, north to an "open space" which is Printing House Square, then to Nassau Street where he passes The New York Aurora, The Democratic Review, and Fowler's Phrenological Cabinet, then left onto Ann Street where many publishers maintained their offices: The New York Tribune, Evening Tattler, The New World, and The Evening Mirror. The Whitman Walk is much more extensive at poets.org, it extends to Chatham Square and Five Points. If you are a Whitman enthusiast, I would highly recommend this website, as we learn of the area and the times through Whitman's own voice.

I became involved with Walt Whitman as a student and like most students, I found myself greatly influenced by his ideas and his rhetoric. I do not use rhetoric as a pejorative but in recognition of his unique use of language and his grass-roots style. Whitman is not for everyone...but then, who is? It is interesting to see how he struggled as a young man, was sometimes regarded as lazy, but persisted and maintained a singular vision, which has been described as a manifestation of cosmic consciousness.

When I came to New York and lived in Brooklyn Heights, I walked through the many places that Whitman visited daily and lived a block from the apparent site of his printing office/shop that he ran from 1849-1854. This was demolished and replaced by condominiums, although at least it is called Whitman Close.

I think that my wanderings with empty pages in hand for the purpose of writing poetry is directly linked to my understanding of Walt Whitman as a wanderer who recorded everything he saw as the poems that eventually found their way into Leaves of Grass. I also was taken with his notion of a single book that evolved and grew over the years, just as leaves of grass.

Somewhere in the geological strata of the stacks of paper, books, and memorabilia that have accumulated since high school days are my Whitman poems, poems written in the incandescent glow of Whitman's spirit.

Printing House Square

I have always felt myself drawn to an area of Manhattan near city hall but east of it where Park Row starts to veer eastward beneath the Brooklyn Bridge. It is an area that now embraces city buildings and Pace University. From Helprin's Winter's Tale, I gradually have come to the realization that this was once the location of Printing House Square, an area that was the most vibrant and provocative square in the city, where the power of the press and the Fourth Estate was literally born and rose to prominence.

Helprin describes why the location of Printing House Square was so appropriate and contributed to the dynamic life of the city:

...On Printing House Square in lower Manhattan, ...it had been the place near the center of government for the political news; the wharves, for the collection of foreign dispatches; the Five Points, for crime; the Bowery, for theater and music; and Brooklyn (via the ferry, until they finished the bridge), for human interest.

Because Helprin located it at the "junction of Dark Willow, Breasted, Tillinghast, and Pine Streets," I first sought out Pine Street, but found it seemed too low in Manhattan and I couldn't find traces of the other streets. Further, this location did not appear to coincide with Walt Whitman's descriptions, which seemed to place it further north near Chatham Square. From Whitman's accounts, I believe that Nassau Street and Park Row figured more prominently into the proximity of Printing House Square. Whitman was the editor of the New York Aurora on Nassau Street for a while and then was booted and landed for a three-month stint in 1842 as editor of The Evening Tattler at 27 Ann Street. His sojourns around this area during the early years of his efforts to be a journalist helped me piece together some locations that helped delineate Printing House Square. Then I came upon the engraving made in the 1860s of this fabulous square and realized that it was enormous, and may have indeed at one time, stretched as far south as Pine Street.

Then I came across a book by Frank Moss, published in 1897, The American Metropolis, which provides incredible, detailed descriptions of Manhattan, and the activities of Printing House Square in colorful, anecdotal detail:

In Printing House Square many times have been crowded great armies of patriotic citizens, rejoicing over the victories of war announced on the bulletins, or watching with pale faces the announcements of terrible defeats. In times of riot newspaper offices here have been barricaded and garrisoned by resolute defenders of the freedom on the press...(233) The News of great elections has been received in Printing House Square by countless multitudes. Every great event for fifty years past has been watched for and learned from the bulletin boards , by throngs assembled in this square. Here, when newspapers have prepared to show election news, is the place to see New York at it's best and its worst. (238) ...On the night of the first Tuesday of November, there was another great gathering of the people in Printing House Square, but there was no solemnity about it; it was a tumult of rapture, and a convulsion of joy. The immense crowd filled the square, leaving barely room for the cars to pass through, and it extended into the part as far back as it was possible for human vision to catch the bulletins that were constantly flashed upon the tall fronts of the newspaper buildings. (239)

Earlier in the book, Frank Moss extols the great significance of Printing House Square:
The square will ever be famous as the place where The Great American Newspaper has had its development. Greeley, Raymond, Dana, Jones, and many others, hardly less famous, have done their life work here, and have enriched the nation and the world by it. (214)

Printing House Square dominated the life of Manhattan, the nation, and the world for more than a century. It began to break up when the New York Times moved to Long Acre Square at 42nd Street and gave it the new name of Times Square in 1904. I am astonished that New York City has let such a legacy dissolve into oblivion with such little notice of its historical significance.

Thanks, Mark Helprin, for restoring some of the luster and life of Printing House Square!

Paper, Pens, Poems, and Posts

Going into bookstores, I find that a popular item is the book of blank pages. Over the years this has been my favorite medium, and I started writing in such volumes many years ago when they were actually rare and somewhat difficult to find. Now these empty books are to be found everywhere, elaborately produced: simple to ornate covers, folios of gilded edges, ribbon bookmarks, and lined pages. In my opinion, the lined pages ruin the illusion of an emptiness waiting to be filled. The lines are reminiscent of spiral notebooks used in school, taking all the joy out of the creative fantasy. I always used the unlined pages and preferred a size that was easy to carry around at all times.

Sometimes I would attempt journaling on these empty sheaves of paper, but seldom completed the task. I have many such partial beginnings, many begun at the turn of the year. None of these journals were as sustained as this Blog, although the obstacle that blunted my efforts in this space at the new year was even then lethal to the imagination, which can at times be extremely fragile. Yet as I walk around Borders and Barnes and Noble, especially in their coffee sites, I see many young people logging in their journals, which possibly explains the market for such empty tomes. Apparently we must have new generations more obsessed with neatness and order, as the lined pages are no impediment to such embryonic inscribers.

My most successful feat with such empty media has been writing poems. A poem is such perfect content for this medium. For me the challenge is creating short works in which form and content are uncovered in the moment. There is a sense of discovery, of solving a challenge, unraveling the Gordian knot, which I do not cut like Alexander, but rather find some means to extricate the tangled cords. Language serves as a puzzle to be solved as the imagery evolves through an expanding awareness triggered by the words themselves.

The medium of choice to mark upon the page was the black ballpoint pen, preferably medium point...not blue, not green, not fine-tipped. The right pen on the right texture of paper was much like finding a grand piano of exquisite tone and touch on which to improvise. Each poem was a tacit and tactile discovery. The rules were simple. Since the poems are written in ink they are permanent etches in time. Once the lines are on the page they are fixed and permanent. Generally they are only one page in length. Here is a sample:

Shafts of light through stained glass
Collide in pools of color
On the cathedral floor;
Motes of dust stream through columns of light
Like tiny technicolor galaxies.
Silence, with its gaping jaw,
Exhales a smothering sigh
Obliterating everything unlike itself.
Eternity lurks in its own caricature
Evading Time in the womb-like cradle
Of the church,
Basking in the prismatic glances
Of stained-glass windows.

Posting on the Internet is quite a different medium, but for me it has similar elements of surprise and satisfaction as a work is uncovered. Not all posts are equally successful or revealing. The process is quite different than the mechanics of paper and pen, but one gains the advantages of fonts and color, substitutes for texture. The texture of the digital screen is extremely monotonous and dull, despite the dazzling color and animation. Even though many have predicted that books will disappear into the digital medium, we are creatures of texture. We need the tactile satisfaction produced by flipping through the pages of books, magazines, and newspapers. Digital domination by singular visual supremacy is not yet a fait accompli.

Must the Winter End So Soon?

I have been reading Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale, an epic novel that pays homage to New York City and is inhabited by characters who come in and out of the narrative much as do the characters in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. I have made it a slow read on purpose, savoring the wit and wisdom of an author who is deeply immersed in this city by the sea, and understands it even more than Pete Hamill. Pete Hamill's Forever is an epic novel of New York City, an impressive achievement that left me breathless. Even now as I write about it, I want to read it again.

But Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale rises to an even higher level. Somehow he has managed to merge realism and fantasy, creating characters whose essence is ultimately shaped by the crucible of the city that challenges and nourishes their existence. It is a perfect read for celebrating the delight and destructive power of winter. The frigid air of winter brings clarity, etching the city and the surrounding Hudson countryside in crystalline perfection, enabling us to see further and deeper into the soul of an energy that binds us together as one.

Outside, as I write, temperatures are moderating. The days are getting longer, and I feel compelled to speed up my reading of Helprin's masterpiece, for it is a book to be savored in the deepest chill of winter. I came across a review by Bobby Matherne written in 2003, who apparently felt that the book should be read in summer:

Actually most of the scenes take place in winter, not just one winter, but many winters. All the action outdoors takes place in the middle of extreme cold -- the Hudson River is frozen solid all the way from the ocean to its source. Helprin has written a paean to New York City and a love song to winter. Not the bitter cold, desolate winters when everyone huddles inside for warmth, but a vibrant, active winter full of evocative scenes of festive block parties on ice, ice-boating on large lakes, ice skating on frozen rivers, and midnight silvery sleigh rides bouncing over snowy hillocks or gliding silently over glassy smooth ice surrounded by quaint candle-lit Dutch villages along the fictional Lake of the Coheeries near the headwaters of the Hudson. This novel makes great summer reading as it will keep you in a perpetual chill as you read it.

On the contrary, a winter read takes you through the chill of winter as though you were on the greatest adventure of your life. It is a book for winter, for celebrating both its magical and destructive powers, and while reading it you experience a different season, one that whisks you away on the winds of winter as though you could fly through the storms and blizzards with those whose warmth wraps you in a cocoon of imagination, rich safe-havens rescuing you from the oblivion that lurks on the other side of this frigid realm. If you haven't read it, set it aside for next winter, and begin reading it in a tavern, drinking a tankard of ale as you savor the warmth within, while watching the snow blowing into drifts outside your window.

I was both amazed and distressed that Mr. Matherne describes the flaw of the novel as celebrating criminals and criminality:

If the book has a flaw, it's the constant thievery motif. Peter is a criminal, Pearly is a criminal, most of the people Peter meets are criminals or began as one. ... The author treats criminality as if it adds light to the city, when in truth it adds only darkness, as does every form of immorality. The polishing of the lights that criminals do is with dirty rags that obscure and obstruct the light; the red flashes they create are from burning down other people's property, and the lightning flashes are flashes from the muzzles of their murder weapons. In 1983 Helprin was creating celebrities out of criminals while it seems that the world today is creating criminals out of celebrities. Neither process brightens the world, but only darkens it with its immorality.

Suddenly Mr. Matherne, rather than reviewing a novel, is lecturing us with depressingly moralizing drivel. The truth is that Helprin's understanding of the dark side of human activities illuminates the moments of liberation, when an underlying moral sense comes to the fore, transforming characters, redeeming them, or helping us understand their presence in the larger scheme of things. At least the reviewer in the New York Times got it right:

Is it not astonishing that a work so rooted in fantasy, filled with narrative high jinks, and comic flights, stands forth centrally as a moral discourse? It is indeed... I find myself nervous, to a degree. I don't recall in my past as a reviewer, about failing the work, inadequately displaying its brilliance.

I hear by the grapevine that we are due for another blast of Arctic air this weekend, perhaps a final fling of winter. I am halfway through the book, and I will have to hole up somewhere as this last surge of winter returns, fueling my attention and hurling me to the end of a book that I wish would never end, but must ...and too soon at that.

Daylight Savings Dwindling

So today we threw the daylight to the tail end of the day, supposedly to save energy, but the energy it takes to change the clocks and systems in our house already offsets any energy saved. I'm sure that there are others who, like the researchers at a university in California, find that there is no savings in electricity and that overall usage increases.

So we wonder why the media must raise concerns to the level of an alarm with dire warnings that the collapse of technological society is immanent. Isn't March Madness enough? Must we compound it by fumbling to set our watches and clocks? Where on earth is it all headed? Perhaps to the moon, whose friendly face seems to shine through even the most muddled of time changes, even as it inches further and further away from the earth each year. Try setting your clock to the moon in another 50,000 years!

For some reason this time-change loomed more devastatingly than the change of the century. Some were even prone to claim we were altering the Mayan calendar and accelerating our doom before 2012. Now we learn that for all our efforts, daylight is continuing to slip through our fingers. It is enough to make you reconsider the whole affair. Even Australia is contemplating making daylight savings time permanent in an effort to bolster its economy, encourage a baby boom, and defeat clock tampering once and for all.

But the most important news is that we are losing the energy battle. It appears that the more daylight we save, the more energy we consume. It's a helluva way to run a railroad --- which, by the way, used to be so reliable you could set your clock by it!

Remembering Someone

As a child he was usually alone. His mother was a credit union manager and his father travelled a lot. He had a sister who was almost ten years older, so she was in a completely different world. He often marvelled at the mystery of her world as she seemed to be seldom around. When he was much younger, she was his baby-sitter, but now at around six years old, no one thought anything about his being left alone for a little while.

Yet, there were many moments of loneliness so intense that he found it unbearable. He would look into the night, straining at sounds and passing cars that might offer some rescue, but all passed by with dissonant indifference. Tears cut through his separateness, descending rivulets of absence, desolate and desperate. He stood in the silence and wished for something that was beyond his grasp, outside of his understanding, a vast distance shone like a remote continent, now lost and obscured by the haze and debris of Time.

Yet, there was a presence that made him distinctive. Everyone who met him later in life sensed a special source that nourished him like an inner fountain of awareness and resourcefulness. His aloneness was not a barrier, not a wall creating an unbreachable partition, but more like a vast gulf that invited many obscure and ingenious routes to his inner world. This gulf provided a means of mediation with his apparent detachment.

Some might say that his aloneness became his strength, if you can find strength in isolation. It was a strength for a different time, aloof, but waiting for ultimate strangers who would invade his defenses and harvest the richness of wonder and beauty that might emerge in mutual paths of discovery. It was a timeless isolation that could yield instantly to someone who possessed the linchpin to his secret world. There was his immediate world that everyone knew, but there was an alternate quietness waiting within that promised more than one could imagine. Such a sensibility needed the originality of outsiders, alien visitors who could read the invisible terrain.

The Eloquent Silence

Words come, filling the blank pages. Music comes, emerging from the silence to the somethingness of tone and rhythm. Images emerge onto the empty canvas or on to the tape or film. It is as though the emptiness waits---solely for the purpose of being filled.

So I have thought that with these Blogs I could open an empty space, and the words would come and shape the moment, finding some pathway to the substance, an underlying isness waiting to be disclosed.

Silence is not the same as nothingness. Silence is the emptiness of creation poised on the verge of becoming. We come from the silence, from the beingness that contains awakening awareness.

I remember when I first discovered this (before the acknowledgment that I have always known). I lay dying on the floor and a woman named Viola, who had glided into our lives in a moment of need, cupped my face between her hands and called to me from the silence. I awoke into the presence of restored conscious awareness. Not only was I no longer dying, I found a source of creative flow, a fountain of ideas manifest as writing, music, performance, and visual imagination. In that instance from the silence I knew myself, suddenly aware that knowing was the nowing of the silence, and knew was the perpetual newness, the newing of the now. Even now, words fall short of the magnitude, the eloquent silence.

Viola had made the silence so tangible that for months afterwards I tried to grasp the somethingness of existence as a substance, a materiality I could hold in my hands, an illusion created by intense awareness. Somehow I sensed that this was what Einstein had discovered for all humanity---that energy was mass converted by the speed of light squared. The speed of light squared is consciousness, awareness converting substance from spirituality, giving birth to the true material of the cosmos, the very source of all that we are.

Noticing

In teaching research, I find it sometimes helpful to bring it to a simple level of the act of noticing. Researchers are often people trained to notice certain things, and more recently we have opened that idea to noticing without the bias of certain things limiting our "gaze." Sometimes we just want to cast our net over the side and pull things up which we notice in some particular way, sometimes systematic, sometimes not. Intentionally intending the world is an acknowledgement of otherness.

So for me, noticing has been a metaphor for discovery. It is a special way of knowing. Now that I have coupled this with my new passion for fiction, I find that writers are a special breed of noticers. They notice for me. So do poets. Such noticings are like flash points of consciousness. They are incandescent. Illuminating. Because of them I also notice. Now we have new poets in filmmakers who also notice the world and conscious awareness through intense acts of imagination.

But from the wonderful details that these noticers have discerned in the reconstructions of their imaginations, I am learning that I too, need to stay more consciously alert to the moment. Now I watch instances with new intentional intensity. Such noticing seems to demand a way of capturing the essence of the noticed. Today this has become almost routine to the vocabulary of film where the continuum of Time is shaped in instances of discovery that are of the past and the present, and are shaped as much by a creative sensibility as by historical accuracy. The things we notice create new instances for noticing.

This has transformed my own engagement with Time. Every detail of every second is the rich content of experience. Nothing we do, see, taste, smell, hear, feel, or say is trivial. Somehow all is the substance of existence and serves to define what we are and what we are becoming. Sharing our noticing increases the substance of what is real for us, expands the universe. Even in our increasing understanding of the cosmos, we learn because we notice more and more. We create special instruments for noticing time and space with many different mechanical eyes, ears, noses, tongues, and hands, with many different filters---all recorded as "data."

Maybe that is what we are: noticers of time as infinite manifestations, recording the dimensions of the cosmos as conscious awareness. It comes down to ourselves as distinct distillations of awareness, eloquently articulating multiple universes in our myriad noticing of details of being and time.