Tuesday, April 29, 2008 :::
 

QL

The Quadratus Lumborum -- universally pronounced Kyoo-Ell -- runs from the back hip-bone to the bottom rib, on both sides, with connecting service to the sideways prongs of the lumbar vertebrae. Anglo-Saxons injure it a lot, because we generally hold our hips stiffly in line with our chests, and never give the poor QL a chance to completely contract or to really stretch. Belly-dancing would be impossible without the QL, as would climbing a ladder: any activity that hitches up one side of the pelvis up closer to the ribs requires that this muscle contract on the hitching side, and stretch on the other side.

Back when I used to "throw my back out" periodically -- before I learned the back exercises (really unattributed yoga, I learned later) that made those incredibly painful, disabling bouts a thing of the past -- it was the QL that I injured. So when I learned about it in massage school I was anxious to work with it.

But it was disappointing, at first. It was hard even to find it, especially on someone fleshy (like me). It's a back muscle, but it's mostly on the other side of the muscles, which at this point are pretty thick and powerful, right alongside the spine. If you try to get into it by pushing hard on the paraspinals, not much happens, because the paraspinals (being a cluster of mostly short-stranded muscles) hit their stretch limit before the QL's even started; and you can't squeeze it against anything, because there's nothing on the other side but intestines.

Well, that's one trouble with learning out of picture books: if you think of the muscle as a back muscle, then you only try to work it while someone's prone. You're stuck in two dimensions. There are a couple good ways to work the QL, but neither are from the back. Sidelying, you can bring the bottom thigh up (headwards) and nearly-straighten the top leg out to get a bit of a sideways stretch (you may need to tuck a towel or cushion under the side to make this work). then you can reach to the forward edge of the paraspinals and press nearly straight down: you've got the QL pinned against the spine, and you can really work it. Or -- this is my favorite -- with someone supine, you can reach underneath on both sides, and make fists of your hands, and simply roll their body back and forth over your fists. You can catch the edge of the QL with your thumb-knuckles and really stretch it. Their body weight does all the work. The intestines are free to get out of the way: they have all the room in the world. Most people are really grateful to get this kind of stretch -- similar to a toe-touching stretch, as far as the back muscles go, but a safe one. (I wince when I see people doing toe-touches, with a hundred pounds of torso or so pushing down on a three-foot lever; I'm always relieved when I see them come back up uninjured.) When you've done a number on the QL, you can finish off with a nice stretch -- with the person you're working with still prone -- by picking up both feet and pulling the whole lower half of the body, legs, pelvis, and all, to one side and then the other.

As Pamela Sundin-Hart, one of my favorite teachers at East-West, always insisted, "any muscle that attaches to the ribs is a breathing muscle." The QL has a crucial role in keeping the ribs stable so that when the diaphragm pulls, the rib cage doesn't simply fold in and follow it. When the QL is knotted up we favor it by breathing shallowly. Shallow breathing means less oxygen, and less oxygen means less energy: a jacked up QL will make you tired, and not just because you're in pain.

Labels: Massage, Trigger Point

posted by Dale at 9:45 AM
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Monday, April 28, 2008 :::
 

A Sleep and a Forgetting

I went to KCC last night. It was full of young people. In the kitchen at tea-break it was actually uncomfortably loud: Reyna and I had to scoot out to the living room.

It was nice to see them all there. Though I'm puzzled, as always, when young people come to the Dharma. How do they know, yet, that the world isn't going to make them happy? It makes so many promises. It's so beautiful, and so plausible. And it's so good at convincing us that our unhappiness is our own fault. If only I were twenty pounds lighter -- if only I weren't diffident -- if only I had enough resolution -- if only I did yoga every day -- if only I meditated every day -- if only I ran every day practiced the guitar every day went to the gym every day studied Italian every day read more demanding books learned to appreciate opera and Noh drama and Renaissance painting and memorized poetry and got out into the wilderness made more time for friends and understood quantum mechanics and stopped pressuring myself to do more things -- ah, then I would be happy.

They must be far cleverer than I, to have begun to have a suspicion, so early, that the whole project is untenable, that it guarantees its own failure. It's made all the more confusing by the co-option (by no means a Western innovation) of spiritual practices into schemes for worldly happiness. Yoga and meditation, after all, *are* methods for attaining a kind of happiness that I genuinely do believe in. So is appreciating Renaissance painting, for that matter. But you have to get the right end of the stick.

What makes the difference? Surrender, I think. It's precisely the bit of religion that I habitually think I can skip, that I characterize as Medieval or superstitious or authoritarian. The bit about giving up: about saying "I can't do this," about offering myself to be done with as somebody else, or something else, wills. "I'll do everything but that," I say, and then I wonder why it doesn't seem to work. It doesn't work, because it's like saying, "I'll do everything it takes to learn to swim, except get in the water."

What I learn, from surrender, is that it's not what it looked like, from the outside. I learn that my self-will, far from being my freedom, is actually the hag that's been riding me all these years. It's not my inmost self. It's a parasite, a tapeworm of the mind. It no more has my good at heart than a deer-tick does: it's simply feeding on me.

And then, of course, I forget. And I have to do it all again.

I was refraining from doing my three prostrations before the shrine last night, lest it should put Reyna off. So I simply scooted up to the umze's spot and got the liturgy out to bring back to her. When I turned around I saw that a couple of these young kids were doing their prostrations, and by the time I got back, Reyna was in the middle of doing them too, and looking radiantly happy. She took to it all like a duck to water.

In some embarrassment -- feeling myself an awkward, untutored oaf -- I began to do my prostrations too. But when my forehead touched the floor the embarrassment vanished. Once, twice, three times. Not what I conceive you to be, Lord, but what you are. The body has more honesty in it than the mind.

Labels: Dharma, Portland

posted by Dale at 12:08 PM
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Sunday, April 27, 2008 :::
 

Half Moon

for Beth

I pulled the curtain aside: the half moon was rising
through a blur of white clouds like the frayed cross-straps
of a foundering lawn chair.
At such times the soul holds lightly to the body,
snubs itself against frail anchors, longs to go with the wind,
over the ruffled harbor, out to sea.

You may hold the rib cage in both hands and lift
and turn it; letting loose as it fills on the inbreath,
bearing down again on the outbreath; the soul
rests in its body then like an egg in the nest,
like a ball in the hand of a juggler, like an apple
passed to the reach of a child in the back seat of a car.

I pause on the stairs, holding back the curtain,
half, like the moon; surrounded by the clustered
questioning dead, not ready, maybe, to make that journey,
but free to go.

Labels: Poems

posted by Dale at 11:49 AM
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Saturday, April 26, 2008 :::
 

Why William Morris Would have Loved Portland

Well, lots of reasons. But here's just two:

Tile & ceramics: The Art of Daily Life. Beautiful, and sometimes droll. I covet some of these pieces.

Knitting as art and community: Stitchmarker.

I love these deliberate and humane refusals of the boundary between art and craft, beauty and use. And they're very, very Portland.

Labels: Portland

posted by Dale at 8:29 PM
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Saturday Morning

Morning. I've done a lot of massage this week, and my forearms and quads are tired. (Why quads? Because I do a lot of my massage kneeling: good for the back, because I don't bend over much, but involving a lot of standing up and getting back down on my knees.) Another massage at eleven. I'm in Tosi's, on an incredibly beautiful morning, a bit sweaty from my bike ride. Deeply happy. I'm beginning to believe that this massage gig is actually going to work out.

If I'm having a difficult day at work -- which doesn't happen often, at the Foundation, but happens sometimes, of course -- I remember I have a massage scheduled that night, and a wave of gladness and gratitude washes over me, and -- everything's okay. It still seems a deal too good to be true, that people are willing to pay me to do something I love doing so much, that people are willing to trust me.

It's the culmination of that realization, some five years ago, that I was assiduously building my own isolation. Once I could see it, I could start unbuilding it.

(And now, incidentally, I have to get back to practicing, because I can feel the beginnings of a backwards slippage. Faint, but unmistakeable. I'm not going back to that.)

And now a clean blue sky, a bright morning, a cup of glorious diner coffee, the light spilling in through the north windows and making it seem that I've stepped over the frame into a painting of a Greek diner by Vermeer. And maybe Reyna will show up, who knows?

Labels: Massage, Portland

posted by Dale at 7:51 PM
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Friday, April 25, 2008 :::
 

Two Short Poems

---

The crows tell us the truth all day
feather for feather, caw by caw;
but they don't care
if we listen.

---

New leaves and the taste of you
and the sticky buds of the alders;
in Spring
we lick our fingers.

---

Labels: Poems

posted by Dale at 8:44 AM
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Thursday, April 24, 2008 :::
 

Pictures

I have the pictures!



Some more stashed on flikr. Now I really have to take my blog-pretending-to-be-a-website and make it into something real.

Labels: Massage, Portland

posted by Dale at 6:51 AM
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This Time of Year

I love the evening massages at this time of year, the quiet ebbing of the light, crossing from day to night; skin talking to skin, tuned to the rhythms of another body, losing the fret of my own life because, for once, it's not my life I'm attending to. I'm the outrider of sleep, a servant of rest. I love the fact that I'm intimately connected and yet -- not a person at all, not someone who has to be entertained or impressed. I'm just a pair of hands that light and warmth come through. Massage sidesteps all that I find most tedious in dealing with people: the anxiety and positioning, the endless production of words and opinions and judgements. All that just goes away, and I can do the only thing I ever wanted to do, which is love people.

Labels: Massage

posted by Dale at 5:37 AM
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Wednesday, April 23, 2008 :::
 

Profile

I am two hands carrying warmth:
I am nothing else. I bring the evening,
the illuminations of sleep; I am
the outrider of dreams.

I am an emanation of the Moon,
of the light that remains
when gaudy drunken daytime
Bangs the light switch. Lurches away.

Then the eyes adjust,
and the wide healing dark flows back into the room
and the shadow light of the new moon
comes where it is invited, leaves dark

what wants to be dark. My hands rise and fall
with your sternum and your belly, breathing
in time with your heart, following the blood
where it leaps to the surface and dives,

where it comes to the turning point
at the finger-ends and the toe-ends,
the tidemark. Respiration. The whole body
breathes, not just the lungs.

I am the light of darkness,
the breath of the blood;
I am what is left when the worrying stops,
when the wanting drains away.

Labels: Massage, Poems

posted by Dale at 9:38 AM
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Saturday, April 19, 2008 :::
 

Still Winter

Penetrating cold: we seem too weak to be able to shake off winter. The confusion settles behind my shoulders, in for the long haul.

I hear someone singing, very faintly, far away.

It's one of those strange bardos, a roll-up time. A market adjustment. Things slip, a little. The cargo shifts.

It was still light when I started my massage last night, and the skin as I rubbed in the oil gleamed like wet, dark chocolate. Such a beautiful color. English is still poor in vocabulary for such skin. "Black" and "jet" and "ebony" are simply wrong, not red enough; "brown" is hopelessly vague. "Chestnut" is too light. "Chocolate" comes closest, and conveys some of the richness and delight, but it has no dignity. What we want is the black equivalent of "alabaster." We don't have it, yet. There's a sort of reddish obsidian that has that glow and depth, but when you say "obsidian" people think "jet."

Night fell. She slept, and woke, and slept.

I don't know why people apologize for sleeping. It's rude to fall asleep in the middle of a spoken conversation, but massage doesn't work that way. The conversation goes on, awake or asleep.

I walked slowly, this morning, daunted by the cold and gloom. I seldom understand why people don't like the weather to be cold and dark, but this morning I did. I usually like the cold and the dark because I can feel the torch of my body burning so strongly against it. This morning the flame was feeble and uncertain. I felt I could gutter in the cold, be lost in the dark.

Our German exchange student seems to want to have nothing to do with us: he spends all his time at the host-house of another, pretty and female, exchange student. I daresay we are rather dull. He decisively nixed the idea of going over the mountains to the Warm Springs Reservation. We're a bit baffled by him, and I think he's a bit baffled by us. But anyway, it's only another week. And he liked the Nike outlet store.

Labels: Massage, Portland

posted by Dale at 11:11 AM
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Friday, April 18, 2008 :::
 

Vanity Fair

I read you Vanity Fair until you fell asleep;
The tears still wet on your face; the dread
Of being old and helpless overwhelming you
And I thought of you meeting Rawdon and Becky
On those dusky roads beyond the pillow slip
And how we are all striving and failing
To avoid the collapse; of our horror of the day
To come when our market value
Dips under zero and stays there.

I used to think I was special, you said, and I know;
I used to think I was special too. But no one is special.
If we are loved it is not because we are special, but
Because we are ordinary, because we live
In time and of it, because of shared defeats
And shames too deep for anyone else to know.
You can watch people trying to be special, so special
That everyone must love them and no one ever stop,
And see the news of how it works out
In the tabloids displayed at the checkout line.

Dear love, we are not special and we never were.
Others are smarter, prettier, braver
Than we have ever been or will be; and if
We try to be special we will only break our hearts.
Let us be the most ordinary of people,
Let us triumph over having something to eat today
And having a hot water heater that works
Most of the time, and in having someone
To read us to sleep when the grief runs high.

Labels: Dharma, Poems

posted by Dale at 9:43 AM
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Thursday, April 17, 2008 :::
 

Death and his Brother

"I know that death is the final event," said Dick. I wonder what it's like to know that? I can't imagine what knowing that is like, any more. I used to know that -- but back when I used to know it, I didn't ever really think about dying. Not my own death, concretely, I mean.

Not that I'm certain it's not the final event. I even incline, cautiously, to thinking it probably is. But I wonder what it's like to live in a world with such hard edges. Mine is so blurry. I can walk with my own death down to the end -- not being able to clean myself, having people intubate and catheterize me so as to make sure I die more slowly, the edema and the muscle aches, the fluid filling the lungs, the person next to me running the goddamn television so that my last moments on earth will be spent with Oprah or Jerry Springer. I can see all those things vividly. And of course I can imagine death as the end, in a childish kind of way, by imagining silence and blackness and a sense of vertigo. But that's as ridiculous, as a representation of death, as the old man sitting in the clouds is as a representation of God. A final-event death, no experience at all, would be nothing like the experiences of blackness or silence or vertigo.

I can picture death as an awakening -- a slightly more sophisticated picture. Coming to realize that everything I took to be so real was not actually real at all, at least not as I thought it was. Awakening is something we nearly all experience nearly every day; it's a familiar enough experience, though I'm not sure how many people understand its implications. You'd think that having the daily experience of finding that your understanding of reality was, in fact completely bogus, would lead you to think that such turns were in general possible, or even likely, but it doesn't seem to have that effect on most people. The fact that dream experience, which seems real at the time, turns out not to be real, doesn't seem to engender, in most people, a similar suspicion of waking life. I don't know why not. It does in me. I have no confidence at all that I'm not in for a similar turn, at death; I'm not even sure that the waking confidence that dreams have a lesser reality is justified. Who knows where all I go, at night? The fragmentary bits of confused memory I have of it at waking are surely just a tiny fraction of all that I experience. Who do I know, in those other countries? What do they say to me? What pledges have I made to them, and when will I be called upon to fulfill them?

Well. Those are the silly sorts of things I wonder about. The specifics, at any rate are silly; but I don't think it's silly to doubt that the stories my mind makes up out of the pictures my senses present to it during its waking hours correspond very closely to reality. At times, I sure, they don't correspond at all.

As for my imagination of what will happen to the subjective consciousness at death -- something I've never (to my knowledge) experienced before -- well, my confidence in the accuracy of that rests near zero.

Labels: Dharma

posted by Dale at 3:44 AM
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Wednesday, April 16, 2008 :::
 

The Poem in my Pocket

It's my birth week and I will remind everyone to carry a poem in their pocket this Thursday, and think me a good birthday thought, wrote Deb

It takes some twenty minutes for the forest

To forget you are there. You don't have to hide.
Sit very still: meditate, or dream, and it begins to open
Little shivers and sways; a rustle as
The new red twigs bend sharply under
Hardly any weight.

That part's easy. The hard part is keeping still
As the forest begins to unfold.
You must not turn to look. Everything
That ought to show itself will show itself
In good time.

It's easy to think that the forest is hiding
Because it does not know you.
If only it were true: the forest knows you better
Than you know yourself. It knows how thin
The thread that keeps your silence.

The longer you are quiet the more you realize
How right the forest is. At the first splash of color
You turn your head; a whir of wings
Cocks your predator's head; your jaws
Open ready to snap.

Quieter than that. Stiller than that
And even stiller to write a birthday poem.
You must wait even longer, trust
That what matters will come of its own accord
Into your field of vision.

If your heart is bursting with extravagances
And declarations then it's simply time to wait.
Those who look do not see;
Those who listen do not hear.
The simple tune

Begins softly in the branches above
Happy birthday to you, in a sleepy murmur
Happy birthday to you, from the thicket close by
Happy birthday dear Deb,
Happy birthday to you.

But even now you must be very quiet
Till the last shadows of the song have
Faltered away over the leafbed, and only rise
When your own quotidian business
Calls you away.

Labels: Poems

posted by Dale at 8:59 AM
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Tuesday, April 15, 2008 :::
 

desiree

the dogs
are enormous

the biggest lollops up onto the bed
taking up most of it
to keep a bit of an eye on me
from the tie-dye coverlet
but mostly
he naps

my fingers find their way
through the dreads
to the soft shell
of muscle
above the ears

o how i love you
desiree

you were nervous, you said
and i tried to put you at ease but
you know
i'm no good at that until
the laying on of hands

astonished again
at love that wants nothing
that rises
from somewhere else
that uses my hands
and leaves me
inexplicably
content

i who am always wanting
always needing
wanting and needing nothing.

then you curl up on the sofa
like a child
i feel so good
you say

and of course i do not say
how much i love you desiree

because we have no language
in which to say that
without saying also
belong to me
so i say i'm so glad
and join my hands
namaste

and then i let
the slightly less
enormous dog
win our tug of war
for a soggy toy
and i leave
having loved perfectly
and wanting nothing

o how i love you
desiree

Labels: Massage, Poems

posted by Dale at 9:00 AM
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Monday, April 14, 2008 :::
 

The Lord of the Trigger Points

Forgive me, Tolkien fans, but I find it a useful mnemonic.

Two Points in the upper traps, where temple pain is made,
Two in the levator scap causing stiffness of the neck,
Two in the SCM whence frontal headaches trade,
One in the lower traps, starting all the wreck,
In between the low thoracics and the shoulder blade.
One Point to start them all, one Point to goad them;
One Point to aggravate and stir them up and hold them,
In between the low thoracics and the shoulder blade.

Labels: Massage, Poems, Trigger Point

posted by Dale at 9:28 AM
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Sunday, April 13, 2008 :::
 

An Ape that can write Poems

The King read these lines with wonder and delight and said to his Eunuch, "O Mukbil, go to thy mistress, Sitt al-Husn, and say her, 'Come, speak the King who biddeth thee hither to take thy solace in seeing this right wondrous ape!'" So the Eunuch went out and presently returned with the lady who, when she saw me, veiled her face and said, "O my father! Hast thou lost all sense of honour? How cometh it thou art pleased to send for me and show me to strange men?"

--The Second Kalandar's Tale


I

The pomegranate broke upon the floor
And grains ran over the marble;
You tried to peck them all up,
But missed the one with the Jinn's soul.
You begged your father and the ape
To seek the last grain, but in bird form
You had no words. They did not understand.


II

Love is a disaster: even
The Arabian Nights know that.
Where others saw
A marvelous enditing ape
You saw an ensorceled prince
And for love of him
You began a fight beyond your powers.


III

The Jinn rose in fire from the last grain
And struck and burned and burned and struck.
You brought him down in the end, but
You did not live the day. Your poet-ape may
Have turned back into a prince, but too late
For any happy ending. Farewell
The years of painfully acquired egromancy,
The study of the stars, the power
To shift shapes. All gone, all done
In a moment, to make an ape a man.


IV

It is only a story wrapped in a story
Wrapped in a story, after all. Shahrazad
Trying to keep her head. The next marvel
Will take shape before the mourning can begin.
But fathers take heed: no good can come
Of an ape that can write poems.

Labels: Arabian Nights, Poems

posted by Dale at 9:15 AM
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Friday, April 11, 2008 :::
 

Shoot

I am exhausted.

But I did it. Survived my photo shoot. The photographer was marvelous. I'm anxious to see the pictures.

For most of my life, I have hated having my picture taken. There are very few photos of me extant. But I thought my massage website, when it materializes, needed to have photos. So I bit the bullet, and started roaming the web, looking at Portland photographers' sites. I knew what I was looking for. Someone who could do natural light interiors. Someone who could do both portraits and photos of people at work. Someone who photographed what they saw, instead of what they wanted to see -- i.e. whose pictures of different people looked different. I hate the stock soft-porn spa massage photos, pretty girls in soft focus stroking other pretty girls in soft focus. I imagine they work, after their fashion, but it's not what I wanted to convey, and I don't imagine clients brought in by such pictures would be happy with what they got.

I wanted real hands on a real body. And I hoped for some sense of the connection I feel, when I'm listening to someone's body with my hands. A dear friend, and one of my first paying clients, agreed to model, bless her! -- so the connection was there. I hope the pictures turn out!

"Tuck your head, just little there," said Joni, when she was doing the head shots. "Makes you look approachable. No, not that much. That's like 'hey, babe.' Not what we want."

"Definitely not," I said, and we all laughed.

She paused. "You hate this, don't you?" she said, sympathetic, but amused.

"I've always hated having my picture taken," I said. "That's why I wanted you. I saw your photos and I thought, I could deal with that. I could have my picture taken by her."

It's not quite true to say I've always hated having my picture taken. It would have been true a couple years ago. But I know photographers, now, by way of the web. In New York, at the blogswarm last year, I actually liked having my picture taken, for the first time in my life. I trusted the photographers -- people I've known online, whose photos I've loved for a long time. I knew how they looked at things and at people. I was willing to have them look at me and show other people what they saw.

It's not really about wanting to look pretty, or not much. (Richard Burton, when he was having his portrait painted, implored the artist, "Don't make me look ugly, there's a good fellow.") Of course that plays. But it's much more than that. It's a psychological horror of being represented by people who don't understand me, a feeling that by the malign power of the camera I could be turned into what I'm misunderstood to be. "Horror" is really not too strong a word. The people who photographed me in New York have no idea the level of love and trust my permitting them to photograph me, even welcoming it, signified. If they saw ugliness or awkwardness, that was okay. It would be my ugliness and awkwardness, and I'm perfectly willing for the world to see that.

So. I was nervous. But I lived through it. And now I am very tired.

Labels: Massage, Portland

posted by Dale at 9:10 AM
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Thursday, April 10, 2008 :::
 

Against Prissy Translation

I'm reading Richard Burton's translation of the Thousand Nights and a Night (a.k.a. The Arabian Nights.) I've also read a very entertaining commentary: The Arabian Nights: A Companion, by Robert Irwin. This book greatly endeared itself to me by referring to Burton's "barmy erudition." Burton's notes are copious, learned, and eccentric in the extreme: he seizes any excuse to display his extensive, bizarre, and highly unscientific knowledge of foreign sexual habits; and tells us, for example, in far more detail than we want, exactly how various peoples go about blinding or castrating unfortunate superfluous heirs.

But Irwin also attacks Burton's translation, and I don't agree with him about that. The things he accuses Burton of doing, Burton does indeed do. He fetches up archaic English words with abandon (this possibly bothers me less than people who may have to look more of them up, but he has excellent judgement about what words to use: many of them should never have fallen out of usage -- hent, dight, etc.: marvelous pithy words that I'd be glad to see rescued from the linguistic attic.) He also translates the poetry as poetry -- not always as wonderful poetry, and, since I'm innocent of Arabic, I can't say whether that's accuracy or clumsiness. Irwin also takes Burton to task for preserving the "rhymed prose" of his original, and that's what I really want to talk about.

Rhymed prose is something I had never encountered before reading the Nights, and the effect is charming. When the pitch of the narrative is to rise -- for example, when we meet a particularly beautiful lady or particularly fearsome demon -- you'll find the final words of clauses rhyming. Irwin singles out this as a particularly "unattractive passage":

But in the stress and stowre I got sundry grievous wounds and sore; and since that time, I have passed on my back three days without tasting food or sleeping aught, so that my strength is down brought, and the world is become to me as naught.

Now certainly Burton has to work to make the rhymes; to use inversion, and to fetch in quaint words to do so. But why he should not even attempt to translate such an interesting and integral feature of his original as the rhyming prose is beyond me. Also beyond me is why he should not reproduce the archaic language in which the original is, I don't doubt, written. Again, I know no Arabic; but I know something of various oral and semi-oral storytelling traditions, and they all use archaic, quaint words. Why exactly a translation should not reproduce this part of the reading experience baffles me. The argument, if it were explicit, would l suppose be that "accurate" translation trumps "atmosphere," but I don't think that holds water for a moment. There's no way to really separate out the semantic charge of a word from its atmospheric charge -- and anyway, why would we want to do so? Why is conveying the one a legitimate task of translation, and the other not?

Someone who translated, say, Tolkien, without attempting to follow the changes into archaic language, would in my opinion seriously distort him. The fact that many modern people, particularly literary people, roundly dislike dropping into archaic language in order to signal a change in formality, and prefer the boundary between poetry and prose to be clear-cut, does not give the translator carte blanche to simply erase these features and replace them with something the audience likes better. The whole point of translation is to bring something strange and new to readers -- not to convince them that the whole world shares their provincial tastes.

And in this, Burton triumphs. The reader of his Nights enters a different world. And Burton was perfectly fitted for this task by his very defects: he's juvenile in just the same way the composers and audience of his book were juvenile. He loves the bizarre and sensational. His racism and sexism echoes theirs. He is attuned to them. Reading his Nights is not always a pleasant experience, but it is always an illuminating one.

Labels: Arabian Nights

posted by Dale at 11:58 AM
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Tuesday, April 08, 2008 :::
 

Volition

Once upon a time, under the influence of George Orwell and his ilk, I learned contempt for the passive voice. Orwell, like most political activists, perceived a world of free agents. Evil was caused by wicked greedy people doing bad things. Good was caused by decent selfless people doing altruistic things. Thus reality was accurately described by sentences in the active voice; and only those seeking to conceal their agency would avoid it.

The active voice does make for forceful, vivid writing. But I no longer think it corresponds very well to reality. The fiction of independent agents is good for storytelling. But not for understanding what really happens.

"It's raining," we say. What is raining? What is this "it" which decides to rain? Well, we're told, it's just a way of expressing something our language is not well-suited to describe. "It" is a convenient fiction.

But really this "it" isn't a special case. All active sentences employ, and propagate, the same fiction. "I sat down to meditate," I say. The "I" posited by this sentence is no more real than the "it" that rains. I could have done something different, people will say. Could I have? How do you know?

People who study the brain were pleased, at one point, to be able to identify the part of the brain that makes executive decisions. The only trouble was that they found, upon testing, that this part of the brain became active after the motor control centers, not before. In other words, you reach for a glass of water first, and then you decide to do it.

This will surprise most people, but not many people who meditate. We do first, and then we make up the story that explains the action. Volition itself is not conscious: what's conscious is the subsequent narrative.

Now that is a drastic oversimplification. I readily admit that: but I require of those who claim to make conscious decisions that they admit the same thing. What really happens when people act is at least as much like the concealed, diffuse formation of water droplets in a cooling cloud as it is like the drama of titanic free agents that our language insists upon.

Labels: Dharma

posted by Dale at 11:45 AM
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Monday, April 07, 2008 :::
 

Untitled

I love clumsy women

who trip on the curb
because they are listening to you

who drop asparagus
on their blouses

who blush and mutter
butterfingers

as another pen falls
to the floor

who can't find things
in their purses

who kiss
with all their hearts

Labels: Poems

posted by Dale at 1:31 PM
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Sunday, April 06, 2008 :::
 

Not True Any More

It's a true story, about the monk who shared
his forest hut with a venemous cobra;
and the point of the story is not that he was brave
or foolish; the point is that he had
such confidence in his equanimity
that he trusted himself not to startle her.

The story goes on, and becomes a dream,
not true anymore, and night by night the cobra
drawn by his warm solidity
lay with him and eased her fangs into his heart
and night by night
she sucked away his courage.

And finally the monk went to the abbot
and said, master, my courage is all gone.
I cannot practice any more. I must leave this place.
And the master said, young man,
if your courage is not here, then where
do you hope to find it?

Sir, said the monk, my eyes are opened
to a new day, and all the world is full of fear.
I have lost all my conviction
and I shall not find it here. Give me leave to go.
My story has become a dream;
it is not true any more, and I must go.

It does not take long for a monk to pack.
A bowl and a robe and a pecha or two.
He gazed round the little hut and his eye
fell on the cobra. I will take you with me,
he said, for of all beings here
you are the only one I learned to love.

Labels: Poems

posted by Dale at 9:16 AM
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Saturday, April 05, 2008 :::
 

Bell

How I loved the touch of your hands on my flesh
How the thinness of the sheet intoxicated me
How, when you set your knee upon the table,
And put the back of my hand on your thigh
To sink your elbow's point into my palm,
I could have forgotten I am old and you are young.

("What brought you to Portland?" I asked later, and
One of your eyebrows flicked upwards;
Expressionless, you nodded your head
Briefly at the alcove
Where your boyfriend sat, surfing the net;
And I thought,
Oh dear.)

This is not love, though I am fond of you,
Fond, as touching makes one,
If one is me.
This is cathexis; the habit of investing
The young and pretty and female part of the world
With special significance.
I have made you the gatekeepers of heaven
Whether you will or no
And whether I will or no
And though now I no
It is not so easy. I see you now and long to cross
Into the indistinct joy
Remembered from other people's pasts.
I cannot well express
How thoroughly I disbelieve in this paradise,
Nor how deeply I believe.

(I came through the door last night and Jonquil
Jumped up to hug me, and I held her warm young body
And said, "Hi, love,"
Without thinking, not knowing exactly
What I meant.)

Piece by piece I unmake the past:
I must dissolve
All of my life; I must open my hands.
You do not understand; you are thinking in terms
Of of your bloody right and wrong.
I am thinking of God; I am thinking of
The darkened halls of a suffocating gauze,
Of a diaphragm that cannot take a whole breath,
Nor release one.

Listen, think of it otherwise: think of the earliest
Sunrise you remember,
The flickering line segments
Cast by ants' legs
As they pattered in the morning light.
Think of of the last bell
Rung by the umze,
The sound of pure silver
Shining in the shadowed room.

Labels: Massage, Poems

posted by Dale at 12:14 PM
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Wednesday, April 02, 2008 :::
 

Laptopped Again

Whew. It's good to be laptopped again. With birthday money from my folks, I sprang for this machine: a Thinkpad T-41, refurbished from IBM, $422. Sitting in Tosi's, tip-tapping away. Now I can start typing in what I've scribbled in my notebooks, past couple of weeks. I seem to have written this on Easter:

---

Easter morning. A gentle rain falling. The sky is soft gray, and the light comes up from the wet streets, catching the fluted geranium leaves in the window boxes, and then spreading up in fans of barely visible luminosity, sweeping up, as if, in some esoteric inversion of photosynthesis, the leaves were giving life to the sky.

Christ is risen today.

---

It was all a long time ago, and very far away. Isabel and Sir Richard Burton -- the explorer, you know, and translator of the Arabian Nights, not the actor -- were at sea. He looked at the waves and the sail. "I should like to be buried at sea," he said, suddenly.

His wife, who was Catholic, said quietly, "I don't think I could quite bear that. Is there anything else that would do?"

He reflected on the importance of the body, in her faith. He himself was a Sufi, if he was anything. He could not stand the thought of suffocating the dark earth. He wanted the air and the light.

Oh well. He grinned his wolfish grin. "Then I think I should like to be buried in a tent," he said lightly, and let the matter drop.

Years later, she had a mausoleum made for him, a tent of white translucent marble, so his coffin could lie in the light. When she died she was laid beside him, a little lower, so that once again they were sleeping in a tent together, as they had used to do in Syria and South America.

---

That's how I remember the story, anyway. There's a picture of the tomb in the biography I read. A first-rate biography of the two of them: A Rage to Live, by Mary Lovell.

He loved to make people's flesh creep: to pretend to have coolly murdered a boy in Africa lest he give their party away, to have resorted to cannibalism when a castaway. There was always a juvenile streak in him. He was one of the great adventurers of his time, and still he had to make up stories to impress people. But one of the last acts of his life was rescuing a robin from a cistern, and carefully drying and warming it. Good karma, I should think, for the voyage out.

---

The gears that keep me meshed in the present have been slipping. The other day I got off the bus. I had gotten to the best part of a mystery novel -- not, of course, the revelation of who did it, but the epilogue, in which the detective retells the story from the start, but in such a way that all that had been puzzling is made to seem plain, or even inevitable.

I was eager enough for this that I kept reading, as I walked along. Something I used to do constantly as a boy and a young man, but which I had not done for many years. The street gently rocked under my feet, and the distance between me and boyhood slipped away. Alone under the cloudy sky. The loneliness and self-sufficiency of an inveterate reader swept up around me. So perfectly, so sensitively attuned to the words on the page; so disconnected from the indistinct, flesh-and-blood figures that swirled past me on the sidewalk.

I stopped, as I do, and looked at the sky. I didn't know who to ask. I still don't.

The self-sufficiency has always been a piece of fakery. I dread being alone, just as ordinary people do. I sometimes think my whole life is a fabric of virtues made from necessities. I was alone on Easter, as I arranged to be. Wholly alone, and the pure anxiety of it threatened to eat me up.

I have always presented myself -- and thought of myself -- as someone who was perfectly content with, even eager for, solitude. It is not true. Take away the company of books and images, the pretend-company of my boyhood, and quickly enough I become agitated. Desperate to eat, and craving oblivion. If I had a television I would have turned it on. I had plenty of work I could have done, but without the reassurance of human company I couldn't bring myself to do it.

I'm not sure where this leads. I think: why should I not need company? Surely that is simply what my species does, like crows or baboons. Gathers in company. But I can't do that, either. Company is difficult for me. I never understand; I'm never understood. Socializing is often an ordeal, always tiring, to me.

---

But this is very exciting: the T-41's run for over an hour on the battery, and the battery's registering 75%. I'm wired again!

posted by Dale at 10:21 AM
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Tuesday, April 01, 2008 :::
 

Not a Sparrow Falls

It's fortuitous that NaPoWriMo should coincide with Crippling Self-Consciousness Awareness Month.

posted by Dale at 7:29 AM
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