I Could Finish My Homework, Or I Could Think About Whales, God

I was at my cousin’s wedding, which was lovely, and the service was lead by a monsignor, a guy above bishops. He was conversational and Herman Melville turned up in his sermon. I’d just read In The Heart of The Sea, a book based on the boat-staving sperm whale who inspired Meville’s Moby Dick, so I thought yes, Melville, you’ve got me, Father. Now what about the novelist?

Mostly what I’m thinking about is that it would be hard to write so many sermons.

At this wedding in LA, my friend Danichi wedding, which was also beautiful, but the priest, a young guy, not catholic, so I guess he would not be a priest, he talked about Kierkegaard. And quoted him. In his service before the vows. Very bad. So many hip philosophers to choose from when speaking about love. Why that one.

I’ll admit that I was dehydrated at this time from a late night. And I also had food poisoning from a vegan restaurant in Silver Lake that Munchie chose for us to eat at for brunch. And the day before, in a bathroom of a San Francisco Starbucks (serves me right) my glasses fell into the urinal while I was peeing, and suddenly I was peeing all over my glasses, and urinal water, my glasses sat in urinal water. And I kid you not, I had fleas. Or maybe bedbugs, from the Fisherman’s Wharf Hostel. I wrapped my clothes in trash bags and dumped those bags in a public trash can.

So, bitten, blind, nauseous, and headached, and very, very ashamed, I can’t remember the quote, but the important thing to know is this—that Kierkegaard was a miserable creature who hounded his intended fiancée, and after begging her for marriage, he backed out of the deal so that he could, I don't know, be, what, severe and anxious? Which is his right. But really, what I’m wondering is, what a brave and worldly, or not even worldly but practical monsignor to use the skeptic Herman Melville, and what a poor move to use that emo Dane.

What was the Melville quote? I thought I’d never find it. I knew I wanted to look it up but I thought, nope, that thing is gone. Turns out it’s everywhere:

“We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.”  

The context was, it’s OK not to be a good Catholic, and get this, the guy actually said it, it’s OK not even to be Catholic, just so long as you are decent to people. I wanted to cry if that were the kind of thing I could do. I’d been waiting to hear that for years. This is the closest I’d come to God in decades. How can he say such good things? Probably this guy is an atheist who knows he has a fun job, I thought.

But to the literature point, it sounds like Melville—“A thousand fibers… among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes” a third of Moby Dick is just wild flashes of rhetoric and cadence. Can you read scansion? I bet that line has some meter. 

But then I read this blog, melvilliana.blogspot.com, and they found that above quote in a sermon by Henry Melville (no relation?) a British preacher, 1855. Herman the Novelist was alive then, had just finished his whale book a few years prior. How about that. And what does it all mean, and etc. 

I don’t like Moby Dick as much as I used to. So many encyclopedia chapters where the author tries to prove to you that he’s smart and knows his shit. All this is because critics made fun of his early books—Omoo, Typee, Mardi, Red Burn, White Jacket—said that he made it all up, and knew nothing of Fiji and these other, to New England, uncivilized communities where people were always doing it and having a good guilt free time. Although he published these books as novels, I’m not sure what genre expectations were at the time, but they came off as too outrageous for most.

So I’ve just been skipping those encyclopedic I-will-prove-it! chapters. I write “Herman, no!” under those chapter titles. Why I still read it, aside from my love for setting and novels set in small spaces is how Ishmael, although he does not really believe, still challenges himself to. Either because he is lonely, worried, or because (not or, but and) he realizes that there is some value in the practice of belief. Or that haters are often coming from a place of wanting to believe.

Now, I am not that person, but I do like reading a book about that person. And I also like that London preacher Henry Melville’s quotation got misattributed to a spiritual mess of a guy like Herman Melville, whose now classic novel was almost unanimously hated in his lifetime and earned him no money in large part to his narrator’s endless knocks against his Protestant countrymen and his embrace of taking transcendence where he could get it.

Winston, Lorca, Roofdog, the Radio

Lorca is our dog and she never barks. There are dogs up and down this street. Chihuahuas, packs of unneutered Pit bulls, a few mutts, some smaller dogs with white hair, and an enormous German Shepherd. There’s a poodle, too. The size of a shepherd, but hopelessly stupid looking. Curly black hair, his name is Winston.

If I walk up our apartment’s back steps and that dog is in the yard, it will bark at me. He sights me from two houses down. I want to throw a rock at Winston, but yeah, I know, that would be cruel, it’s just a dog. If it were up to Winston, that wouldn't be his yard, his life, he wouldn’t even have that name.

My downstairs neighbor, a guy, barks back at the dog, too. Which is a little weird, I thought, but only a little; he and I are of the same mind, that dog sucks. I look at Winston and say mean things in too many words. “That dog has a bad attitude” I say. “Winston, shut the fuck up, you are juvenile.” Then I pet Lorca, who never barks, and I say, “I’m sure glad you're a normal dog.” But she is not normal, that’s why we gave her the name of a dead poet from Andalusia; she’s strange, she doesn’t really play that often, tries to flee from us at speeds of up to 34mph if she’s off the leash, has really odd habits. But Lorca is silent and kind, and for this I love her.

Though I can take no credit. Lorca came to us that way, stoic. Winston barks and barks. “Winston, shut up, you are terrible,” I say. And then Winston’s owner, who I did not know was in her yard, says, “Winston, please,” and I cringed because I didn’t know she was there. She just has this dog, who sucks in public, and maybe he is very nice when they are alone, and my dog is splendid all the time, and I have done nothing to earn that. I love my dog.

One more dog. Roofdog lives on top of a church. I’m not sure what denomination of Christianity, maybe Catholic, but their enthusiasm makes me think otherwise. But the roof of this building, where Roofdog lives, is flat, black, and probably only comfortable for the last two weeks of September and the first two of October.

Brianna and I were driving through rural Wisconsin on Friday, and a conservative man on the AM radio was talking about how American liberals love to condemn Christians for crimes real, imagined, and ancient, but they will never say a mean word about a Muslim, even after a man of such and such Islamic background is in the news. He was reporting from Berkeley, CA. You know Berkeley, where the acid is still in the water and old punks and older hippies and expensive colleges live? Anyway, the usual is said. Scandalous statements on both sides. We listen to the radio and I reach the immature conclusion, as usual, that religious fervor of all kind is bad business for the general populace. Probably I’m wrong and I don’t care exactly your opinion this, really, I’m just showing you the timeline of my thought process. Radio, politics, religion, injustice, Roofdog.

Roofdog, who howls at everything below him, which I hate, but who I instantly forgive because, really, what else can he do? His owner locks him on a roof all day, and his life is hell.

Roofdog, you live in a city on a hill and we can all see you barking at us. I bet you are hungry and thirsty and in need of love.

Who is so cruel that they keep you exposed to the elements all day, no tree to hide under, etc?

It is known that the kingdom of heaven is not for dogs, and yet your owner rubs your face in this. Cruel. Sometimes I’ll think, I’ll write a letter or call animal control on those jags who lock their dog out on days hot and rainy. Then I think, how about you volunteer for something useful to your fellow Chicagoan instead, you lazy ass? Or maybe even write in your journal instead of reading your Twitterfeed and the headlines. Pay the blessed electric bill instead of drawing on it.

And that is my letter for today, which is Sunday.

Moonflowers, which are one the porch; and Stout, which you can walk across

Moonflowers grow on my balcony. A flower puffs at night and blooms by morning and dies by the night that follows. If I check on the flowers now I know that they will not be as strong as they were at 9am when Brianna woke up to get the check engine light observed by Jiffylube on Diversey and Elston. “Five moonflower blooms is your new record," she said.

Now they wilt in the breeze. If I were on the porch I would see flies and bumblebees entering and exiting the flowers all afternoon. Bumblebees have our porch on their flight path. They rise through a handrail, disappear behind some petals and fly north east. How long have they been flying that way?

But before I say anything else, I have too share something disgusting. This is what Brianna told me yesterday: there is a rabbit at the zoo who had a sore. (It is already disgusting.) And after days, the sore would not get worse but would not heal either. When they took the rabbit to the zoo vet to get some health, the vet cut open the sore, to let it weep or what have you, and a fly, a Bot Fly (which looks like a winged bear with a heap of trash for a face) hopped out and flew away.

Now all of those mammals get a Bot Fly vaccination.

When I hear about horrors like the Bot Fly I wonder, and so many of my thoughts lead this way so that it almost does not matter, about the existence of a higher power. Is the Bot Fly an argument for the existence of God, who is a terror and a trap-setter, or is it a note that the world is a maze with a mouth at the center waiting to eat you?* These are the big and useless questions of the day. What to do, what to do.

At a library in Seattle I almost bought a postcard with a quote from Cicero, a Greek who I know more as a street name than as a philosopher. The quote said: “If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.” Instead of making a purchase, I copied that maxim into my notebook from where I sat.

            Tonight I might make a coffee/stout drink and try to finish Eminent Victorians, which is said to be the first book of profiles (think New Yorker profiles, but older). I got lost in a profile of Cardinal Manning b/c of the minutia separating the Church of England from Catholicism, but reading about Florence Nightingale should be easier.

Anyway, It’s hard for me to read about England b/c English writers of old always thought their island and their splintery politics were important, but they weren’t.

Much better to read the Irish, who take walks in the rain and know that not caring outcharms statues and cathedrals, which takes us back to stout beer, which you cannot see through but can walk across; and moonflowers, which die every night and bloom every morning.

*A botched Simone Weil quote. She’s intriguing but reading her is like digging t through bedrock. Here is a quotation I enjoyed from Waiting for God, though getting to it was difficult:

“The beauty of the world is the mouth of a labyrinth. The unwary individual who on entering takes a few steps is soon unable to find the opening. Worn out, with nothing to eat or drink, in the dark, separated from his dear ones, and from everything he loves and is accustomed to, he walks on without knowing anything or hoping anything, incapable even of discovering whether he is really going forward or merly turning round on the same spot. But this affliction is as nothing compared with the danger threatening him. For if he does not lose courage, if he goes on walking, it is absolutely certain that he will finally arrive at the center of the labyrinth. And there God is waiting to eat him.”

I am 30 yrs old and sometimes I sleep with the light on

I have a friend who cringes when the car rides over bridges and through tunnels. And at home, he watches videos of roller coaster videos on Youtube. Does he watch them full-screened with the lights off? Does he scream? I forget.

I was writing this on a plane. When I felt turbulence, my first instinct was to hit “save.”

Today is Sunday. On Friday I read a peer’s piece about how that peer hears a voice in his head speaking at all hours. Or sort of, the heard voice is an expression of remembering the person.

A couple of readers in my writer's group speculated. 

“That’s nothing,” said another peer. “I hear voices, like, every day. So many. Even right now. So it’s, you know, it’s not strange.”

On Friday night I sat in bed and considered the phrase hearing voices.

Hearing voices, to what extent? Spoken like they feel so real that a microphone could catch them, or just as a watermark memory of the original?

Maybe it was past midnight, and I know my head was already swirling from a few glasses of beer, but I listened to see if I could hear the voices of the day. I could. Then I tried to hear my grandparents. I smiled to know I could hear them, too. But this gleaning was more feeling the voice than hearing. And if it were hearing, it was only hearing like how one perceives a baseball game on the radio a room or two away—is it still playing?

So I clicked off my lamp and went to bed.

Maybe I was asleep for five minutes. There wasn’t any drool on the pillow and I'm sorry, but I drool a lot. I woke up to a loud whisper.

“You’re welcome.”

I sat up and hissed and I bunched myself up in the sheets. “No, no no,” I said. I wrapped the sheet around myself like a hood and slipped off the bed. I turned the lamp back on and I opened the windows.

There was nothing under the bed. I looked in the closet, too. Then I closed the closet door until I felt the lock click.

Surely I woke myself up, I thought. I must’ve been talking in my sleep. I need to sleep with my mouth closed. And other things, too.

A Feelings Dump Written After Reading 30 pages of Walker Percy, Thinking of Eileen Myles, and having one beer, am I a lightweight now? Possibly, or Shellshag excites me so

I think shellshag are a great band, like this thing that has been happening in the other room that is close to you but you will not open the door to intrerrupt that activity out of respect for it. When I first heard them play “fuck society / fuck sobriety” a cover song, at this theater for a food not bombs fest, I thought it was incredible. Why. I don't know. they watched each other while playing, snarling is the word, but its not mine, it's the word you'd use in a music zine to describe them. Look online, you can’t find a copy of “fuck society” anywhere, but once I got it in the mail for donating to razorcake, where I write reviews, but which frankly is a bearded dude show magazine to maximum’s raging radical show magazine, musically and mindfully I guess I’d like to be with maximum but I’m at razorcake, ho-hum, we pass the lesson, onto the song—It was fall when I saw shellshag and I biked there on my blue Schwinn letour, upon which I resemble a prince, especially if I am 23 and wearing my white helmet. I went by myself, leaving May Linn with her mom and her mom’s friend to hang out in the front room chatting after dinner, having pie. Her mom’s friend went to brother rice, a really nice guy from the southside, a nice guy for all of those factors is what I’m saying, he balanced being nice with knowing how to fix things, qualities which, when joined, amaze me most of all other parts of being a person, like you have these qualities that are of value to the world and see nothing to do with them but help and lounge and not charge people by money or otherwise. I left them because I wanted to see the arrivals. I love the arrivals. Why. I just do. At the theater, maybe the portage park one or maybe another, I saw a friend who I always meant to hang out with more, she was wearing a sweatshirt like my mom wears without the collar, says usa on it, a kohl’s purchase for sure, she waved and I waved and I thought, whoa, Oh my God, it is so good to see smiling almost-friends, these platonic hi and hellos feel so good to me that I can only express them on the fly, they don’t need to be analyzed or explained, so much better than flirting which is almost always bad and weird, but we waved and I was still relieved to not have to talk, so then I went inside—did I drink a beer? I always felt like I needed to drink a beer to have fun at those events, you have to hold something anyway, I must’ve had a beer, but I was cautious too because it was a Sunday night and I was teaching everything for the first time then, careful with my lesson plans and notes for class (the short story unit, I’m guessing), maybe I had two beers, what I wanted was something to eat, but the burger king was closed pardoning the drive thru and they don’t serve cyclists. I saw shellshag, watched them play that song, which was beautiful in circumstance though I know I cant explain it to you I just have to say it—“it’s beautiful,” etcetera, and then the arrivals played songs from Cocktail Molotov along some songs that were almost as old as me, and then, what? I biked home, back to Cordelia street or Cornelia street, one of the daughters from King Lear, the hangout session was over, maybe I leaned in May Linn’s doorway and explained things to her, asked how the night went, went to sleep myself and woke up to smelling trees in the courtyard, and that’s what I miss most right now, not shellshag’s great song, which is a cover anyway (I’m really coming around to covers and the thing of the performer, just this musician who has like five great songs or good ones, and the rest are not theirs at all, I think that's great and the opposite of pathetic, which, whatever, other thoughts) but the smell of the courtyard, that’s what I could go for now, greenery, with the window open, greenery with the window open and I wouldn't complain about the smokers and their cigarette butts mixing with the leaves. Jesus Christ can it be spring already?