In The Very Old Man With Enormous Wings, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, an Angel (or a foreign sailor with dirty wings) lands in a poor couple’s back yard. They are puzzled at first, but invite over the neighbors to help them figure out what they are encountering. Soon, they have stuffed the old man into the chicken coop, where the chickens groom his wings and charge admission to see the angel. They do nothing to protect him from the elements or the people they bring in to see him, and throw him scraps to eat.

In the end, when his wings grow in more fully, he stands up and flies away, leaving the family behind him, I think that what the old man stands in for is the most important aspect of this story. It is clear that he represents something, but I see numerous things that could fit what he stands in for. Literature is partially about empathy; learning to appreciate the differences in people and see through another’s eyes.

One interepretation that fits him, I think, is that he could be the representation of how we treat those who are different than ourselves; of another race or gender. In the text, we know that he speaks another language, and when the family hears him, they don’t understand it, but from hearing it, think that maybe he’s not an angel, but a lost foreign sailor. (The neighbor convinces them that he is indeed an angel, but that just goes to show how human he was, and that they recognized that.)

Yet, human or angel, they thought it was okay for them to stuff him in a chicken coop and let people throw things at him. What they did, regardless of the humanity they saw in him, was treated him like he was less than human. An animal. Which is what humans do when they come in contact with the strange. During the pre-civil war era, Americans decided that Africans were not human, (and it is a very very dangerous thing to keep narrowing your view of what a human
is) and thus treated them as beasts of burden. Deciding upon your superiority is very dangerous.

At one point, they said that they didn't have the "heart" to club him to death, as if had they not been so squeamish, that would have been an acceptable, or even the correct, thing to do. This, along with the ending (where the wife felt "relieved ... both for herself and him") where the wife is glad that he is out of her hair, also made me think of the impact of being so selfish that you can only think of yourself as complex and multi-layered, but others, especially those who are unlike yourself, as props, that you an stuff into th chicken coop for your own amusement or personal gain, which, when you think about it, is a very slave-owner mentality.

Reading The Boys Next Door, I kept wondering if it was okay to laugh. Some scenes walked the line carefully and made me wonder if laughing would entail laughing at the “boys” because of their handicaps, or laughing with them because of humorous moments they had, as people with disabilities.

I found myself so amused when Barry went into his pro golf, but that seemed less amusing when he was talking to his abusive father; I was laughing when Arnold was threatening to move to Russia, but immediately felt guilty.

The whole play I walked this line, although I got comfortable. Then, near the end, Tom Griffin hit me straight in the heart with the line, by Lucien (in this breaking-the-fourth-wall lucidity). “I stand before you a middle-aged man in an uncomfortable suit, a man whose capacity for rational thought is somewhere between a five-year-old and an oyster. (pause) I am retarded. I am damaged. I am sick inside from so many years of confusion, utter and profound confusion. I am mystified by faucets and radios and elevators and newspapers and popular songs. I cannot always remember the names of my parents. But I will not go away. And I will not wither because the cage is too small. I am here to remind the speices.. of.. the species. I am Lucien Percival Smith. And without me, without my shattered crippled brain, you will never again be frightened by what you might have become. Or indeed, by what your future might make you.”

Is that true? It certainly sounds profound. Do the damaged among us – anyone who is less than fully whole – make us uncomfortable because w e know but for luck or the genetic lottery or grace of God, we could be like that? The handicapped are less than functional; they are not less than human, and this play was so … humanizing; giving them humor and heartbreak and silly little dates where they sat on couches and talked about keys.

I think that this play goes out of its way to create not sympathy, but empathy for our fellow man who is a bit (or a whole lot) different from what we have come to expect as the norm. Even the title ‘The Boys Next Door,’ places them not far away, but as people who could literally live down the street, who could work in our mom and pop corner stores, frequent our libraries.

This play made me uncomfortable, made me see the ugliness inside of people; inside of me. (The heart is deceitful above all things and no man can contest.) It was like looking into a mirror and seeing how ugly people are, in the same way that Lord of the Flies does, but it also was very, very beautiful and touching.

I give life half of my attention. I've always been quick on my feet, and most of what I encounter makes sense to me after giving it a few moments of thought, or reading through the instructions, the explanation; write it out to me in words and I get it; explain it to me and I don't usually need to ask you to repeat yourself.

But I don't open myself up; I don't let things change me because I can do them on autopilot. I don't have to dissect words and look them up, for the most part, because I see them and they make sense and in my head I'm already making connections and picking out allusions to T. S. Eliot and Emerson and Thorough.

Reading Reading for Transformation, I just kept thinking about the way I read. Granted, I do get into what I read, I understand it, and I can break it down into thematic elements later, but I rarely give it all one hundred percent, don’t pull it in close and let it change me. I’ve lost that high school breathless wonder that expected each piece of literature to be the one that changed my life, because I was right back then, Whitman and Salinger (PBUH) and Oscar Wilde and The Love Song of J. Alfred; they meant something to me, held me captive while I thought about what they had to say, but it’s never been a spiritual practice.

I’ve never “meditated” on poetry that wasn’t from the book of Psalms, or Song of Solomon (and even that I give sketchy half-attention to because I’m a bona fide child and that book sort of weirds me out sometimes), giving it a chance to reverberate in my bones. I let words into my head, drenching my thoughts, and permeating my language, but not into my heart; my heart is off limits. I’m going to try it that way.

"Darkness is a question that must be asked seriously. Quick or sure religious answers to darkness offer us no hope because they shut down the question."

I love the set up of this syntax; the idea of "darkness" as something of a question, and not as something to be avoided. Corrigan has been drilling in the same idea, the same turn of phrase bout this subject since the beginning of the semester: there are no pat answers, or, there is no reason to rush towards them. That our faith and lives are not defined by the fact that we have questions, doubts, uncertainties, but how well we go about our journey for answers. Wrestling with grief, with sadness, with uncertainty doesn't make you any less of anything.

Jesus wept. Showing up four days after his friend had died, Jesus didn't arrive in a flowing superhero cape, toss aside the stone at the door of his tomb with one hand and fix the situation with a phrase called out in a booming voice: he wept. He was not an observer of Mary and Martha's suffering; he experienced it with them.

We imagine God as this supernatural Mr. Incredible, coming just in the nick of time in response to our cry for help, instead of as a co-sufferer. We forget that in Jesus living a human life with human limitations and exposure to temptations, he really does understand. I imagine him sometimes, facing temptation with a serene face instead of a twisted brow, his character out-of-line with the idea that temptation might actually, well, tempt him. But if Jesus came down here with no desire to sin, with nothing in his physically human makeup trying to warp him towards saving his own life, or towards his own glory, living a sinnless life means little. It's like saying that the only way a snake can "sin" is to grow wings and fly, and thus, snakes are saints.

I'm not rushing to an answer, because when I shake in the dark, I want to know where is God when little girls are getting sold into child prostetution, or when people literally starve to death on one side of the globe and people spend tens of millions on researching the cure for a disease called "having unluscious, short eyelashes" or any number of things that make me sick to my stomach, but when I finally do get there, and you can't call it a pat answer, because it doesn't leave me settled; it doesn't fit over my face like a snug, warm, blindfold, but I know that God is suffering, too. I think it's especially important to remember that today; that Jesus suffered and suffered hard so that we, as his people, could bring more pain to his heart, every day, but also so that some of us could be spared, if we'd only say "yes."

Happy Easter, everybody.

I spent forty beautiful minutes at Lake Bonnie Park, reading Mary Oliver and Robert Hoss.

While I was reading Hoss’ poem, I just kept thinking about the astounding similarities and defining differences between the two’s world view. Even more than Mary Oliver’s poetry, though, I kept bringing it back to Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself.

Robert Hoss looks at the world and is wowed. Not being able to sustain wonder, he says, is an evolutionary coping mechanism to getting us out of worshiping nature and onto more productive ventures. If we could be as amazed at everything as we were the first time we saw it, or experienced it, “we’d have never gotten off of our knees.”

Clearly being amazed by the world is something deeply personal.

Walt Whitman, in the same way, is always delving into nature. (Oliver, too. I keep leaving her out like the redheaded stepchild.) He’s amazed by the texture of grass and the scent of the woods and wet moss, and the perfume of the world and the call of the birds, the toads, the wild cats. He is always talking about replying to the call of the wild.

Mary Oliver, in the same way, references nature in a glorious, gorgeous simplicity. The common ground between all of them is their reverence of nature. Between Oliver and Whitman, though, in their natural world, God is never far off.

Walt Whitman says that the grass is like a handkerchief, dropped by God, so that people can explore it and prod at it and ask who it belongs to, and they will find his signature in the corner.

Hoss looks at the grass and comments on how inexplicable the evolution of the world into something this diverse and beautiful was. Where Whitman sees God, Hoss sees “cells dividing” and multiplying in complex ways. His eyes are open, much more than anyone I know, but his heart seems to be closed.

i.

I fall onto the earth,
heavy like the wave against the coast,
and just as naturally.
my hipbones were made to dig into the earth
as defined as shovels,
to anchor me into the grass.

ii.

The suns rays are like golden liquid today,
and they greet me like an old friend;
I get the sense that they have travelled
a thousand miles to nudge me with warm fingers.

I feel swallowed by their heat,
my heart patting a happy rhythm through my shirt,
digging itself a burrow,
half in my rib cage,
half-escaped into the soil.

iii.

Whitman says that this grass
is a handkerchief dropped by God,
so that we can search every inch.
And maybe he meant God, of Israel,
or maybe god, a literary device
that means something to old poets,
a kind of textured idea that sits in place of
love or justice or maybe condemnation
but I have my face pressed into the grass,
and I can feel capital-G-God's signature against my face,
as flamboyant as any John Hancock.

In my head, I can't help but smirk as I wonder,
"Whose?"

iv.

My philosophy is mind over matter,
so today I am nourished not by food,
but by photosynthesis,
and instead of the heat swallowing me whole,
I will swallow it:
absorb it through my leafy arms,
breath it in, hold my breath to wring every
drop of sunlight from the air.
It is summer
and my body is limitless.

v.

When I look at nature,
I use mostly my heart and my eyes a bit,
and leave my glasses at home,
so that I can see it face to face.
The edges blur, but the color is more than real.

vi.

A girl thinking about the near-nudity
of deep summer
told me she relies on water, lately,
and asked if I was doing the same.
Determined today to soak up only the sun,
I can't help but think about her.
The oak tree, maybe he's embarrassed
about the size of his roots, but I have my doubts.
I, though... I told her no.
I explained that the dimensions of my hips,
they didn't have anything to do with the
dimensions of my heart,
and that my legs could take me past ten miles of asphalt
if I put one foot in front of the other.

"Nature" and "human" are not such dissimilar ideas.
"Art" is not so far off, either.

If you took a blueprint of my body, or yours,
you would see how perfectly the joints fit,
how gloriously functional every chamber is.
A portrait of my crooked heart would show
that one of the doors opens and directs traffic
the wrong way
down a one way corridor.
Still, it's beaten a million times,
to bring me here,
to right here,
to right now.
So that I could swallow the sun on a steamy afternoon.

vii.

When I get up,
I comb bits of tree-debris and dry grass from
my hair, that too, wind tangled,
a modern day Rip Van Winkle,
and the world is different.
Darker now, and cooler,
the remnants of a summer afternoon's heat
still soaked into the grass,
my shirt,
my skin, warm to the touch.

I kiss the grass goodbye.
I know whose.

viii.

dear world,
my heart is an empty room.
come set up camp.

The first things that struck me about this poem:

1. This poem was s full of casual name-dropping allusions.

2. This poem is very aware of itself as a poem, and as literature, commenting constantly on poetry and literature.

3. The amount of science dropped just as casually into a poem is much more unusual to find than allusions. Allusions are commonplace, but for some reason (I think because of the distinictons we make between right-brained and left-brained and asking people to identify themselves as one or the other…) we assume that people interested in science and people interested in literature are exclusive audience, and that one reads Nation Geographic and the other reads The New England Review.

4. State of the Planet has such a fundamental curiosity about life and the world around it, while (and this ties into numero tres) also being deeply connected to literature and beauty and unanswerable, doubt churning questions. (“Cells that divided and reproduced. From where? Why?”)

5. The subject of this poem, for the first few sections, comes back to a girl. She’s running and it’s raining and she’s observing the beauty of the world and nature. In her bag, is a book, dog eared (well read / well loved) with a title “like” Getting to Know Your Planet, but then the subject of the poem seems to be the world itself; its beauty; its majesty; its history. But it keeps coming back to this girl. She understands the accidents of the universe, because she had an accident spilling milk that morning; and it comes back to her, her hair wet, and windshield wipers clearing her view out of the car.

6. So much geology, along with science and evolution and literary allusions.

7. Some of the imagery and lines were so unexpected. The rest of this will be about my favorites and what I got from them.

A. Section 1: “One of the six billion of her hungry and curious kind.” I love the image of this girl, running in the rain, (I privately imagine her laughing) to get to her car, her bag thump-thumping against her bag, filled with a dog eared book. This image seems to be a set up for the entire poem: with the human hungry and curious about the world around her, and experiencing the beauty of it both cognitively read-this-book-a-thousand-times and in a practical, feet-squishing against wet grass sort of way.

B. Section 1: “… that this was something we’ve done quite accidentally, which she can understand, not having meant this morning to have spilled the milk.” The two things I love about this line are that, one, the author uses the typical spilled-milk regret, (something that, as the saying goes, there is literally no use for) to draw a parallel with global warming / temperature change, and two, that a girl can sympathize with an entire planet’s mistake because she spilled a liquid. (Or an everyman object for her failures.)

C. Section 2: “Pacific Salmon nosing against dams … in a rage to breed.” Salmon literally jump up waterfalls to get upriver to breed each year, so the image of them confused and unable to pass a man made structure was really evocative, to me, and pretty much defines the entire theme of this poem.

D. Section 3: “… their bodies must be so strange to them. An artist in Chicago – thinking of a great trading city in Dacia or Thracia – has asked to learn the method so he can sell people dogs that glow in the dark.” Man is always using nature to direct him, getting ideas from it, imitating it. This is unnerving in the most satisfying way.