The last few days here in Oakland (where I live)/ San Francisco (where I work) have been composed mainly of blue sky and sunshine. Lots of each. It almost feels like summer, which is unusual for San Francisco in the summertime.

Fine, fair weather. The kind of golden hued days that made me feel immortal as a child.

My inner weather these last few days, however, has been punctuated by brooding black clouds, occasional thunderstorms, several inches of rain.

Sarah has suffered with me through these strange days of sunshine and deluge. I thank the Universe for her presence. Even in the murkiest downpour, I see rainbows every time I look in her eyes.

Searching the net for information regarding the death threats Michael Newdow has received from decent god fearing Americans for his currently controversial suit regarding the Pledge of Allegiance, I came across this story about a man attacked by a deer while performing routine maintenance on his car at an Ohio gas station.

Strangely enough, just yesterday as I walked home from the bus that delivered me from a hard days work I witnessed a young deer clicking down the street in something of a panic. The animal trotted past me on the opposite sidewalk, turned the corner and vanished into whatever fate awaited it. This is not something one sees everday in Oakland, California. Motivated by a concern for the safety of the animal and anybody who might encounter it in this very urban neighborhood, I notified the animal control people.

I can only hope that one way or another my little Bambi made it to safety.

I urge everbody who has not already done so to pop over to Frank Paynter's place and catch up with the discussion of "genderism" he has initiated and is bravely moderating.

Do you think you know what it means to be a man or a woman? Read some of the contributions at Sandhill and think again.

Not being a prominent American, I wasn't asked to sign this statement of conscience* but I am happy to add my signature in spirit and to endorse the statement with all of my heart.

With you or against you, George W.? That's easy.

Just watch me turn my back on your illiterate, war mongering, U.S. Constitution mocking self.


* Thanks to Tom Tomorrow for the Statement of Conscience link!

When the great Tao is forgotten,
goodness and piety appear.
When the body's intelligence declines,
cleverness and knowledge step forth.
When there is no peace in the family,
filial piety begins.
When the country falls into chaos,
patriotism is born.

-Tao Te Ching, verse 18, from a translation by Stephen Mitchell-

I am one of the lonely tonight. . .

Sarah is far from home on business again.

The tanka below is for her. Sorry to say it is not a new one. I don't even have the moon tonight.


The hesitant moon
hides behind clouds, lights dimly
their ragged edges.
Empty pillows on the bed,
another night without you.

Richard Cody, 2002

I have been writing one thing or another for a good portion of my 35 years on this planet. To the right of me as I type these words is a large wicker basket (I have learned from watching Trading Spaces that baskets and trunks are practical and aesthetically pleasing storage spaces) which contains a stack of notebooks and binders filled to bursting with the detritus of a lifetime spent indulging artistic impulse and the urge to self-expression.

That stack is nearly two feet tall and includes material dating back twenty years or more in some cases. Sifting through this paper trail is a curious (sense 3) experience for me. It is interesting to see how my writing style has evolved over the years. Some of this stuff is so bad that it is painful in a self-conscious kind of way to read. There are treasures as well, though, if I may say so myself - strange glimmering shards of inspiration, softly luminous jewels of imagination buried in the black soil of mad teenage scrawlings.

It is the latter, I hope, that I propose to share with you here. It seems at one point in the early to mid 1980's that I experienced a definite phase in style and format. The vignette (3a) was my specialty. A few short paragraphs conjuring a scene on the page. Not unlike, come to think of it, what I have been doing recently here and here.

It is in a spirit of openness that I present for you the least embarrasing of this material from bygone days in the first of a potential series of posts I will call The Paper Trail. I post this material as is - no cosmetic tweaking of grammar or punctuation, no tidying of sloppy ideas or execution. The raw output of my young mind for your elucidation and entertainment.

Please keep in mind that I was doing time in my teenage years - between 14 and 17 I would guess - when the words below were written.

The Paper Trail

I sit here, and my thoughts as they so often do slip back to those warm summer nights. Not so long ago, yet seeming like an eternity away.

The two of us sitting out on my front lawn, drinking lemonade in the lazy summer heat, talking and waving happily to the passerby. Talking. . . yes we talked, long into the night. It's the one night that strikes me now in particular, his rough but somehow soft voice sounding out to me in the twilight of sunset.

"Hey," he said softly, as if he didn't care if I heard him or not.

"Yeah?" I answered as I observed the growing amount of red in the sky.

"Have you ever laid awake at night" he continued "safe in your bed and heard the sound of an army of rabid tootsie rolls parading through the streets of postwar Australia while viscious kindergarten children disembowled their parents?"

I glanced over at him and thought that maybe once, as a child, I had heard such a sound. "No." I answered.

He looked at me with those burning red eyes full of some emotion that I couldn't name. "Well I have." he said coldly.


Don't even think of plagiarizing this laurel in the crown of literature, I hereby copyright it in this year of The Goddess, 2002.

So much for discipline. . .

I managed a poem a week for four weeks. All poems that I am pleased with, I might add. See here and here for two examples posted previously.

Four weeks but I missed my self imposed deadline last Friday. The well was dry. . .

Sarah opined that it was a bad idea to begin with, this time-clock creativity. She agrees that discipline is a practice worthy of pursuit but maintains that art will not be rushed. She is right, of course. Those beautiful ladies we call The Muses will not be bent to my schedule.

Calliope, Erato, Euterpe, Polyhymnia, Thalia. . . I ask you creatures of grace to share my company.


I await your presence.

Has a book ever changed your life?

This is a difficult question for me to answer. Certainly, various pieces and types of literature have electrified my imagination, stirred my spirit, and challenged my intellect (such as it is) over the years. But has any of them worked a definite change in the way I view the world or live my life? I can't recall any shocking and immediate changes occurring in my thinking as the result of the written word. I am sure, however, that the seeds of ideas harvested from disparate texts throughout my life have cross pollinated and taken root in the rich, dark soil at the bottom of my mind. What fruit or blossom they might bear after passing through the alembic of that mind I call mine remains, perhaps, to be seen.

A book that is bearing plentiful fruit for me at the moment is Riane Eisler's, The Chalice and the Blade. To attempt to sum this book up briefly would be to undermine the relevance of its topic but, in short, it concerns itself with the oppression, suppression and repression of women and femine ideals such as compassion, equality and sharing.

As I make my way through this book, I find issues such as male agression, war, feminism and the relationship of the sexes in general taking on new dimensions. Ms. Eisler, drawing on archeological evidence and utilizing the science of systems analysis, paints a very convincing picture of a world that might have been and yet may be if we can break free of what she refers to as "Dominator" ideals such as ranking, possession and agression which have shaped the cultures of the world for the last few millenia or so. As I make my way through this book I become increasingly convinced that perhaps the crucial problem facing us (the world community) today and one which underlies our shared history of war, genocide, and violence in general is one of gender. Specifically the female gender and it's place, or lack thereof, at the table in the conduct of social, cultural, human affairs.

As Elizabeth Cady Stanton said in 1848:

"Among the many important questions which have been brought before the public, there is none that more vitally affects the human family than that which is technically callled 'Women's Rights'."

There are certainly more women in positions of power and influence today than there were in Stanton's time but this statement rings just as true today as it did 150 years ago.

As this man's world spins faster and faster (where she stops nobody knows) into a future of environmental degradation and yet more war, let us hope it is a statement that is ringing loud enough to be heard.

Row Row Row Your Boat

How bravely we rise to face each new day
As the golden sun chases black night away.

From one unknown into another without hesitation we leap -
Headlong into consciousness from the misty shores of sleep.

Awake, the world is just what it seems,
Solid and distant from the province of dreams.

But the dreamer knows behind closed eyes
What the waker, at angles, can only surmise:

Life, as the author of the old round wrote
Is a trip downstream in a tiny boat.


Richard Cody, 2002, 2014

"Ask not what you can do for your country
what's your country been doing to you"

- from The American in Me by The Avengers -

Read this. . .

Thanks to Stavros the wonderchicken for the linkage.

Stop.

Feel the breath in your body.

Give thanks for what you have right now.

As Jim says:

"Well, I woke up this morning, I got myself a beer
The future's uncertain, the end is always near"

As for me, If I must enjoy a beverage that rhymes with near, I would prefer orange juice.

Below is my poem for the week ending 5/19/02. The title, Original Sin, was suggested by Sarah - it is appropriate if a bit more generic than I would like. The original title was going to be Adam's Complaint but, after a quick Google search I learned that Denise Levertov had already penned a poem with that title. Plagiarism is not the issue here as I conceived the title and the poem prior to learning about Ms. Levertov's piece. Still I felt compelled to change the title - despite the fact that anything I have ever written and subsequently stuck a title on likely has any number of identically titled pieces belonging to other authors all over the world and throughout time, all unknown to me.

In any case, as the poem is essentially a dialogue between Adam & Eve, I have left Adam's Complaint in the body of the piece itself to distinguish between the "speaking" parties.


Original Sin

Adam's Complaint:

Wasn't it enough to know
We were who we were?

Unadorned, unashamed,
Ignorant of sin
We walked with Yahweh in a world of green.

It was enough for me, at least,
To feel the sun on my skin
And to see the stars shining in the night sky.

Now I cannot see them burn
Without wondering how
And, worse yet, why.

I choked on the flesh of the fruit you plucked
And am choking still.

How could you make a friend of that worm -
He whom I curse and kill
A thousand times daily?

These garments chafe my skin.
My hands by toil are bruised sore.

Eve's Reply:

The fruit which catches in your throat
Is to me pure delight.
I can yet taste upon my lips
The sweetness of that first bite.

I have not had enough.
I want more.

As for the serpent you so revile,
He is innocent of any crime.

Bless his lost legs,
He was merely in the wrong place
At the wrong time.

Your tender hands, your troubled mind
Are no fault of his or mine.

The garden was a gilded prison,
The fruit in your throat the key -
Swallow it, dear boy,
and know what it means to be free.


Copyright (of course) Richard Cody, 2002

Terra Incognita

There are vast realms of consciousness still undreamed of
vast ranges of experience, like the humming of unseen harps,
we know nothing of, within us.

Oh when man has escaped from the barbed-wire entanglement
of his own ideas and his own mechanical devices
there is a marvellous rich world of contact and sheer fluid
beauty
and fearless face-to-face awareness of now-naked life
and me, and you, and other men and women
and grapes, and ghouls, and ghosts and green moonlight
and ruddy-orange limbs stirring the limbo
of the unknown air, and eyes so soft
softer than the space between the stars,
and all things, and nothing, and being and not-being
alternately palpitant,
when at last we escape the barbed-wire enclosure
of Know Thyself, knowing we can never know,
we can but touch, and wonder, and ponder, and make our
effort
and dangle in a last fastidious fine delight
as the fuchsia does, dangling her reckless drop
of purple after so much putting forth
and slow mounting marvel of a little tree.

- D.H. Lawrence-

I have only recently discovered the writing of D.H. Lawrence. Until reading a collection of poems (edited by Kenneth Rexroth), Lawrence was nothing to me but a name with heavy literary baggage attached to it. It was a joy to find pieces like the one above shredding my ignorance and revealing to me a mind not unlike my own.

I don't know why I should be surprised to find in Lawrence a kindred spirit. We are both, after all, poets. Is it a stretch to assert that all poets, indeed all artists, share some measure of common ground beyond that shared by all human beings? I don't think so. The artist is a seeker, a peeker into the nature of things, a translator of the ineffable. As such, he/she is participating in something larger than themselves, entering a realm of creation which is the province of the Divine. We are all, of course, a part of the Divine, but we are not all participating.

"I worship Christ, I worship Jehovah, I worship Pan, I worship Aphrodite. But I do not worship hands nailed and running with blood upon a cross, nor licentiousness, nor lust. I want them all, all the gods. They are all God. But I must serve in real love. If I take my whole passionate, spiritual and physical love to a woman who in turn loves me, that is how I serve God. And my hymn and my game of joy is my work."

- D.H. Lawrence -

I hardly know where to begin with this 1912 quote. The rejection of the death image which Christianity has focused the Western world's eyes upon? The realization that all deities are mere aspects of one God? Or, perhaps, the assertion that to live life in love and joy is what Lawrence considers his work to be? Yes, this last, I think, is what I would like to focus on for a moment. This is a concept I have pondered before - the notion that any person who lives a conscious life is, in fact, an artist. This may (or may not) stretch our definition of art but it rings true to me that in fashioning a life of love one is participating fundamentally in the creative realm I mentioned above. Never mind his poetry and the hundreds of thousands of other words he spilled, Lawrence's real work was to love and be loved.

What greater work is there, after all?

Shake one time for me

I was just submitting the blog below when the earth moved. First quake since we've been back, rattled the glass in our new Ikea wall unit, moved the walls a bit or seemed to at least.

All too often, I think, we forget that The Earth is always turning, a living planet. Tectonic reminders put us face to foot with the fact that we are living on a dynamic world still in the process of forming itself.

". . .The hills, of course, were a paler shade in those days. . ." Aunt Maggie smiled a distant smile and rested her hands on the smooth veranda.

I gazed at her long nails and lost myself in the lines of her curved fingers. Those hands, I knew, had once been capable of marvelous things. I recalled from my youth the first time I heard about Maggie's hands. She had revived a litter of spaniel pups smothered blue by a jealous breeder simply by touching them, one after the other, with a single outstretched finger. According to father, the air sizzled where puppy and finger met. There were other stories, of course, and more dramatic, but this one lodges in my mind. I had never seen the magic myself and I wondered. . .

"Also," Maggie continued, "there were more trees. . ."

I followed her gaze to the hills that rolled away from us beyond the veranda. The sun was lowering and long shadows were stirring there.

"When the sun goes down" Maggie closed her eyes, "you can't see anything."

She brought her hands to her face, slowly, and in the gathering gloom I thought I saw a faint glimmer pulsing near her fingertips.

From my head to yours - a piece of a dream picked from the stream of my ever flowing mind.

It seems "funny" at times how bloggers that I read regularly will post a blog about something that has been on my mind. I have recorded such an occurrence once in this space and it has happened on other occasions that I have not bothered to note. All of this synchronicity reminds me of Alan Moore's notions of Idea Space which I touched upon here.

This time around Anita has blogged on the subject of personal discipline, an idea which has not only been on my mind of late but one that has been realized (to some small extent) within my life in the last two weeks.

The discipline of which I speak is one of writing - not blog entries but poetry. I have set myself the task of penning at least one poem per week. This modest weekly goal has been set to keep the creative pump primed, so to speak, and to maintain my mental and spiritual health in general. I have discovered over the years that writing is excellent therapy for the mind and soul. The creative process is a link to the Divine and, so long as the creator does not let ego blind him/her (easier writ than done!), a path to the truest and most liberating insights. For all of this, however, I am a lazy bastard and simply do not write as much as I ought to. Hence my new found discipline.

Thus far I have been successful, making my first deadline with the short and (I hope) sweet note I posted to Louis Armstrong a few days back. My second success was the completion of the difficult poem some of you may recall reading about (which I may post here at some point when I can bear to look at it). Will I be capable of maintaining this discipline?

I can only say that I hope so.

. . .the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. . .

- Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 32nd President of the U.S -

. . . Especially when that fear is being used by our "elected" leaders to perpetuate war never ending

There have been a number of animal rights issues blipping across my RADAR screen of late - issues that I feel bear not only mentioning but examination. Unfortunately, I am too tired at the moment to do anything but the former. I simply don't have the gumption to climb up on my soapbox and sell my notions about remote control rats, the question of legal rights for chimpanzees and other primates, or the apparent expansion of McDonald's animal welfare policy .

I have maintained a vegetarian diet ( I do ingest sea food and dairy products) for a few years now, motivated by the need to wash my hands of the degradation and disrespect perpetrated upon animals by the food industry, so you will perhaps believe me when I assure you that these issues are important to me.

Not really very important at all but slightly amusing is Bert's weird/bad art page . I linked to this site a while back from I know not where (a blog, perhaps? Was it yours?) and entered one of the caption contests. It seems my effort has been awarded first place. The prize, 15 seconds of fame, is appropriate and a logical extrapolation of Andy Warhol's 15 minute theory given the increasing speed with which time is passing these days. However, since the author of the winning captions is not credited it is really the winning caption itself that enjoys basking in the 15 second limelight and not the writer. Oh well, you will just have to take my word that the winning caption for this picture is mine.

Speaking of writing. . . I have finally finished that poem. I have no idea if anybody reading this is interested in the resolution of the two month struggle that this piece gave me but I proclaim it here for the universe to hear if nobody else: the poem has found it's form.

I will rest tonight without those same tiresome lines running through my head.

Love is the blood of God.