A Sharp Point

J asks me: Why blog? As in: why bother? I could ask the same of the bright, red berries in Champ de Mars, which have just burst into shocking red flowers despite the imminent frost.  Hey guys, pourquoi? My answer is sentimentalized existentialism: just more heartache and pointlessness.  Which itself is enough to make me sharpen my proverbial pencil and write.

Pencil sharpening is, and always has been, more of a manipulative behavioral trait than a functional event.  So much of the school day, when one is young, is sculpted by Others, plodding movement along the arthritic spine of Somebody’s Agenda.  But the pencil, bless it, comes along and allows the student’s Autonomy to do the worm irreverently, in the very face of rigidity and standards.  How?

Recall the wall-affixed sharpeners in the classroom (http://www.officemuseum.com/pencil_sharpeners.htm):  one could get up from one’s desk legitimately to take advantage of these, and with frequent repeats.  From a teacher’s perspective, those “repeat sharpeners” were immediately obvious, like a Lamborghini parked at a bike rack– slinking towards the wall, brandishing the broken point of a mustard yellow #2– and completely unstoppable.

The only other legitimate excuse to leave one’s desk was the indisputable human need to urinate.  After all, what is an appropriate come-back to “I have to pee!”? “No, no you don’t”?  But this raison d’ voyager could only be utilized so many times before you (as student) risked being diagnosed with something serious. No so much a case of what would Jesus do? as who would Jesus sue? Pencil sharpening, on the other hand, is an infinitely renewable excuse: pencils break faster than bladders fill.

But I return to pointlessness itself, more existential than material, for which the world offers no relieving sharpener– except the will to imagine one.

Sacred Profane, Same Same

The idealist in me and the pragmatist in me frequently need to sit down to talk, and it’s not always pretty.  At this schizophrenic forum, the topic du jour is: how to learn in the world? It seems incumbent upon me to answer that question in the course of this year away.  But either the pragmatist or the idealist, feeling persnickety and school-yard-ish, rejoins: I don’t hear anything, do you?—What is that, the wind? A split mind is, alas, not mediated by the pure fact of inhabiting a single organ.  At these times, I must throw up my hands and turn back to poetry.

Perhaps one learns in the world just by being in it, in the very messiness of Time.  Or is that too obvious of a conclusion?  In my skull’s miniature laboratory, the ego still likes to think it has concocted, or will concoct, some original solution.  A solution not so absolute that it would give Socrates a posthumous ulcer, but rather one provisional enough that the ego has something to wear to its Cocktail Party and drop, with an intentional, philosophical thrust, as a marinade atop the olives.

And so: Ikkyu.

Ikkyu this body isn’t yours I say to myself
wherever I am I’m there

A poet who refused to pick between the sacred and profane as subject matter: for him, it was a case of both both, the quintessence of same-same, not either-or. And this swaddle infuriates: to not be told what to sublimate, what to deprecate, is analogous to a vegetarian being handed a steaming bowl of broth which is either made with beef bone or not made with beef bone.   Bon appetite! Enjoy, in great moral perplexity, the conundrum of cow or cowlessness.

Thus spoke Ikkyu:

A single night of love is better
than a hundred thousand years
of stale meditation

&

That stone Buddha deserves all
the bird-shit it gets. I wave my boney
arms like tall flowers in the wind

These offerings were left at my electronic doorstep, at just the right moment, by R.  For R, poetry is a thread, a fil du monde, which ties him (back) to the world.  This kind of knot a sailor couldn’t undo– not even a drunk, knot-savvy sailor.   G. Apollinaire, who talked back to the sharp teeth of Modernism before the flu put him in the dirty laundry bag of its even dirtier suitcase, saw a thread like this in the coursing Seine itself:

Under the Mirabeau Bridge there flows the Seine
Must I recall
Our loves recall how then
After each sorrow joy came back again

Let night come on bells end the day
The days go by me still I stay

(trans. R. Wilbur)

My R. is not a Parisian, but he’s slept the night in Gare du Nord—a right of passage in and of itself, though it is unclear from what to what the passage runs.  There may still be a pigeon living, giving himself fowl-enemas on the transparent ceiling of the Batobus, who remembers this event.  In a dwindling dialect of pigeonese, he tells his tribe about the night the poet dreamed under the gray awning of the station’s roof, under the grayer awning of the sky—a gray dream, likely, of a less gray time.

Or perhaps, even less abstractly, a dream of where the closest pencil might be, and a sharpener to grind away the dullness of Samsara.
sick of it whatever it’s called sick of the names
I dedicate every pore to what’s here

–Ikkyu

(ikkyu to be found at: http://www.poetry-chaikhana.com/I/IkkyuSojunIk/index.htm

…(read more of this post and other gesticulations at: twentyfourhouryoga.wordpress.com)