Hypocrisy

According to Stephen Ross of The Harvest Fields, 6,924,246,831 people are currently on our planet. How Ross can determine 831 as opposed to 827 is beyond me, but I’m comfortable with an estimate of about 7 billion. Ross also reports that about four people are born every second and about two people die every second. Thus we are adding 172,800 additional people each day. But this is not really news. Many people know this. Many intelligent people write about population and sustainable growth. If you want to read interesting articles about this, I like Population, Sustainability, and Earth's Carrying Capacity: 
A framework for estimating population sizes and lifestyles 
that could be sustained without undermining future generations by Gretchen C. Daily and Paul R. Ehrlich. Also if you are interested, check out this fascinating article by Jared Diamond called The Worst Mistake In The History Of The Human Race. Diamond argues that when we transitioned from hunter/gatherer to agriculture, we unknowingly created all the problems we currently have.

I want to start with the given that we will, if we continue our trend, reach a point in which the planet, as we now know it, will be unable to support the population. Now some people will argue that this saturation point will never actually come because we will continue to create new technologies that allow for unlimited expansion. To argue that something is not a problem because we will invent a solution

when the issue reaches critical levels seems irresponsible at best. This seems to be our thinking as far as fossil fuels go. We will burn oil to ease our lives until there is no more oil to burn, then we will figure something out. Hey, I’ll be honest, this is mostly my mindset. We tend to deal with problems when we have to, proactive isn’t really something we seem to be very good at. We like maxims like “Live for the moment,” “Go for it,” “You might die tomorrow so live today,” etc. 

So we celebrate birth and mourn death. Biologists argue we are programmed to do this in fact. No one I know is angry when a loved one or friend has a child. In fact, my sect tends to celebrate, and why shouldn’t we? Children are the future. They make us closer to biological success stories. They bring us immeasurable rewards. And of course we are crushed by death. We feel loss and sadness. I don’t know anyone who condemns birth and celebrates death for population control reasons. In fact, this seems absurd, but doesn’t it also seem to be what is required in order to control population growth. So here’s that contradiction I find within my worldview. Do I fight for regulations that aim to control population growth, or do I fight for individual choice in reproduction? Do I support medical interventions to extend life, or do I argue that by extending life we are adding to unsustainable population growth? Of course this produces another contradiction: If any restriction or policy is developed, who gets to develop it? Each of us would probably rather sit in the driver seat and point to that group over there as the people who need to be controlled, than to have that group over there tell us whether we can reproduce or extend our lives. So here’s why I’m a hypocrite: I want a sustainable population, but I don’t want anyone to tell me what I have to do to achieve it.

Those people...

Amiri Baraka, the artist formerly known a LeRoi Jones, loves Jazz, is a cool dude, works to help with street kids and gang members, and bebops his way through public readings. He’s a guy who began his career as a poet and editor and quickly became associated with the Beat Generation where he resided until the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965. Although the Beats are known for acceptance and 

tolerance, Baraka apparently decided at this time the best way to fight for civil rights would be to distance himself from the white world. Thus, he moved to Harlem and associated himself with the Black Nationalist movement. Wikipedia reports, “he broke away from the basically white Beat Generation and became very critical of the pacifist and integrationist Civil Rights movement. His revolutionary poetry now became more controversial. A poem like Black Art (1969), according to academic Werner Sollors from Harvard University, expressed his need to commit the violence required to ‘establish a Black World.’ Rather than use poetry as an escapist mechanism, Baraka saw poetry as a weapon of action. His poetry demanded violence against those he felt were responsible for an unjust society.”

Here's the poem referenced in the quote:

Black Art
Amiri Baraka

Poems are bullshit unless they are
teeth or trees or lemons piled
on a step. Or black ladies dying
of men leaving nickel hearts
beating them down. Fuck poems
and they are useful, wd they shoot
come at you, love what you are,
breathe like wrestlers, or shudder
strangely after pissing. We want live
words of the hip world live flesh &
coursing blood. Hearts Brains
Souls splintering fire. We want poems
like fists beating niggers out of Jocks
or dagger poems in the slimy bellies
of the owner-jews. Black poems to
smear on girdlemamma mulatto bitches
whose brains are red jelly stuck
between 'lizabeth taylor's toes. Stinking
Whores! we want "poems that kill."
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
with tongues pulled out and sent to Ireland. Knockoff poems for dope selling wops or slick halfwhite politicians Airplane poems, rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr rrrrrrrrrrrrrrr . . .tuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuh . . .rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr . . . 

Setting fire and death to
whities ass. Look at the Liberal
Spokesman for the jews clutch his throat
& puke himself into eternity . . . rrrrrrrr
There's a negroleader pinned to
a bar stool in Sardi's eyeballs melting
in hot flame Another negroleader
on the steps of the white house one
kneeling between the sheriff's thighs
negotiating coolly for his people.
Aggh . . . stumbles across the room . . .
Put it on him, poem. Strip him naked
to the world! Another bad poem cracking
steel knuckles in a jewlady's mouth
Poem scream poison gas on beasts in green berets
Clean out the world for virtue and love,
Let there be no love poems written
until love can exist freely and
cleanly. Let Black people understand
that they are the lovers and the sons
of warriors and sons
of warriors Are poems & poets &
all the loveliness here in the world
We want a black poem. And a
Black World.
Let the world be a Black Poem
And Let All Black People Speak This Poem
Silently
or LOUD 

Well all this is well and good. Here’s a guy who was fed up with the racism he saw around him and decided to take action. But for those of you who know the story, part of Baraka’s “action” included at one time refusing to read poetry to white audiences (a position he has since abandoned), advocating violence toward those he believes are responsible for racism (a position that he may have also abandoned), and an ongoing anti-Semitic undertone which raises its head every once in a while even though he publicly denies it. 

I happened to be in the audience that booed Baraka in 2002 at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival when he read his 9/11 poem “Somebody Blew Up America.” This poem, which is actually quite good with the exception of Baraka’s anti-Semitic conspiracy theory stanza, caused the governor of New Jersey to ask Baraka to resign as the state’s poet laureate. The controversial stanza is:

“Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed / Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers / To stay home that day / Why did Sharon stay away?” 

For the entire poem here’s the link:
Somebody Blew Up America

Baraka’s is just one example of the dilemma that may be inherent in all of us. How do we reconcile conflicting ideas. For Baraka, his conflict is in reconciling a personal hatred of racism with a personal hatred of certain groups. For me it is reconciling a personal humanitarian position of acceptance, compassion, and tolerance with existential “you get what you pay for” thinking. Sure this is often reconcilable, but when it comes to population control, modern medicine, and environmental issues, things get a bit confusing. So over the next three days, I will wrestle with my conflicts and see if indeed there is some resolution.

The Tool Shed

Here is a recent poem I wrote which explores memories.  The summer between my third grade and forth grade school year, my family moved from a suburban development in Austintown to my great-grandfather’s farm in Columbiana County.  All this is in eastern Ohio.  The century old farm house, cavernous barn, and many outbuildings were wonderful places to explore and develop into forts and hideouts. 

A pump house drew water from a well underneath into a trough for the cows.  As a kid, the pump house seemed dangerous.  Only old planks stopped me from plunging down into the dark well.  A narrow but long corn crib with opossums and groundhogs living underneath stood directly in front of the pump house.  A larger side building called the sheep shed stood just to the west of the barn.  We had no sheep, 

but this two-story shed worked for storing firewood, a tractor, and miscellaneous obsolete tools, boards, and buckets.  The shed also featured a loose plank-floored loft accessible by climbing a straight ladder someone had made by nailing slats between two studs.  In the loft was an open window that back in the day would have featured a hoist allowing the loft to be loaded and unloaded with relative ease.  When hornets were not building nests  

up there, this was a favorite clubhouse.  We had a dark little old smoke house that was too sooty for play.  There were two tool sheds and a gravel-floored garage.  One of the tool sheds we sold to a neighbor.  He and my father maneuvered it onto the back of a hay wagon and moved it, in one piece, to the neighbor’s yard. 

This poem is about the remaining tool shed.  It was grimy and dark and full of dangerous looking rusted-out tools and tractor parts, 

immense nuts and bolts, heavy pry-bars, greasy planks, and half-used bags of fertilizer. I could never see very well in that shed because one light bulb insufficiently lit the space and the oily dirt floor absorbed whatever light there was. Well, that was thirty-six years ago. Here’s what the tool shed is to me today, as a memory.       

At ten the tool shed is a mysterious place:
a medieval monastery,
a Muslim harem-room,
an Aztec ruin.

Under-lit by two small windows pains cracked/cloudy/missing:
a brown bear cave,
a midnight prairie cabin,
a bedroom for the blind.

Greasy and chunky, the floor is rusty brown with diesel fuel and saw oil:
a nineteenth-century San Francisco street,
a chimney sweep’s bed,
a junkyard dog.

Elders and ancestors worked in this dimness:
amateur blacksmiths,
arc-welders,
tractor mechanics.

There on the brown-grey wooden work bench:
the church altar,
the surgeon’s table,
the writer’s desk.

There beside the bench grinder with its honing wheel worn to the hub:
a thickly sliced black snake,
an ancient coin,
a worn-out old man.

There is the ancient hunk of iron that I want to carry out of that shed:
a newborn infant,
a sacred scroll,
a piece of the true cross.

It is not a child’s toy:
a pirate’s hook,
a detached dog’s tail,
an imaginary ogre.

It is simply too serious for play.

Tattoos and Permanence

Love precedes loneliness. The unconnected are not lonely. They are solitary trees in overgrown fields. Only the trees of the forest understand loneliness. They drop leaves onto small flowers too naive to understand how the sun deceives. 

I penned this many years ago in a journal and stumbled upon it today. I love it when this happens. It’s like meeting the guy I was back then; it’s Proustian. Younger me floods over

present me and strange feelings float to the top. These must be the feelings of many artists. I now read my old writing with a certain detachment from the ideas and style, an ability to look anew with fresh eyes and additional maturity and growth. This is simultaneously disquieting and stunning. What I thought was such a poignant observation expressed in such an organic metaphor, now I see as eerily naïvely eloquent. 

This is why I’ve never gone under the pen and tattooed my body. Who will I be ten years from now? I consider who I was ten years ago and barely recognize that person. 

Do I want to look at a cryptic Celtic design tattooed on my forearm from now until I expire? Will it still exhilarate me and represent me when I’m 60. Perhaps it will, but chances are it will not. My devotion to fiction reminds me of this. For years I could not get through War and Peace and then something clicked and I read it twice back-to-back. When I was twenty, at best, I would have tattooed a Bob Dylan lyric on my arm, at worst, the name of some girl I thought I was madly and eternally in love with. Today, both would have been sad mistakes. Strangely, the Dylan lyric would perhaps have turned out to be the more embarrassing. At least the old passionate love of youth is universal and thus aptly celebrated and manifested in permanence, but a song lyric? Really?

 

 

"I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now." 

Those who know I read avidly often ask me what is my favorite book. I cannot answer. One book does not rise head and shoulders above the thousands of significant works out there. Besides, the book I’m digging today, will not be the book I’m digging next month or next year. Like a tattoo, singling out one work and clutching it next to the heart for the rest of my life seems stifling. So to beat this point to a pulp, I ask myself what do I think about these lines I wrote all those years ago––these lines that back then I was so impressed with that I inked them into my personal notebook. 

I wrote, “Love precedes loneliness.” I still agree with this notion. If I do not value anything (love it), then I can not miss anything. Reminds me of Buddhism’s call for the

rejection of desire. Ok, maybe I could allow this body ink into my bicep. It still seems true today––it stands the test of time. I go on to write, “The unconnected are not lonely.” By buying the preceding line, I guess I have no choice but to agree here too. I am thinking of exceptions though, but most of these exceptions are people who have valued something and then lost it. The sad old guy in the chair valued family, health, possessions, idealized dreams, and perhaps lost some or all of these things; he is lonely. Yet I am uneasy with the idea that there could be an unconnected being. Isn’t desire inherent in us? Don’t we naturally long for companionship, feel lonely when we do not have it? Doesn’t a baby instinctively want to be held and nurtured? Aren’t we born lonely before we have anything to love? Freud would argue that we did 

have something we unconsciously loved––the womb. We are born lonely because we valued the womb and then lost it. Ok, let’s stop here, this is getting too much like Intro to Psychology 101, but perhaps the line is actually defensible. I’m also going to stop here because the rest of the jotting is metaphor. If metaphor is effective, it cannot be restated or translated without losing its impact. If it is trite and nonsensical, then it is not worth considering. I like that. Perhaps that is my tattoo. This is what the young me is teaching the present me. The young me would have attempted to literalize the metaphor and perhaps ruin it, but now I know when to leave things alone. 

"The Value Of Baseball" Part IV (end)

Baseball is fair because there is no clock, no time limit. The end, regardless of time spent, pitches thrown, batters faced, errors committed, or runs scored, comes only after the losing team records their twenty-seventh out. The batter could foul off pitches forever. The home team could fail to get out of the top of the first. The bottom of the third could never end. Baseball is fair because ties are not acceptable. Extra-innings are forced, the teams must play to a decision, the effort must be judged, there must be a winner. Baseball is fair because the defenders have the ball––the power. The batter can only do what the defense allows, can only take advantage of the defender’s mistakes, can only hit the pitch the pitcher did not want to hang, can only steal the base on a slow delivery and an errant throw.

Baseball is fair because crossing the plate is one run regardless of the effort, regardless of being walked in or having to collide with the pitcher, regardless of a squeeze play or a passed-ball error, regardless of a five-hundred foot blast or a sacrifice fly, the ground-rule double or the two-base RBI. Baseball is fair because no man is an island; yet, all batters stand alone in the box and try to pull the middle-in fast ball and fail more times than not; yet, the right fielder is on his own judging his leap for the fly ball heading toward the wall; yet, there will be an error recorded beside his name in the books if the left fielder drops the routine pop, if the third baseman boots the grounder, or if the first baseman cannot take the throw on the short hop; and later, when the veteran hangs up his glove, when his knees will no longer carry him around the base path, when his shoulder will no longer allow the ninety-seven mile-an-hour fast ball, when even the DH is too grueling, we can sit back and print out his stats and commemorate his feeble efforts––his three hits out of every ten at bats, his one-hundred-fifty-two career errors, one hundred and six coming from second base, the rest from later, when he was converted to a first baseman; and we can not only hold him accountable, we can use these numbers to back up our claim. Baseball is fair because of the old-time lazy Sunday afternoon doubleheader were a guy could sit in the sun for six hours drinking draft beer from a plastic cup and dropping peanut shells at his feet, where a guy could settle into the flow of the thrown ball, the labored pace of the pitcher, the beauty of the diamond, and forget his job, his debt, his dying father, his leaky sink, his life; where a guy could claim sanctuary, become part of the crowd, the community, the congregation and not be the foreigner he has become, where the followers worship and yell for their heroes, their deities, and collectively express their distraught and their frustration, their jubilation and their triumph. Baseball is fair because there at the ballpark, at old Forbes Field or Three Rivers Stadium, at old Municipal Stadium or Jacobs Field, my father is not a worker and I am not an academic, no, there we are a sect, together, unified without boundaries. 

Harvey never cared for baseball, but Bud followed it passionately, and just as Bud took my father, my father has taken me to the ballparks of Pittsburgh and Cleveland. My childhood ballpark memories are intricately wrapped up in these steel and concrete structures. But, Bud was not Harvey, he could not be my father’s father, and so the games of my father’s childhood were not what the games of mine are to me. My father needed a different connection, a different tie, and perhaps I too would have worked through my ineptitude, my feebleness, and strove to become a heavy plate and black iron worker, a master welder who at fifty-six could lie on his back on a filthy floor and back-weld above his head, if it were not for those fields, those players, those occasional days at the ballpark, if it were not for my father releasing me from the circle, and I wonder if he knows what he did. When the father, frustrated and angry, beats his son, humiliates his son, antagonizes his son into killing the erne, the son becomes a man. And I wonder if the father knows what he did. When the coach, fed-up and pressured, rides the player’s back till the fires of hatred burn in the player’s eyes and the player moves beyond the ordinary, the player becomes the star. And I wonder if the coach knows what he did. And I wonder if my father knows what he did. During all our ballpark times, I have never asked him.

My grandfather Harvey and my father never managed to pound out much of a relationship, and Bud never understood why my father took that apprenticeship at that shop and worked beside Harvey for all those years, but I know why my father worked there; I know why he hid his face behind the black glass of his hood; I know why he refused to give up his creed, refused to move on; and for that very same reason, I now sit at Jacobs Field and look through those old binoculars, and beside me, protected from the sun by a blue cap, sits my beaten father, and when we watch Kenny Lofton chase down a fly ball in center field, I know my father does not need his uncle Bud’s binoculars, that he has never needed them; I know he can see Willie Mayes, Larry Doby, Uncle Bud, and his father as plain as day.

The Value of Baseball: Part III

Harvey’s hood was flat black industrial. When I was a child, I played with it. The head band, even in its smallest position too open for my skull, webbed over the top of my head like an old bucket. With the hood’s dark green glass down over my eyes, I was a blindman, an alien, a robot wandering through the yard

and visualizing my location, and if today I were asked to recreate that boy in his grandfather’s welding hood, I would drop a five gallon bucket over my head and navigate around the room to everyone’s enjoyment, but my father would not find it funny, he would consider it silly and degrading, a man with a bucket over his head, why? I can even hear, in my mind, his protest to this subjunctive construct. 

I wore this same hood at twelve, when, in a long-sleeve flannel shirt and blue jeans, wearing gloves so big on my small hands that I could barely grip the whip, I stood beside my father in his heavy work shirt tucked into his dungarees, in his worn boots and wide leather belt, in his turned-around baseball cap and welder’s hood, and listened to him, like a novice listening to a master artist, teach me how to weld. And it all seemed doable, the process he displayed seemed possible, seemed simple; but, with the hood down, I could not see to start the arc, and sparks jumped whenever the rod inadvertently made contact with the metal plate, and after many false attempts, I eventually pushed the rod forward into where I guessed the weld should be, and magically the opaque lens of the hood turned transparent against the triumphant white light of the arc I was creating, and in that glorious light I became spellbound, mesmerized, narcissistic. Afraid of ruining the moment, I did not draw the rod across the plate: I feared that any movement of my hand, any attempt to direct the magical arc I had created, would only break the connection. Then there were too many sparks, the arc was not advancing, I was not drawing the light down a line, I was frozen, burning through the metal, the hum was not there, and I pulled the rod off the plate and all went black again. When I lifted my hood, a dastardly hole large enough for my ring finger to slip through, glowing hot at the edges, peered back at me like Oedipus’ gouged socket––repulsive, abnormal, sickening: I had ruined the plate, abused the canvas. When my father did it, the hum and the crackling were melodious, the rod’s constant contact with the plate lit the stage and the black curtain was lifted, and in wonderment I watched the molten line he created, and saw the theatrical nature of his performance. I reached a second time for the whip and again I could not advance the arc once struck, again there was only the chaotic shower of sparks which allowed me to see that metal stage, upon which my father so masterly performed, only in glimpses. Again I burned through the plate. A third time, a third lewd hole, tears of frustration rolled down my face in lines, and I was ashamed to lift my hood. I dropped the whip. The rod popped loose and rolled across the concrete floor. My father lost his patience, and it was on that one chilly Saturday morning, beside the portable welder in the garage, that my mettle was tested, and I failed, and, now, with my awards and honors framed on the wall in my cluttered office, with my academic accomplishments and artistic successes, I can not help but think back on that day as the day I realized that I would never be a man, the day I realized that all my accomplishments from there on out would be nothing but the contrived conveyance of self-assurance within an insecure world of intellectual ramblings, assurance that what I am doing is good, is honorable, is dignified, when deep down I know it is not. My father attached metal plate to metal plate. He built things. He looked at what he did, not as the work of art that it was, but as a task, an assignment, a responsibility, and now I go to 

museums and look at work without function, work which we teach ourselves to appreciate, but which has not the intrinsic value of the industrial production, work which was created by people like me who not only make it, but can also articulate why it should be accepted as valuable. Yet, Harvey would want to know how the nude sculpture on my coffee table advances the world, and he would not accept my aesthetic theory, he would object to art, not because he would not see its beauty, but because he would not understand its departure from work, he would not understand beauty without function, and like primal beings, he is the more spiritual, he is the one who would call for, who would insist upon, a union between art and life––a destruction of barriers––who would detest the entire abstract notion of going to 

an art museum, and deep down I think he would be right, and deep down I know that all those men in all those dilapidated mills, in all those cruddy shops, in all those greasy garages, are the real artists, under appreciated, unsung, and I know that all I and all those like me are simply commentators who cannot see through the dark green lens of a welding helmet and strike the arc. 

Once the shop closed, my father never worked again. The union offered him an itinerant position, but he turned away from the trade. The noisy shop that Harvey blamed on his forgotten memory was gone, and no longer could my father hear the clanging of sheet metal echoing around those brick walls and those cracked and mottled concrete floors, never again could he nod his head and drop his hood and become, not my father, but a worker, an artist, a man in an industrial mask; and now, beside Harvey’s hood in my father’s garage, like the beginning of a collection of African art, my father’s hood hangs on a sixteen penny nail, and, in a way, forms the only connection he had to Harvey.