celtic_writer

Milk from the Moon

Two of my great uncles, Pat and Jack, were gold miners who lived in Jersey City.

Family lore has it those boyos spent much time in Alaska, panning east to the Klondike for enough gold to live for a spell way back in the lower 48. Prospecting, panning, treasure hunting, those Irish rockhounds turned geology into bits of bucks. They always returned to the asphalt foundation of the clan, but purposely made their lives an earned adventure. Did they find fool's gold? Bet they found plenty. They were never wealthy, but methinks in the process they saw clear mysterious lakes and heard the wind blow beautifully through fir trees taller than any tenement.

They were drift miners; together, yet solitary in their quest. They did not work as part of a large crew. Word has it some of the gold found was used to make the band of my grandmother Mary's simple engagement ring. They escaped the deception of daily life most summers to head north, when the weather was dry and creek waters low, exposing areas where shiny slivers might be waiting.

The alchemists of old claimed that to create gold, it was necessary to “give birth” to it. That a seed was needed, one purposely placed inside some womb so it could grow. I suppose for my great uncles this egg was one of transcendence, a state of living above and beyond the limits of material experience, employment likely misunderstood by the genteel populace of the time.

Is it better to live that way, rather than discover your hard-earned bowl's been buried in your enemies' grave? The likes of Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, former Enron executives, will be in court soon. A public display owning up to the idea that perhaps the top U.S. domestic product these days is corporate lunacy. Has clear, creative thinking been buried? The lesson in all this might be that taking responsibility for one's own decisions from now on might prevent all hard-earned eggs from being deposited in the care of some fool's basket.

But troubles---fiscal, emotional, social--- are children of our own creation. We birth them, watch them grow, fall down, get up, change before our eyes. And we hang on to them most painfully. One day these troubles grow up and leave us. There is nothing we can do to bring these particular troubles back. They're off down the road and we mourn for them, because we now have to take new responsibility for different effort. We can't hide behind the old heartache any longer.

What intrigues me about those two Irishmen is they didn't spend their days toiling to make someone else rich. They accepted the odd option: action that enables an individual to simply earn enough so he still has time to sit by the side of a river and look up at the night sky. Nourishment earned from milking the moon's light instead of wondering where it all went.

39 Yards of Empty

Friday afternoon, a soft-spoken fellah in a beatup truck delivered a dumpster. 39 yards of empty. When asked if he could place the rolloff on the asphalt of the drive, between the oak tree and Scott's fence, he said, "Yep, I can do that." He backed up the truck, clanged the iron box down on target, then said, "I'll be back Tuesday to pick 'er up." He drove on to the next part of his life, a simple guy doing a simple job.

The dumpster was almost empty. I unhooked its heavy safety pins, pulled hard on the iron handle, and its door rustily opened. I found a rubber wheel and a small styrofoam box in a far corner on its dirty floor. Fair enough. The rest of the space was mine to fill. There was a basement of stuff waiting, 3/4 of it not my own. Abandoned here by human beings who meant something to me but who have naturally gone on, due to death, growing up, figuring it out, feeling better, discovering new places. Our lives have layers, and the basement was one that required a final purge.

So, like a sculptor who cuts away stone until the picture appears, I began emptying the full to fill the empty. I found a old computer printer that boasted, under the dust of its label, "24 scalable fonts", two long-in-the-tooth microwaves, eight sets of tall bookcase bones sans shelves. Empty cardboard boxes for TVs no longer telecasting from here. Much furniture from kids' college days, schlepped from far-off places like Arizona and Lake Anna, now too musty and broken to be donated anywhere but the garbage. And let's not forget the boxes of old tax records Uncle Sam no longer considers important.

And then I found the letters. Pre-Internet, a box of messages written in pen, on some sort of paper. Postcards and verses from poet Landry, greetings from Bahstin K, a summer full of letters from Hank, now nursing the ill out in California. And I discovered some of the missives my parents wrote each other during the six years of their courtship in the 40s. Delivered by mail across the river from NYC to NJ, then back again. These letters, in this basement, were tied in fancy ribbon, now faded. My parents battled for as long as I can remember. They were passionate about each another, and both loved to dwell in conflict, melodrama witnessed and understood in my childhood as a way of showing off, not the way to treat an important relationship.

In another box, under some file folders, I found an inter-office memo envelope, the kind with two cardboard discs and a string for fastening, fat with letters I wrote my late husband Ken throughout our relationship. The times I was on the road teaching, so far away in the effort to support us through his illness; some composed as he lay in the next room, sleeping. I had no idea he kept them. No ribbons tie them together, then or now. Just a plain honest envelope, one of string and soul.

Sitting in a clearing on the cold basement floor with those different messages in my lap, I was reminded how letters are, as Thornton Wilder called them, "news of the soul." How if you read between the lines, carefully, you receive the essence of the person, who they are, what they are trying to share. How some humans can only express, without the audio armor of humor and intellect, how much they really feel through their plain penned words.

So the letters are now archived in a new place. A blue Rubbermaid tub, its lid burped to keep moist air away. Outside the wind is blowing, in the darkness, as I write this. The dumpster is almost full, with more to contribute to its depths later today. Another half-day effort towards the peace of finishing.

Two Henrys and Perfectly-Equipped Failures

Many literary folks would rather jump off a cliff than read a Henry James novel.

I like some of his work. But then again, methinks the short stories of Sir Walter Scott helped spawn science fiction, and the naturalist writers of the 30s and 40s were masters depicting the parallels of literature and science. In all of James' novels, there exists the "National Enquirer" busybody plot purled into the major story line. And there are tiny bits of wisdom knotted in the author's knitting, if one is patient enough to weed through James' verbose prose.

In this new year of 2006, there is all sorts of advice coming through the Net and across other media on ways you can physically and emotionally improve yourself. And if you don't, by gahd, there's something wrong with you. That is so American, isn't it? To seek a "project" rather than silently looking within.

How about those people who don't want to be fixed? Those average human beings who just want to live quietly, creating what is important to them. Who have no need to blunderbust their way through life, rubbing freedom and liberty and religion and money and terror and class in all noses...here, throughout the world, and back again.

The dirty laundry stories continue to appear in the news every day. Average citizens are being heard...without their knowledge. Warnings of a housing slowdown, with those brilliant greed-driven interest-only adjustable mortgages so many folks sought so they could show off more than they need, soon coming home to roost. Buck buck.

Many CEOs are in legal trouble. One local chap with the last name of Pukke made 80 million dollars "helping" the common American tethered in credit card hock to "get out of debt." This "successful" businessman will soon be on trial for misuse of tax-exempt status, as the company falsely billed itself as non-profit, while the man and his wife had three luxury homes and all the trappings money can buy.

James birthed American characters, time and time again, who believed you can create yourself through money. Many of these high-end characters have no sense of humor, are blindly loyal to class, and are really good at making other people feel uncomfortable. If that's success, you can have mine.

In the James novel The Ambassadors (1903), Lambert Strether, a bourgeois fiftysomething turn-of-the-20th-century New England fellah seeks the big time with a richer-'n-Roosevelt Brahmin Boston lady. He is dismissed by her until he conducts a mission. The task: go to Paris, retrieve my son Chad, who is cavorting with a French babe over there, bring him back, and then I will marry you. Lambert discovers that Chad is perfectly happy in France with a woman who may be dubious by staid Boston standards, but who is a cool person in her own right. Lambert sees beauty for the first time, and it is not the Puritan kind he knows. He learns that beauty has nothing to do with class or money, and neither does success. He speaks with one Maria Gostrey, a woman he befriends on this excursion:

"'I am a perfectly-equipped failure," Lambert says.

'Thank goodness you are a failure - it's why I so distinguish you. Anything else today is hideous. Look about you - look at the successes. Would you be one, on your honour?'

'Look, moreover,' she continued, 'at me.'

For a little accordingly, their eyes met.

'I see,' Strether returned. 'You too are out of it.'

'The superiority you discern in me,' she concurred, 'announces my futility. If you knew,' she sighed, 'the dreams of youth! But our realities are what has bought us together. We're beaten brothers-in-arms.' "

Another Henry...Miller that is...his work banned in so many countries, wrote:

"Living apart, and at peace with myself, I came to realize more vividly the meaning of the doctrine of acceptance. To refrain from giving advice, to refrain from meddling in the affairs of others, to refrain, even though the motives be the highest, from tampering with another's way of life - so simple, yet so difficult for an active spirit. Hands off!"

Photo Henry James:
http://www.ku.edu/carrie/specoll/AFS/library/2-ww1/James/Henry.html

Photo Henry Miller:
http://www.powys-lannion.net/Powys/America/miller.jpg