Lignum In Luce
Lignum means wood in Latin though I remember my one classical brother telling me that it also had to do, if I could believe him, with the movement of natural light across the surface of a solitary piece of wood over the course of a day spent making a word bank, a lexicon for what you see there, what happens to your senses.
~
Pallets suggest the pallet-makers. The extent to which this is lost on shippers and handlers drives me bananas. Pallet-makers may or may not call any one pallet they nail together Pallet the God while freight forwarders go about their business like Automaton.
~
Nowhere on the farm are skulls set upon sticks, as I was told some would be, but remain in use in the heads of sentient beings coexisting. The person who told me to expect skulls on sticks slurs his speech, which may explain our misunderstanding. This gives me an idea. A history of slurred speech is one worth telling.
~
Who can say if the blue wheelbarrow goes unused anymore? It may be in constant use whose owners are workaholics. We admire their work horses (as the blue wheelbarrow remains wedged in Mulch Mountain) but can’t pat their noses, one after another in a long line of stoics, without one bolting. “A horse walks into a bar,” workaholics tell us to ease the tension, and the bartender says, “Hey buddy, why the long face?” One wonders what fraction of animal stories pressing mammals together like odd bedfellows ends in punchlines like horses leaping from quays into rolling green oceans to tread water.
~
Cows use horns as sense organs. Horns give cows a sense of their surroundings and metabolisms. Cows without horns can’t feel anything. A hornless cow doesn’t know who a cow is as an entity. Farmers take horns off cows so cows won’t notice cows close by. Cows with horns require a wide berth. Enter the personal space of a cow with horns and see if cow likes it. Cow is a strong-willed being. Who goes near cow now? If you do, see cow get out of the way of you. —Dreaming Cow
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A transcendent god was overheard listening to bigots today. It was overheard listening to codependent women and mansplainers with some alcoholics in their ranks who were the industrialists plotting the clearcutting of forests meant to last forever. The poet Nerval intones Christ among the olives as I ask after trees, Are you holy?
the Lord lifted his thin arms
to the sky, as poets do
after the silence
and the loss of his friends’
belief…
I saw him once too, you know, but my dream showed him in snow, barefoot among the evergreens. There was a wintry scent and the look of it, his noble mien slipping in and out of view amid dipping branches more real than I would have imagined, his approach across the drift, in one tired word, breathtaking. To not wake up is to go on living.
~
What lives in the rotting stump with carpenter ants, beetles, gorging termites if not usual suspects? Sunlight reshapes the city block, a square measuring one-point-seven million square feet, with its apartment complexes, cineplex, food court, a thousand or more sacred pedestrians, into a shrinking circle whose surface recalls the open face of the stump, with its core and radial lines and rings of life inviting you to rub it with your finger.
A Girl Gets Her Heel Caught in Her Mother’s Pocket
Noia is the most sterile of human feelings.
It’s the child of spiritual numbness
and mother of nothing.
It isn’t merely sterile in itself
but renders sterile everything it invades
or gets close to, etc.
—Giacomo Leopardi (September 30, 1821)
[Please accept la noia as the noun meaning the bore or the boredom in Italian and not, for Ben Lee, that loanword from the Greek leading to a mental wandering demeaned by paranoia.]
Ben Lee is not original. His only talent, if originality and talent go together, rests in teaching sentence structure in easy-to-remember ways to teenagers in need of remediation. If this feels like a fishing expedition on his part, well then fine: who will lift him up for a second? Who will take his place modeling deep reading to boys caught in their strides between drifting away and quietly joining and saying without pride what makes them special? His own Original Scene appears every day as metal lockers with combination locks, desks in rows and circles, rollcall and acned faces, posters of essential authors, including one mystery figure John Dewey who no boy is curious enough to ask about, and fire-drill and live-shooter protocols.
On May 23, 1832, the Italian social critic Giacomo Leopardi writes in his hodgepodge manual, “Original men are not as rare as we think,” also true of a woman. If he does not clarify that the discovery of one’s own originality springs from intentional, repetitive doing toward a desirable product, is it because one also makes beautiful gestures involuntarily, when originality and beauty grow as enmeshed in the realm of the unintentional, the automatic, as they are in a performance of Christmas Oratorio? Strangers kiss their children hello and goodbye with childless men and women looking on in admiration. What makes this beautiful scene feel like originality to Ben Lee if not his suspicion of a happy upbringing as a myth suddenly dispelled by incontrovertible shows of affection between parents and their little ones?
The teaching profession fills yearly with originals unsure of their true callings. Teaching is an accessible career, a profession, if not everyone can be Restorer of Antiquity for the Smithsonian. Poplars grow outside Ben Lee’s window with green teachers heard through their own windows telling their students to look to the boy on their left and the boy on their right to see who can follow instructions. Who can contemplate a question without an answer? Who among us is a true original? What of originality is intentional? What is beauty? To what extent do we understand this about ourselves? Given this insight or lack of insight, what practices will we develop for self-regulation over the course of a lifetime?
Mother and daughter board the train at Duboce Triangle heading south away from the school building. The daughter so forceful and scrutinizing for or like someone so young, the mother a small woman in an artists’ smock with a spot of yellow on her chin and earlobe and flecks of green on her wrist. Her head gray like down flung from a pillow, she shares a face with her daughter, only hers is gaunt as her girl’s oscillates between concern and knowledge as happiness. Pressing her thumb into greens and yellows while climbing her mother some of the way to heaven is conjuring a burly father when her heel gets caught in her mother’s pocket like a foot stuck between two ribs and she must hang from her mother’s neck until freed from it.
Asking if rails stretch out before us into the distance is the right way to say it, for she must look in the direction we are heading, the child catches Ben Lee staring. Leopardi lies open in his lap like he is reading. Whispering aloud to her daughter that people can’t always help overhearing, for Ben Lee’s sake the mother uses originality in a sentence: The root of the word originality, origin means God or the extent to which someone feels their connection to it, like an old Sufi saying that there are as many ways to God as there are people. Because she whose mouth is stained purple, whose mother wants her to get down off her, cannot draw stairs and perspectives, wheels draw closer together as the space between rails narrows. Some mothers issue daughters challenges instead of warnings: Be quiet for ten minutes without even coughing, and I will give you something. Daughters think it over.
Be not budge-friendly when our originality we are coaxing. The inverse of the Leopardi maxim, No one is original, is as old as the hills, buildings, and pedestrians passing in the rain beyond the window. A girl sits beside her mother on a train fake coughing. Like parenting, the supervision of other people’s children, some teachers in their probationary periods have yet to notice, slackens diurnal rhythms while accelerating the passing of seasons down to a few seconds. Ben Lee must execute more exhilarating lesson plans if he wants to capture a child’s imagination. He must sit some part of the workday by himself in silence, if not in meditation more ritualistically. Original and unoriginal men and women are one and the same when they are and are not tired.
Of Civilizations Soon Wiped Clean (Improv for Joan Riley)
No scene has a meaning, no scene moves toward an enlightenment or a transformation. The scene is neither practical nor dialectical; it is a luxury—and idle: as inconsequential as a perverse orgasm: it does not leave a mark, it does not sully.
—Roland Barthes, “Making Scenes”
On the word go, players bring to life what’s inherently dramatic in a prompt their audience devises for them: You’re in a job interview but forget what you’ve applied for [Go]. You’re stuck in an elevator with strangers’ feigned serenity filling the box like water [Go]. You’re lost in a foreign land whose language is half as Greek as architecture dreamlike [Go]. You’re a door-to-door salesman sprung from midcentury America to sell enough perfume samples to win a Caribbean cruise from Central Manager [Go]. You’re a spy spying on your ideal nation for one you despise [Go]. You’re a hostage-taker demanding for your lone hostage breath food water shelter sleep clothing [Go]. Not your original but a freshly implanted artificial intelligence churns out second-person prompts for performers seeking catharsis to act on [Go]:
~
One of two mountaineers, no sooner have you reached basecamp than you must gesture to your darkened audience (nightfall) snow falling upon outstretched tongues. You must remember to look at your companion when speaking your desire, agree on a general direction for the scene commencing, hog no limelight whatsoever but more like grown siblings reminiscing about a warm, distant birthplace, listen closely for the creaking floorboards of First Home. Please make her look good as she makes you look good as you make those entering stage left and right look good. Assume or decline the role of headstrong caretaker and never look back on your decision [Go]:
~
An understudy playing Simple Simon in tonight’s performance of The Cherry Orchard, you grew up believing you would have no one to talk to. Tolerating hungry faces whose mouths ache to explain something, thespians listen to you past midnight. If they’re sleeping together why not join them [Go]:
Your date to the Sadie Hawkins dance will teach you French kissing if you let her. She will explain the mechanics of dry humping failing to mention a surprise ejaculation at the end of each session. Your classmate’s interjection: “Let’s see the brilliant move, Mister, if you have one” [Go]:
You're a bluesy guy after all, as is your companion, to wit. She lies next to you gently snoring while you stare into space in the belief that, whether you would amount to anything without her, the two of you combined form the mind of an inventor. That you have a hard time holding down a job, you're working on it. Your giddy charm, what a coworker calls symptomatic of an illness, is something to work on. [Go]:
You ask a woman if certain positions determine the gender of the child you want to conceive together. Enumerating ways, doggie, butterfly, modern missionary, lazy grind, rocking horse, reverse slither, and so on, you never mean to objectify her. You've known her since the third grade. You're thinking about her thighs this morning [Go]:
You are a high school English teacher finding your classroom crammed with semblances of those once living—Anne Frank, Cesar Chavez, Black Elk, James Baldwin, Hellen Keller, Emily Dickinson. Rachel Carson spots a brown pelican through birding binoculars as the North marches to war, and the South. Your students raise their hands to ask the whereabouts of weapons civilian soldiers brandish in old photos. Where are the hats now? Shoes? Buttons? What clocks we count on to keep appointments. What bicycles we ride for the love of going places. What brand of glasses bridges the nose of Keith Haring whose splotchy face, a picture of an illness, is a self-portrait [Go]:
Float like Ophelia floats in the heavy raiment of the period once you have dropped from willow tree into brook. Swap your speech as she once swapped hers for flowers growing more garbled by the second. Sink down with palms up [Go]:
Principal Joan Riley approves your improvising scenes about most things not personally experienced but never the dead and dying in Palestine without first understanding who in the audience is grieving [Go]. Huddle with your students in a bombed-out shelter for who bombs the same shelter twice without fresh intelligence [Go]. Accompany other people’s children into scenes from civilizations soon wiped clean—Mayan, Minoan, Mississippian Mound Builders, Petra, Easter Island, Khmer, etc. In an age of anger, when everybody looks to see who is exotic, is part of what makes a Roman a Roman her not living outside the empire? Who will say, “I am aware of your concerns—you want to be respected.” [Go]:
~
One of two mountaineers, you reached basecamp an hour ago and have yet to receive an official welcome. Crowd onto the rickety old stage with the other players, chitchat in silhouette, pass the flask while set builders erect a sagging doorframe [poetic], snowshoe, crampons, sunscreen, hook, avalanche transceiver, winter wren, cloud, jetpack, falcon, wings, pale blue, weather balloon, that evening star, Leonids to animate what older folks call heavens:
Dip of Bell ladles earthly light
late in a nuclear age,
such lively details ensemble mates,
generous imagination,
the theatergoers. [Go]:
