Hello from Mumbai–& from a blogger who says of his previous life: “I may have been a dog.” RT
So this is the deal, folks: I lost my job in fall 2009, and my unemployment benefits ran out at the end of February.
Difficulties pursue me as I try to keep everything in one piece: my apartment, utilities, social network…
As I wrestle with this latest episode of self-definition, I sometimes think of what Jane Jacobs has to say in her great book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities: life is not a work of art. It’s a difficult message for someone who’s an artist, but it reminds me that stuff left over from earlier in my life–i.e., unfinished homework–needs attending to.
And in the meantime, being poor has its lessons to teach, starting with discipline, which I take to mean recognizing and focusing on your unfinished business and living with challenges that might teach me humility and respect–taking a box of charity canned goods home, considering which church-sponsored meal might be ok to attend, trying to plan a career, instead of just taking a job. Wondering what happiness might mean for me…
We need time to process, and we are always getting older…if you’ve got what you need, you know it; if you don’t, find the courage to claim the things you need.
So life is not a work of art, but we need to make *some* sense out of it…like looking at a Pollack drip-painting, there is method (and beauty) in the madness. RT
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Photo: Budget Hotels in Tokyo; WikiCmns; CC 3.0 Unported; Author: Kounso.
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My father passed away on President’s Day, 1997, a few weeks shy of his 70th birthday. He was a Foreign Service Officer who fought in the Black Forest and went to USC on the GI Bill. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa, married my mother, and they went to Washington so he could take the Foreign Service Exam.
His birthday was March 6th, so I’m a few days late with this, but it seemed like the right moment to remember my father and his generation. When Dad received his Phi Beta Kappa key, he didn’t know what it was, so Mom told him he had earned a prestigious honor, and bought the key for him for his wedding present.
Soldier, scholar, public servant–we’re all thinking of you, Dad!
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P.S. The photo is of Dad holding me when I was about 5 or 6 months old. That’s a proud pappa!
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src: brockhaus&efron; wikicommons
word invention, one of those engines of language creation, seems to be out of fashion. It says weird, why don’t you fit in, normalize your vocabulary. Well, i think english could use some new bells and whistles. So I’ll offer some of the words I’ve made up over the years:
1) Zumi: a bridge
2) Azhoka: one of the languages spoken by centaurs
3) Panat: literally, a fifth; one of the divisions that the city Orrenea is divided into
4) Orrenea: a city of canals lying at the mouth of the Kirruri River. Seat of the Council of Kings and the Safarbin
5) Fire-pearl: a fresh-water pearl harvested from oysters in the silk-grass steppes
6) Zochi: the Dreamer, who made the moon
7) Aruna: the Singer, who made the sun
8) Asmeva: a centaur, what the centaurs call themselves
9) the Hisanzh: the island of the centaurs in Orrenea
10) the Magnaura: the building in Orrenea where the Council of King meets
all of these words from my novel about centaurs, which may eventually take wings and fly… RT
It turns out that Luwian was an indo-european language spoken by groups of people in southeastern Anatolia during the 1st and 2nd millenia BC. It is now extinct, but was almost certainly the root tongue of Lydian, a language spoken during classical times in the same area, which not suprisingly, came to be known as Lydia (Lydian is also extinct). For those interested in more famous events, it seems possible that Luwian was the language spoken in ancient Troy.
The language was written in Luwian Hieroglyphs, a 500-character system that was used in Hattusas, the Hittite capital.
Now, the reason that I mention something as obscure as Luwian is that I am a bit depressed. And somewhere I read that the best thing to do when you are depressed is learn something new. More often than not, this advice has worked for me.
Why, you might ask, am I depressed? Well, there could be worse reasons: I’ve just completed and am on the verge of publishing a chapbook of poems via Lulu. What started back in 2009 as simple frustration with the fact that I didn’t have anything to carry my poems around in smaller than a binder morphed into a project to publish a humble quick-print shop-produced, paper-bound edition and then, most unexpectedly, transformed itself into a professionally printed and manufactured book that is available worldwide. hmmm…..
i had the same feeling when I finished my 1st draft of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the 500-pound white gorilla sitting in the middle of my writing projects. I finally had it in first draft!
Then the blahs settled in. The Gilgamesh project has been going for more than 10 years, and I had already invested three of them in the effort. Then I got a job with a Big Commute attached; the job has happily faded over the horizon.
Back to more important matters. My chapbook contains a 100+ line extract from tablet 9. The book has been a year in production, mostly because the Gilgamesh extract proved tougher than I expected to put in poetry. then again, all the tablets have been difficult.
i look at Luwian and wonder about the immortality of writing (especially if it’s not officially sanctioned). some ink on a scrap of paper, a few electrons buzzing around in some machine…
then i remember that somebody (and probably more than one of them) has busted his or her butt trying to discover luwian inscriptions and decode them. & look at Gilgamesh, come down to us from the beginnings of history, 5,000 years ago…maybe there is something to the scribble…
The title of my book? Amassunu. It’s available now on Lulu, but I haven’t got the proof copies yet, so caveat emptor! (on the other hand, the softbound edition is available at a 15% discount!) 
I suppose, if you can’t be happy, then at least you can be crassly commercial.
Or then again, maybe the blues have moved on…. RT
P.S. if you visit Lulu, ALL will be revealed concerning my TRUE identity. 
P.P.S. my next post will contain a full-blown & shameless appreciation of Amassunu…..
And Last But Not Least: photo src: WikiCommons; Luwian hieroglyph: Enlil2.
they will never cut down all the trees in russia
I don’t see the sequence in my title
mentioned too often; what I usually come across is “seek & find.” It’s interesting that Jesus didn’t think that the finding was the hard part; the truth is all around us, if we stop and look at it. What’s hard is the expansion outward from the truth, the learning to live with it.
It seems that the truth is hard, painful, that we despair or run away from it, that somehow it’s not quite human. and what might that truth be? that possessions, including our bodies, are temporary, and that we mistake them for ourselves. the truth is, we die.
& yet somehow, we can’t believe it until we’re right in the middle of it: “I thought this might be it,” a friend said to me about being rushed into an operating room one day. He lived, but I don’t think he is unaware of the expiration date on his goods any longer.
& that is when we get to the wonder part. we see what’s really around us & come into contact with the goodness in other people, the beauty of the world. we lose our attachments to anything that drags us down, that isn’t part of what we are and are meant to do. Perhaps this is the most dangerous moment in the journey, for there is still work to do, the ruling of ourselves and whatever we know we have to finish in the allotted time. So why didn’t you ever finish your novel, detailing the car, making up with your family & friends, going to bermuda for a couple of days?
& by the way, you aren’t hungry are you? why are you still hungry? when you’ve dealt with the inner wolf, you can get some sleep.
that’s all for now, folks.
it’s easy to get distressed these days
so maybe the best way to begin talking about the extraordinary is to say that we all encounter it, and in fact, every day. but what is needed is energy, focus, and a belief that we can enter and appreciate it…..this place is & heals….are you feeling well? have you had a vivid dream? have you experienced something in your routine in a new and astounding way? or have you encountered something new & beautiful? are you taking care of yourself?
starting with your energy is a way of reaching beyond yourself.
