Uncategorized

Roughing It by Dr. Dale Williams Barrigar

(Co-Ed note. Both images provided by DWB –Oh, to have Boo’s energy! Today we revisit Dale’s piece about America’s Shakespeare, the great Mr. Clemens/Twain, which was first published by Literally Stories UK. Sam had the same level of education as the Bard, but he’s is not detracted by his own legion of fatuous Baconites.–LA)

“Twain is America’s Shakespeare.”

– Leila Allison (2nd Co-Ed note–see, what did I just tell you!)

From the ages of twelve until sixteen, I was raised on the banks of the Mississippi River.

I first got truly intoxicated via alcohol on the banks of the river. (Alcohol would later become a major passion, until I had to give it up.)

I first tasted cigarettes on the banks of the river. (Same.)

I first tasted the sacred ganja (weed), too, on the banks of the Mississippi River. (Also a major passion, not given up so far as of this writing, except in the smoking form; medical edibles are stronger and more long-lasting anyway…)

I first held the hand of a girl on the banks of the river.

I knew a boy who was raped, robbed, and murdered by two other boys, who I also knew, brothers, who people called “white trash,” his body dumped into the river.

I was first shot at on the banks of the river (the one and only time so far, although a few people have threatened to do so since then, both those with guns and those without, women and men) which is a long and involved story all unto itself.

We lived a couple of miles inland. My friends and I would go down to the river whenever we could, which was frequently. Exactly like Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer (which I didn’t know at the time), my friends and I would sneak out of our parents’ houses at night, sometimes out of the window exactly like Huck, to go roaming around our small-town world under cover of dark, in the night, the fabulous night, when the ghosts, the angels, the wild animals, and the beautiful mermaids swimming in the foamy river waves come out, or you wonder if you’ve seen them at least.

We sometimes passed the Lincoln-Douglas Debate statue on our way down to the miles-wide river. One time, some friends of mine climbed all over the statue, which I didn’t do, not because I wasn’t a climber, I was a climber, of trees, cliffs, bridges, public buildings, water towers, fences, and sometimes up and down the outside walls of my parents’ house when getting in and out of the window at night without them knowing.

I didn’t climb on the Lincoln statue because I respected Honest Abe, and what he stood for, too much. I’d first learned about him back in Michigan from Mrs. and Mr. Murphy, our next-door neighbors, who had three framed photos alongside one another on their mantle above the fireplace in the early 1970s: Lincoln, John. F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

When we moved to Illinois, I was instantly aware that we were entering the Land of Lincoln because of them. His leftover presence or memory bathed the whole land for me in a sort of immortal or legendary aura, or glow. He was the reason I would join the Blue Devil high school wrestling team here in Illinois, because I knew Old Honest Abe himself had been a wrestler, an individual who took on the bad guys even then (in my mind they were the bad guys).

One of my earliest memories is of crossing the river, in a car, on a bridge. We still lived in Michigan then and were on a family trip to the West. Dad was driving, and mom was pointing out the window, explaining why the river was so legendary.

The deep country in that part of Illinois surrounding America’s largest river is a mythological land that is yet or again unknown to many, but one day may become much more central to America again (despite its being in the center), because of all the fresh water it contains.

Hilly, extremely rural, filled with cliffs, ridges, forests, prairies, cornfields, eagles, deer, wild cats, wild dogs, and hogs, a place where you can easily get lost for hours on the back roads and not see another single human soul, a land of tiny, sleepy villages at crossroads with one person sitting in a chair on a porch maybe, mysterious isolated farm houses and barns back by themselves in the hollows, and small family cemeteries on hilltops like something out of “Wuthering Heights,” an area where the people almost seem to speak with a deep southern accent, a remote, vast region bordering the unconquerable river that few tourists or outsiders ever venture to or stop at, but where you can sometimes see travelers like hobos wandering up and down the lanes or waiting with their bottles and bags to jump a train, this part of Illinois still has an aura about it that conjures up an American past straight out of a Mark Twain story, large-haired, large-eye-browed, large-mustachioed, cigar-chomping, corncob-pipe-holding, whiskey-swilling, covered-in-newspaper-ink, laughing uproariously, raging Mark Twain.

While we visited Hannibal, Missouri, Twain’s home town, many times, like everyone else in the area, I never read Mark Twain’s stories, essays or novels when we lived along the river. In a fit of homesickness not long after we moved to Chicago when I was sixteen, I picked up “Huckleberry Finn” on a lonely summer afternoon and was suddenly transported back to the river country, where my best friend had been black, just like Huck and Jim. Their escape down the river forever after would stand for the longing for, and movement toward, freedom in my mind.

William Dean Howells called Samuel Langhorne Clemens, aka Twain, “the Lincoln of our literature.” Lincoln, Twain and THE LAND equaled THE RIVER in my mind, the strong brown god, as T.S. Eliot from Saint Louis, Missouri, called it, and the river itself equaled freedom, the cardinal virtue in the U.S. of A.’s finest idealist notions of itself. ILLINOIS, the middle of the country and the middle of nowhere, is America itself, boiled down.

As another great and legendary, iconic Middle American, Robert Zimmerman, aka Bob Dylan, has it about his youth in Minnesota: “Songs, to me, were more important than just light entertainment. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality, some different republic, some liberated republic.”

“FREEDOM!” as Mel Gibson’s version of William Wallace, eternal Scottish rebel, a hero to both Twain and Lincoln, hollers out with his last echoing breath at the end of “Braveheart,” a great and overblown film, defying both the king and the mob, and even something else, like death itself.

Americans are good at escaping, or they used to be, just like me and my friends used to escape the comfort of our homes to go roaming where the edge of the world could be found. As Huck says at the end of his book, which he wrote himself, “I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest…” Now we inhabit the territory of The Mind, and lighting out means keeping your brain (and spirit) as free as possible from the disease of modern life, even (or especially) when they’re coming to get you.

Twain himself had become a kind of early conscientious objector, when he defected from the Confederate army after his very first taste of real violence, which he documents in “The Private History of a Campaign that Failed,” and “Roughing It.”

“I knew more about retreating than the man that invented retreating,” he says about his decision to bow out of the army, avoid the carnage he now knew was coming for sure, and soon, and flee to the West.

“In this country, on Saturday, everyone was struck dumb, and saw at first only deep below deep, as he meditated on the ghastly blow,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in the immediate aftermath of Lincoln’s assassination.

The paradoxical actions and reactions regarding freedom of Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln, one running for his life, then writing about it, as an example to all of us about how you can escape the system if you try; the other refusing guard and accepting the death he knew was coming for him like it had come for so many (and which comes to all of us late or soon), and which had been shown to him in a dream…are both embodied in trips they took down The River. Lincoln saw slaves on the auction block after a raft trip down The River to New Orleans, and told a friend, “If I ever get a chance to hit slavery, I’ll hit it hard.” Fifty years later, Twain went back into the past and wrote a story about a small “white trash” white boy and a good-hearted, good-looking, and wise, black man becoming the best of friends, all by themselves, at the bottom of society, on a raft trip down The River.

“The brown god / is almost forgotten / by the dwellers in cities,” as T.S. Eliot knew; but “the river is within us…”

Visiting Bill Burroughs by Dr. Dale Williams Barrigar

(Ed. Note–actually, Co-Editor note. Both images provided by DWB as we enter day two of some of his fine past works. This originally appeared in Literally Stories UK. It is good to keep things alive in this hectic globe of online publishing, a world covered by multiple layers of ether. The only way that this format can develop a history is to quickly acknowledge and keep a light trained on its past. LA)

It was a time when creative writing programs in the midwestern United States still contained edgy idealists, at least some of them. I don’t know what the writing programs here are like now.

A good creative writing class is, of course, always a bit of a performance. This is true for both the teacher, and the students. Everyone plays their role on an alternating basis.

As a teacher, some time around 2010, I began to notice a shift in my audience.

In another never-ending department meeting, the “head” called the shift “corporate.”

She said it was destined to only get worse.

The shift involved incessant cell phone usage, but also something else that was wordless and indefinable. I didn’t last long in such a climate. Pretty soon they had my head on a platter.

But back in the ’90s, I’d been a student, not a teacher.

I left Chicago for graduate school in Kansas with my now-ex-wife not long after the suicide of Kurt Cobain. His death was announced while I was watching MTV, drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, and reading in the middle of the night. It meant more than a lot to me, because he was almost exactly my age and I was a huge fan. I’m an even bigger fan now, almost exactly thirty years later.

There were practical reasons for choosing Wichita, Kansas, as my destination. But another huge reason was the fact that William S. Burroughs also lived in Kansas, a couple of hours up the road, in Lawrence, an old abolitionist town and still an artistic and liberal enclave with a university. I believed Norman Mailer when he wrote that William S. Burroughs was, truly, a genius of the English language and the written word, somewhat in the manner of Dr. Jonathan Swift.

The writing program at Wichita State University involved taking half creative writing, and half literature classes. So I spent my time studying Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, and Dr. Johnson and Boswell, as well as delivering pizzas to pay the bills and writing endless short stories, prose poems, and book reviews for the local paper that kept pouring out of me and were both inspiring (to myself) and completely in the realm of juvenilia.

But I felt myself getting better at writing every day. And I knew William S. Burroughs was just up the road, a literary giant, a continual, tantalizing presence and inspiration. My intention ever since moving to Kansas had been to visit him, even if only for a few minutes. But I always put it off and kept dreaming about it, aways planning to go and never taking off.

I’d already been on numerous literary pilgrimages throughout the United States. My focus had been on visiting the place and the spirit of the person, instead of the actual author, because most of them were dead. A list can be found at the end of this tale, for those interested in desert island lists. (I’ve been on even more literary pilgrimages since then, including Canada for Leonard Cohen and Mexico for Gabriel Garcia Marquez.)

My three years as a graduate writing/literature student at Wichita State University were almost up. My writing had improved (even if it was still juvenilia), and I’d moved on from delivering pizzas to teaching classes in the department. But I still hadn’t visited William S. Burroughs up the highway a couple of hours in Lawrence. Then the moment came.

I was sitting in a favorite dive bar in a poor side of town on the other side of the tracks with two of my favorite folks in the world. Cocktails we regularly shared together in those days included cocaine, LSD, opioids (no needles), hash, plus two to four packs of Marlboros a day per person, all in the spirit of John Lennon, Rimbaud, Coleridge, Thomas de Quincy, and Burroughs, but tonight we were only drinking: whiskey, beer, tequila (and tobacco smoking). All three of us were taking turns playing the audience at our bar table and “writing in air,” as James Agee called it.

One of my friends suddenly suggested that we get in his car right now and visit Old Bill. Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson and Janis Joplin were playing on the juke box because we kept feeding the coins in for them. We talked about it for about ten minutes, then purchased supplies: pints of Jack Daniel’s and packs of cig’s for the road from the barman behind the bar. That kind of take-out was legal, and not even frowned upon, in the Kansas of those days.

The three of us were in my friend’s Mustang headed to Lawrence. These were two of the closest people to me in my life. One of them I was even closer to, because I was madly in love with her, as well as being a best friend. Our driver had done significant time in prison due to shooting a rival in the leg and other issues, years in the past. He was also a true genius of the underground, someone who could recite entire long passages from “On the Road,” “Howl,” “Song of Myself” and William Blake at will and from memory and would do so frequently in the bars of Wichita. If he wasn’t getting it right, he was making it up, which was even more impressive.

My favorite William S. Burroughs short story is “The Junky’s Christmas.” In this piece, Burroughs, the great sinner, is transformed into a kind of grizzled yet benevolent grandfatherly figure who narrates a tale about a down-and-out junkie who gives away his last shot to a lost soul on Christmas day before being astounded into heaven, as Melville wrote of stoics when they die at the end of his very, very long poem Clarel, a work that perhaps fifty people, or less, have ever read end to end. And that means fifty people ever in the history of humanity, not just who are alive now. If anyone is alive now who’s read this entire poem, I wish to hear from you.

We asked around in the college bars of Lawrence. They told us where Burroughs’ house was. We continued drinking in the bars into late, late in the night, celebrating Old Bill in his home town. We didn’t finally head out to Burroughs’ place until after the bars had closed down.

We found his house, but he wasn’t home, or was sleeping, or wouldn’t answer the door; and who could blame him; we knew he was elderly, so we didn’t try long, but we were on hallowed ground, if only for a few moments.

On the way back to Wichita, the car ran out of gas on a stretch of the Flint Hills Highway that didn’t have any towns, exits, or gas stations on it for a length of seventy miles. A state trooper drove my friend thirty miles down the road and back again to pick up gas while my other friend and I waited in the car and watched the sun come up over the great, tall-grass prairie hills. The state trooper never mentioned the drinking. There were still antelope on the hills in those days and may they remain there forever. We watched a herd of them running by and beyond us into the distance. This sight was true beauty, as only wild animals in the middle of nowhere can be.

William S. Burroughs died on the day I finished graduate school in Kansas. The next day, I moved back to Chicago to enter the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois Chicago, which had been co-founded by Paul Carroll, one of the editor/writers who first published Burroughs and was almost prosecuted by the U.S. government for doing so. Allen Ginsberg had passed on four months before. This synchronicity meant nothing, absolutely nothing, to anyone on this planet except me. And I think it was better that way because it wasn’t something I could’ve shared at the time in the right way, even though I tried.

Old Bill had told and written many stories in his life, in many different forms, and his life itself was a great American story, not without tragedy, of course. Burroughs, who could be more than a tad prickly, always insisted that the purpose of his famous cut-up technique was not artistic, but spiritual, mystical, and magical. The cut-ups brought him messages he needed to know about life, not facts but mysteries.

He didn’t believe in what we call “death,” or “accidents,” especially after the death of his wife, Joan, who had also been his best friend, probably even more than she was his wife.

Robert Browning said, speaking of the afterlife, “Never say of me that I am dead.” I never met William Burroughs in person, but that was never the point.

Postscript.

Alabama: Barry Hannah; Alaska: Jack London; California: John Steinbeck, Henry Miller, and Gary Snyder; Colorado: Hunter S. Thompson; Florida: Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Stevens and Ernest Hemingway; Georgia: Flannery O’Connor, Harry Crews and Carson McCullers; Idaho: Ernest Hemingway; Illinois: Abraham Lincoln, Saul Bellow, Carl Sandburg, Richard Wright, Ernest Hemingway, and Gwendolyn Brooks, who I met in Chicago and who I plan to write about soon; Iowa: Flannery O’Connor and Denis Johnson; Louisiana: William Faulkner (New Orleans); Massachusetts: Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville; Michigan: Ernest Hemingway, Jim Harrison and Robert Hayden.

Minnesota: Bob Dylan, Sam Shepard, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Louise Erdrich; Mississippi: William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Larry Brown, and Eudora Welty; Missouri: Mark Twain; Montana: James Welch and Thomas McGuane; Nebraska: Willa Cather and Malcom X; New Hampshire: Robert Frost; New Jersey: William Carlos Williams and Walt Whitman; New Mexico: D.H. Lawrence; New York: Herman Melville, Walt Whitman and Norman Mailer; North Carolina: Thomas Wolfe; Ohio: Sherwood Anderson; Oklahoma: Ralph Ellison and Woody Guthrie; Oregon: Ken Kesey; South Dakota: Black Elk; Tennessee: James Agee, Cormac McCarthy, and Martin Luther King, Jr.; Virginia: Thomas Jefferson; Washington: Raymond Carver; Wisconsin: Aldo Leopold, John Muir and Lorine Niedecker.

The Old Guitarist by Dale Williams Barrigar

(This was previously published by Literally Stories UK; both images were provided by the author. ‘Tis our pleasure this week to revisit works by our esteemed Co-Editor Dr. Dale Williams Barrigar)

I saw a little man riding a child’s bicycle in Berwyn, Illinois, outside Chicago, on the sidewalk, along Roosevelt Road.

He was carrying a guitar; this was the first thing that caught my attention.

The guitar was strapped over his back. But it was also slung down partly across the side of his body so he could cuddle it with one arm while he steered the bike with the other and pedaled the small pedals with his small legs.

This was a busy neighborhood, but anyone paying attention would surely notice that there was something special between this little old man and his guitar. He held it like it was an animal or a person. He held it delicately while he rode his bike down the sidewalk; he kept it close to him; and he held it with love.

It looked like a small classical guitar covered in road miles. The body of the guitar was red around the edges fading into orange with flower patterns on the pickguard. The strap that held it to his body was an old red one.

The neighborhood was busy, with cars steadily moving in both directions along Roosevelt Road. The famous music venue, Fitzgerald’s, was across the street and both sides of the road were lined with old brick apartment buildings and new corner smoke shops; tattoo parlors; bars; Italian ice and Italian beef restaurants; a bank; a gas station; and Euclid Square Park in the distance.

But the little old man with his guitar was riding the opposite way. Soon on Roosevelt Road, he’d be pedaling into urban devastation, a city’s almost-peopleless wasteland, unless he turned around.

He was small and he was old.

And it occurred to me that he looked much older than he probably was while also seeming much younger in the way he moved, an uncanny doubling.

His long, gray-brown, wiry hair fell all over his shoulders and half way down his back. His small bearded face was wise, wizened, and lean, with deeply sunken cheeks. He was small and old and covered in road miles like the bike and his guitar.

This little, homeless-looking man was not someone you would mess with because of his overwhelming presence no one was noticing.

And he held his guitar like a knight holds his lance; like a warrior carries his club; like a conductor wielding his baton; like a dog walker his leash; like a priest and his chalice.

He had a shocking presence as he steadily pedaled with his guitar down the sidewalk: if you were paying attention. He looked like he was going somewhere, or maybe just anywhere. He wore an old blue button-down shirt over an old white T shirt and he had blue shorts on that went past his knees.

His foot gear had once been white tennis shoes and he had rope bracelets covering both wrists. His skin was dark brown and wrinkled, permanently tanned by sun, wind and sky.

His nose was large and his hands were long, and his eyes were fiery, dark, black-circled, peering intensely and intently from under calm, or calmly troubled, brows. The backpack on his back spilled over from its pockets with plastic water bottles, handkerchiefs, bits of clothing, paper, pens, and other things.

And the little man disappeared into one of the city’s worst neighborhoods, pedaling on his child’s bicycle: carrying his guitar like a lifeline.

A few weeks later that summer, I saw him again. I was taking a stroll around Euclid Square Park with my Siberian Husky, Boo. Euclid Square is a large grassy green space surrounded by houses and trees and Roosevelt Road along one side behind another row of trees. He was sitting directly in the middle of the large, grassy field that was the center of the park. His bike lay in the grass not far away.

And he was sitting cross-legged in the grass in the middle of the park, playing his guitar.

I was too far away to hear well in the wind, but it was fascinating to watch this virtuoso working over his guitar from the corners of your eyes.

He played fast, he played slow, he rocked back and forth, and then he rolled, he rolled half forward as his hands kept flying all over the guitar.

I couldn’t hear it much, but he looked beautiful playing, like a wild man, like a magician: like an escape artist.

Soon I noticed that a friendly-looking old lady had become fascinated with his playing too. The smiling old woman was approaching him on foot across the grass. I saw her reach him, and I saw her bend down, and try to hand him some money, at least a few dollars because she had more than one bill in both of her hands.

But by now he had stopped playing. He had rolled into a little ball over his guitar which he was holding upside down. The man wouldn’t play any more, and he kept his head down, but he reached up and took the money from the old woman. She smiled and was happy and turned away to rejoin her party on the other side of the park.

As she walked away, I looked at the old guitarist.

He flung the money away from him, out across the grass. Both he and I watched the wind blow the bills away across the grass.

Then he looked around to make sure no one could hear him.

And he started playing again.

Notation: Picasso’s “The Old Guitarist” is in the Art Institute of Chicago.

Saragun Springs Proudly Presents The Sunday Drifter

The Mystery of Wallace Stevens

“Call the roller of big cigars, / The muscular one…”

– Wallace Stevens

The American poet Wallace Stevens converted to Catholicism on his deathbed at 75.

The details are hazy because this was such a private event like everything in Stevens’ life, but it’s known for sure that he was periodically seeing a priest for a few months in the hospital before he passed on, and the priest said he converted at the very end. I don’t trust all priests (far from it) but I have a hard time doubting this one about this.

Because Stevens had been moving in this direction for a long time, too. For most of his life, he’d claimed he had no hard and fast faith in a personal God, and he didn’t attend church in a world where almost everyone did, but his attitude toward life had always been religious.

As religious as it gets, in many ways, in the modern world: the religion of poetry. The Religion of Poetry, the individual’s lyric cry that can be maintained against all odds in the world of modern mass society, the land of robotic humanity.

Stevens was the man who fought Hemingway on the nighttime docks of Key West, Florida, even though he was twenty years older, the man who turned down The New Yorker when they asked to publish some of his poems, the man who also turned down Life Magazine when they asked to publish some of his poems, and the man who refused to be a professor of poetry at Harvard when they offered him the job late in his life. Had he done even one of those things, he would have instantly become exponentially more “famous” than he ever was while he lived. And he knew it.

Because fame is a funny thing.

These days we say that the latest “star” of The Bachelorette tv series is famous. But such manufactured “fame” fades so fast we shouldn’t even call it fame, we should think of another word instead.

Or maybe we should just call real fame, the lasting kind that starts slowly and local and builds over decades and centuries, with peaks and valleys, dips and rises, GLORY.

And Wallace Stevens has his deserved share of glory now, in the American poetry pantheon, a true heir of both Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman.

Stevens was a kind of Superman. During the day he was a businessman, an insurance lawyer who walked to and from work by himself and closed his door when he got there, a man who never drove a car and lived alone in his own house even though that house was also filled with a wife and daughter he almost never spoke to (until later when he became close with his daughter). At night he spent his late evenings drifting around his own large, fragrant, tree-filled Connecticut yard smoking cigars and drinking. The neighbors would see him there, the only one in the “respectable” neighborhood doing such. What they didn’t know was that he was also busy penning (in his mind) immortal poetry, this physical giant of a man.

It took me twenty-plus years of studying them (off and on) to truly understand Wallace Stevens’ trio of short poems “The Snow Man,” “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon,” and “The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad.” These works were first published in Chicago’s Poetry Magazine in the early 1920s. They can be understood, sort of, on a first reading, but to truly plumb the depths of these short, vast works, a reader needs to return hundreds of times across a span of years. Harold Bloom convincingly called these three the heart and soul of Stevens’ work as poet and man. Liberation through words has never been so deep and so pungent since the Scriptures were written.

At the end Stevens finally decided (or became convinced) that life doesn’t end when life ends.

Bob Dylan, a Wallace Stevens-like figure in many ways, wrote (and he wasn’t joking), “Death is not the end.”

Walt Whitman wrote, “Death is different from what anyone supposes. / And luckier.”

The Photography of Dale Barrigar Williams (aka, The Drifter) Vol. One

(The header image is a group shot of the Canine stars of this production: Colonel, Bandit and Boo)

Today and tomorrow pictures will be supplying their well known ability to say a thousand words, and then some. These are courtesy of The Drifter today and Christopher J. Ananias tomorrow.

If you are not shy, send us five images and we will be happy to give you a photo shoot day of your own. Standards of legality and good taste apply for those very few among you who need to be told such things–Leila

(Tressa, The Dog Whisperer)

(The Ongoing Legend of Boo and his high end reading materials)

(Sweet Miss Bandit)

(Gallant Colonel)

Dale and family love Dogs, and it shows that the feeling is mutual!

In Memory of 9-11-2001

Today we set aside the usual crash and thud of daily life in the Springs to remember the victims of 9-11, which, incredibly, happened twenty-four years ago today. Both myself and my friend and site co-Editor (no ranks here, we are both co-Editors) Dale have thoughts to share on this occasion. And we certainly invite everyone inclined to do so to contribute their own memories in the comments’ section.

(I took the image at Evergreen Rotary Park in Bremerton, Washington USA on the morning of 10 September. Those are actual pieces of the WTC. Below this article is a picture that stands as proof that there is beauty in the world, if you know where to seek it.)

I happened to be at work for fifteen minutes when reports of the first plane striking the WTC came over the radio. For twenty minutes we, like most others, were hoping that it was an extremely unlucky accident since the sky in New York was as clear and empty as the mind of Paris Hilton, but knew better. Only the very dullest clung to immense false hopes when the second plane struck. In fact there is tape of a somewhat vacuous Fox reporter cautioning people against using the “T-word” after the second plane struck. (One thing that morning did was expose what terrible “journalists” morning show people are–save for Katie Couric, who had news experience. For the most part, it was a relief when the real news people soon took over.)

I also just happened to be working at The Seattle Times. Ha! Not as a reporter, but as the grill cook in the cafeteria (I am, after all, a writer). Still, I was chummy with many of the reporters, therefore I was ahead of the curve information and misinformation wise. I recall the false reports of the “car bomb” in D.C. and a few other falsehoods that slowly withered away as the real events unfolded. Little thisses and thats that still exist on the sound tracks of the day.

People have filled reams and reels about the day. My most vivid in person memory (since I lived and still live three thousand miles from NYC and DC and Pennsylvania) was coming home on the ferry that night and clearly seeing heavily armed military police along the fence at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. For a day or two we looked like everyday in Bosnia. And since the tenth anniversary the image in the header (of two pieces of the towers) has stood in a park about a mile from where I type this.

Regardless, I think it is our duty to remember 9-11 and Pearl Harbor and the murders of JFK, Dr. King and RFK as well as the moon landing, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the good things that still sometimes happen in the world. Instead of thinking “Oh, yeah, it’s 9-11” then return to googling Paris Hilton to see what middle age has done to her, it might be better to think about the victims and even send a prayer on their behalf, regardless of your personal feelings about doing such.

Leila

I now give the virtual mic to our friend The Drifter….

 The Song “On That Day” by Leonard Cohen

The song brings me to tears almost every time I revisit it.

This song is just over two minutes long, from Leonard Cohen’s 2004 album Dear Heather, an album that got slammed by many misunderstanding critics when it came out, but which for me is one of Leonard’s best works, something that proved Leonard was still at the very top of his artistic game at the age of 70 and which also presaged his amazing “comeback” that was still in the offing at that point, his epic, immortal late-years world tour of 2008 to 2013. 

(I saw Leonard live at the very beginning of that tour in Chicago in 2008, and again at the very end of that tour in Milwaukee in 2013, without knowing it would be the end. Both shows were equally stunning and one-of-a-kind Leonard.)  

“On That Day” by Leonard Cohen is a work against war.

Within the brief and compressed time frame of just over two minutes, Leonard creates an eternal-seeming, apolitical poem against all war told in his ancient voice, lifted up by angelic background singers, and taken aloft by the sounds of his timeless Wandering Jew’s harp. 

Leonard’s specific motive in creating this song was the memorializing of September 11, 2001, New York City.

9/11 is a scar within us all; even if we think it’s old news by now (and in America that is often the way we do think), we are wrong. Even those of us who weren’t alive at the time have been marked “forever” by that fateful day. 

At the time, a woman I was deeply in love with had recently informed me that we were over “forever” because she was pregnant with another man’s child.

My wife and I (who I also loved) were separated.

Another woman (who I also loved) and I were also separated, by 2,000 miles.

My mother had just been diagnosed with (incurable of course) dementia.

And a novel I’d spent years creating had been bombed out by every single agent and publisher it was sent to, even though it was sent under the recommendation/s of people who knew those agents and/or those publishers personally. (The number was around twenty.)

And then the Towers were taken down.

So for me, my love of women, my love for my mother, and my love for literature, somehow all connected, are connected in my mind, too, to this day.

Memorializing a public event should always have, within ourselves, a private element, a very personal and private element as strong, for us, as the public event itself.

It’s like how it used to be when everyone remembered where they were the day Kennedy was assassinated.

Remembering “where you were” is more than just what your physical location was.

It should also be about where you were mentally, emotionally, and spiritually in your life. 

You don’t need to go anywhere to do this; all you need is to become quiet within yourself wherever you are. 

In In Memoriam A.H.H., Alfred, Lord Tennyson said, “In words, like weeds, I’ll wrap me o’er, / Like coarsest clothes against the cold: / But that large grief which these enfold / Is given in outline and no more.”

(This image of beauty is of my Assistant at the park photo shoot. By name, Puck)

Leila and Dale and Puck

Saragun Verse Falstaff for God

(Today we honor old Fat Jack. The Drifter has kept him in my mind lately, so the old knight rates a poem. In fact I think that I can dedicate this to His High Rotundity as well as the co-Editor of Saragun Springs— LA)

(The Raccoon in the image is named Falstaff; a truly fitting individual)

i

Handmade gods do not laugh

Even when they employ a staff

Of dull scribes, Bob Hope funny,

He who bought bad jokes with Chrysler money

ii

Go through pages and seek jolly sages

And learn good Will penned the man for all ages

Tankards of ale, sack and wassails

Falstaff lives on after all else fails

iii

Prince Hal was a pal till power spread him nebulous

‘Twas crown and church made him lugubrious

Yet Jack kept laughing and blessed the saints of the doomed

Hallo Pistol, Nym, Bardolph, Drifter and Harold, may your keeness for-ever, Bloom

iv

Kings lose their humour when see good

In split heads, spilled guts and land by the rood

Yet Hal neither lived long nor richly

Nor was he guided home by gentle Dame Quickly

Saragun Verse: “That’s How Come”

(Image of the Messianic Squirrel, Manette, WA at sunrise)

i

On the tongues of angels devils dance

The right words are made but not by chance

If the truth and sound should ever meet

We’d hear “it’s cheaper to let them sleep on the street.”

ii

The keening of youth wears thin in time

Like hippy power ties sold in eighty-nine

The passion disease is easy to cure

With pots of gold and rainbow lures

iii

Sleep tidy in peace is the lucky sin

God loves you more is how it begins

Luxuriate in false security long and well

And but once heed the toll of the bell

iv

And as one hypocrite tells another

“The fault lies with our fathers and mothers”

Yet seldom do parents concede

When devils dance on the tongues of their seed

Versatur Circa Quid! Column Three, Courtesy of The Saragun Gazette by Judge Jasper P. Montague, Quillemender

(Note–I wanted his Judgeship to appear five times this week, but he refuses to show more than once. Not much you can threaten a ghost with, so, well, so be it–LA)

Greetings dolts!

Today we will explore the pervicacity of the ever resilient, yet meek Shadowghost. Before we do, however, I have a feeling that I should explain that pervicacity means stubborn and does not have anything to do with perversion. I believe that the modern world would do well with a vocabulary sheet. “Awesome”; “iconic”; “brand”–and for the sake of all that is intelligent, “ginormous” are not all one needs to describe the world. Moreover one should know the difference between effect and affect and venial and venal, that and which as well as who and whom. Whilst applying my trade I feel more like a red pencil than a Quillemender!

Versatur Circa Quid!

Shadowghosts are of the First Order of Spirits. They date back to the original ghosts who came about shortly after the first people died, many are eons of longevity. Shadowghosts are the original visual phantom; they lurked the cave walls and stone houses of yore and were often interpreted as being gods instead of the ghost of Grandpa, who departed doltdom for something much finer.

Versatur Circa Quid!

A several thousand year history combined with the standard for being a Shadowghost set not much higher than that for the Footfallfollower has resulted in a staggering amount of their kind. Any realm that hosts Shadowghosts has a supernumerary population of the Spirit because there are so terribly many of them. In the dolt idiom supernumerary means “a needless shitload.” Think of the situation in your pubs and ale houses in which males outnumber females ten to one, yet each fellow has drunk himself into an unsteady optimism, and you have something similar to the Shadowghost problem, which upon further reflection, is awfully similar to the dolt infestation.

Versatur Circa Quid!

To locate a Shadowghost requires a wall. Any small shadow (usually an orb) that passes on the wall without cause is likely a Shadowghost. The Spirit is highly territorial and will not share a wall with another Shadowghost, which is somewhat idiotic because multiple moving shadows would have a greater haunt value. This is where, my learned self believes, their meekness comes in. Shadowghosts are notoriously shy and that does not mix with possessiveness. No Shadow would dare to intrude on another, yet they claim a peculiar fierce bravado.

Still, they are stubborn about their name. There have been movements to remove the “G-word” from Spirit titles. The Shadowghosts have been very Bartleby on this, constantly stating “We would rather not.” For many “ghost” more than infers an article inferior to the original, which, of course is a matter of interpretation. As far as I am concerned it matters not, yet I do prefer the wonderful Quillemender moniker over “Gallghost”–”gall” meant iron gall ink, which has fallen into the historical scrapyard. It was a clunky name that failed to capture the majesty of my Spirit class.

Versatur Circa Quid!

If you locate a Shadowghost there is nothing to fear–in fact the tired axiom about him being more afraid of you holds truth. Still, it is kind to feign fright and avoid the room as much as possible. It gives them hope.

Until next week, dolts…

VCQ!

The Immortal Judge