A Circle in a Lake: Writings while Reading the Collected Works of William Shakespeare

Plus Six

Collected Writings May 1-September 5 2011

For Jim Cohn: For over thirty years, my confederate

When I listen to them now (early demos I recorded on an afternoon in a studio in 1964 and haven’t heard since and had forgotten they existed) I know how little I have changed and how many similar stories are told in my later songs. That love is changeable, that you cannot pin anything or anyone down in this world—and if you try it mostly won’t work. I still feel the same, a little suspended in a life that has turned and twisted in many unexpected ways, some good, some not so good, but always and always and still filled with hope.
—Vashti Bunyan

allotrion: an idle pursuit that distracts from serious responsibilities

Shakespeare was 46 when the King James Bible was written. In Psalm 46 of that work, the 46^th word from the first word is “shake” and the 46^th word from the last word is “spear.”

A Circle in a Lake

Table of Contents

Henry VI, Part I (1591)………………………………………………………………………….5
Henry VI Part II (1590)………………………………………………………………………….6
Henry VI, Part III (1590)…………………………………………………………………………6
Richard III (1592)………………………………………………………………………………..7
Venus and Adonis (1592)………………………………………………………………………..8
A Comedy of Errors (1592)………………………………………………………………………9
Love’s Labour Lost (1594)………………………………………………………..……………10
Romeo and Juliet (1594)………………………………………………………………………..12
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595)………………………………………….……………….13
The Sonnets (1592-1595)……………………………………………………………………….15
Merchant of Venice (1596)……………………………………………………………………..15
Much Ado about Nothing (1598)……………………………………………………………….16
As You Like It (1599)…………………………………………………………………………..17
Twelfth Night (1599)……………………………………………………………………………20
Merry Wives of Windsor (1600)……………………….……………………………………….23
Troilus and Cressida (1601)…………………………………………………………………….23
All’s Well That Ends Well (1602)………………………………………………………………24
Measure for Measure (1604)……………………………………………………………………25

Plus Six
For Karen Dalton……………………………………………………………………………….26
Ring Composition, First Movement……………………………………………………………26
Ring Composition: Interlude…………………………………………………………………   29
Ring Composition: Third Movement: Chiasmus…………..…………………………………..29
Ring Composition: Fourth Movement: Shiva’s Ghats in Kathmandu……………………..30
Walking Home from an Homage to Stan Brakhage at the University of Colorado, Boulder,
April 5, 2011……………………………………………………………………………30

Not printed in an unlimited edition and available for free
to friends and others for Christmas, 2011. Some assembly required.

This is number _________________

Henry VI, Part I (1591)

stichomythy: (a form of dialogue originating in Greek drama in which
lines are uttered by alternate speakers)

She:
Such a sorry thing,
dependent, suckled from another
everything it needed, blundering
from one disaster to another.

By discord great things decay
and turn into ruins in a fall so slow
they seem for a moment
to hang in the air, to float.

He:
Much of it is otherwise.
Are you captured by your own invention?
How you think of it determines what it is.

She:
The sum of what we were and what we will be and what we are
is like a stone that’s fallen from heaven, living and decomposing
at once, but to go out as a shower of sparks, no idea of its trajectory,
not aimed at any target, no history or knowledge of its history.

And then expecting answers, lacking any way to prepare
for what we’ve been tossed into, except maybe the way
a stone thrown into a lake becomes without choice
or effort a perfect circle that it can never comprehend.

He:
The wind that moves the barley is unseen.
Only by its effects can it be implied.
This is as we are, bending in the breeze.

She:
There begins the confusion.

He:
Every flower was once a seed in dark underground.
Let there be snow.
It does not mean an end to spring.

Henry VI Part II (1590)

Winter Sunlight

Driving deeper into the clouds
at the peaks a curtain of snow—

in all five directions
a cloak on what summer was—

winter in the mountains
the white of bones, of rabbits

sunlight through the cumulus,
half shadows under the pines—

my reflection in the windshield
between me and what lies ahead.

Henry VI, Part III (1590)

But … we saw our sunshine made thy spring
And that thy summer bred us no increase…. II.ii.163-164


As a swan, evenly matched,
swims against the current,
neither conquered nor conqueror,

the inevitability of losing,
in the days, months, years
I have left of what this is.

Even a marble hand
wears out after almost
sixty years of rain.

All the hours I’ve spent
on a body of work,
that’s the shadow of a life,

crossed-out by
whatever comes next,
not even slowing the tide.

Richard III (1592)

Happiness is the art of never holding in your mind
the memory of any unpleasant thing that has passed.
—The Buddha

At first dash
like a circle in the lake
what I have said is true,

but in my memory books
everything is faced with artifice—
tailored for a story I’ve told

so many times it’s become
a ritual, and what really happened
comes back to me only in dreams—

the shadow of an eagle searches for a mouse
under the snow that covers the stubble
that’s left after harvest.

I stand between my shadow and the sun.
I am only where I’ve been and what I’ve seen.
I step into wherever I’ll be next.

What was I saying? I was in the
middle of a story. I can begin again
if you tell me where I stopped.

The brittle alabaster moon,
I’m not sleeping, a notebook
that once was full of words.

Venus and Adonis (1592)

… mihiflauus Apollo
Pocula Castalia plena minister aqua.
(Fair Phoebus lead me to the Muses’ spring.)
—Ovid, Amores

Feed where thou wilt, on mountain, or in dale
graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry,
stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.
—232-234, Venus hitting on Adonis
Her hair gilds the water as she glides,
later spread on a towel to dry
sun glittering gold.

Make use of time, let not advantage slip.
A compact not of fire but of flint.
The sunset begins to glow.

I’m headed into darker waters,
measuring my strangeness
against the stream.

The silver waves icy like shattered glass,
the black swirling chaos, the undertow,
the sharp stars burning in the sky.

A Comedy of Errors (1592)

Driving with my back to the dawn
the yellow tip of sunlight sneaking
into the canyon.

My tires hum on the asphalt.
I follow the highway
obedient as any river is,

knowing that I’m driving nowhere,
knowing that a moment ago
I didn’t know it–

rushing as if behind me
the canyon was blazing,
in this melodrama I’ve imagined.

Love’s Labour Lost (1594)

Vir sapit qui pauca loquitur. (That man is wise who speaks little.)

1. From the Magus to the Petitioner

Let’s look over
the oracle that
you’ve thrown.

I see a rose
at its reddest
and sweetest. I see

lightning at midnight
in a moonless sky—
white, silver, then black.

I see footprints in the sand
erased by rain, a yellow meteor
in an orange sky,

a cloud that both is and is not,
and beams of sunlight passing
through it both lyrical and ornate.

Petitioner:  There begins the confusion.

How we uncover the “will be so”
is to understand what came before.
Just so, these bones have been thrown

a thousand times, and there is something
new about the way they’ve fallen every time—
but there is something that is the same.

In this way I see the difference
as the answer to what you’ve asked of them.
It’s something closer to listening than speaking.

But you’re a writer.
It would be like being for a few moments
the scaffolding of a pen directed by another.

If you were a singer it would be
to lift whatever you were given
into song.

What will be is just not here yet,
but it’s visible as a lesser light
behind a greater.

You have consulted an oracle
but you are given only hieroglyphs
that are to you opaque,

yet shine with all you cannot see.
An oracle finds the light behind
the bright obscuring light.

II. The Petitioner Answers the Magus

So, is this the final oracle that caps all the rest?
Or is this the moment for applause
before the houselights rise?

What I will do now I do not know.
Having heard the oracle,
what choice do I have?

The moon disappears
when it cannot see the sun.
That same moon that’s overcome

by the emergency lights
turning the snow outside my window
red then white then blue.

Romeo and Juliet (1594): “… birth, and heaven, and earth, all three do meet / In thee at once….”

What, rouse thee, man! Thy Juliet is alive,
For whose dear sake thou wast but lately dead:
There art thou happy. Tybalt would kill thee,
But thou slewest Tybalt: there art thou happy.
The law that threat’ned death becomes thy friend,
And turns to exile: there are thou happy.
A pack of blessings light upon thy back,
Happiness courts thee in her best array,
But like a misbehaved and sullen wench
Thou pouts upon thy fortune and thy love.
Take heed, take heed, for such die miserable.
Go get thee to thy love as was decreed,
Ascend her chamber, hence and comfort her.
III.iii.135-147
In the early morning, her white belly.
Love and death have their own formalities.

How often in our triumph we begin our fall,
how often wisdom is glanced at and passed over.

How often a quick bright thing becomes confusion,
cut-glass snow crystals swinging in the sun.

How often portents in the stars or in dreams
foretell what we should have known already.

But the Muse has lately been some other where.
She sleeps or else says nothing.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595)

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,
Are of imagination all compact…
The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to aery nothing
A local habitation and a name.
—V: i:7-17
Two lovers one arm
around the other lost,
together in the forest.

Nature is mysterious.
The sky’s simple light
dazzles the mountaintop.

At night she takes off her
dark bracelet and puts on
a necklace of silver and ice.

Lightning bugs and moths, the wild—
honey, apricots, mangos, figs
mountain lions and coyotes,

a copper ring, her red hair,
enough food for three nights,
plunging deeper into the forest.

So this is one way to tell the story,
equivocating, or I could highlight
the sense of the inevitable or the magical,

make joy for a moment overwhelm oblivion,
begin the story over,
this time turning it into song

as if life didn’t already pass too swiftly
and all I’ve accomplished already
is as fleeting shadows cast by something bright,

and then when it’s over I’m asked
to account for what I’ve done, when I think
it’s enough to have accomplished anything at all.

Am I even certain I’m awake now?
My life became my life the way a script
becomes a film–

it isn’t what I imagined
but in one way it’s better
even though it’s almost over—

it exists, something I created out of shadows,
out of what I had left after what I
wanted to be had withered.

But what a dream it was!
Above the mountains
the belt of stars came into view–

while I, afraid of bears this close
to the river, lit a fire, stirring it,
half asleep, my arm around her waist.

I cannot report how we got here, really.
The trail has melted with the snow
and turned into clouds.

The disappointments are darker
than anything I was prepared for
by comedy, purgatario or nightmare.

The brightest things take their brightness from the sun,
yet darkness falls every evening and half the world
descends into incomprehensible confusion.

Seasons upend the seasons they succeed—
events occur without explanation and the
impossible is as common as the happenstance.

To almost go too far to find my way back,
a clown, a puzzled prophet,
a bewildered cow.

The Sonnets (1592-1595)

The red glow of a manuscript in the fireplace,
red waves erasing everyone and everything
I’ve written on the page, stirring the embers,

restive, the ash drifts upward, as if life
was a riddle that had been puzzled out,
or something simple, like a look in a mirror,

dreaming of things I’ve since forgotten,
remembering what I was other than the writing,
the hills silvered-over, yellowed fields, the sun

reduced to an amethyst hung around my neck.
But to wear this world out to the end. Nothing
stands to the scythe as I do now.

Merchant of Venice (1596)

I put her to sleep with a lullaby,
praise her with a hymn, wake her with a love song,
fall asleep with my arm around her waist.

The moon is above us, but it’s hidden by a cloud.
And now that it’s almost morning
I wish the dark would last a little longer.

The best I can do is remember the way it is
with music, with what is transitory and imperfect.

Much Ado about Nothing (1598)

“I was not born under a rhyming planet….”

Abandoned by love then restored to love again—
the entire curve from ordinary to extraordinary
and back again.

What shatters is what’s false.
We are kept in darkness, perhaps
for our own good.

There is a release from everything.
When she sleeps she becomes a raven
and flies over the cypress to the sea.

Sunlight falls on the lake,
lifted by the winds into the sky,
silver-blue tinsel sailing past a cloud.

All of life is like water in a sieve,
a blend of grey and frost and storm.
That is my conclusion, although I admit

it’s a little narrow. But think not
of the end of time. Let the stars
for their little lives dance.

As You Like It (1599)

Touchstone: The truest poetry is the most feigning.

I.
The sadness, knowing that I have much of my father in me,
his spirit strong in me, but not like him I wandered off
in search of a distant world which continually receded

until I was far into the desert. How long will it take
to make my way back when all I can hear is broken music,
my thoughts hardened into mesas willing to be visible

in exchange for immobility, while I’m distracted
by anything that’s a kind of ember, like a winter
morning’s ice in the air, rough winds from the north,

too much all at once or nothing at all, to have seen too much
to hold any one thing, as rain overfills fountains and smoke
overflows a chimney, a green gilded snake escaping from

the sun under a bush, pouring into one glass what I am
emptying from another—being as I am my father’s son.

II.

Rosalind: A traveler. By my faith, you have great reason to be sad. I fear you have sold your
own lands to see other men’s. Then to have seen much and to have nothing is to
have rich eyes and poor hands.

Jaques: Yes, I have gained my experience.

Rosalind: And your experience makes you sad. I had rather have a fool to make me merry
than experience to make me sad—and to travel for it, too. Farewell, Monsieur
Traveler. Look you lisp and wear strange suits, disable all the benefits of your own
country, be out of love with your nativity, and almost chide God for making you that
countenance you are, or I will scarce think you have swam in a gondola.
I use words to express
the silence they destroy,
to lift them into song.

It’s hard to live as if life
is elsewhere, or that this comedy
is imaginary or tragic by design.

I call that into question—it’s an art of lies
and all that word implies of fabrication
and artifice. My vision of poetry is

mountain rain and snow
carried by a river
back into the sea.

III.

Touchstone: Hast any philosophy in thee, shepherd?

Corin: No more but that I know the more one sickens the worse at ease he is; and that he that
wants money, means, and content is without three good friends; that the property
of  rain is to wet and fire to burn; that good pasture makes fat sheep; and that a great
cause of the night is lack of the sun; that he that hath learn’d no wit by nature, nor art,
may complain of good breeding, or comes of a very dull kindred…. Those that are
good manners at the court are as ridiculous in the country as the behavior of the
country is most mockable at the court.
Being mortal, it’s a short life
in every way that we go through it alone
or together, until we can go no farther.

I wish it was not one quarter
autumn and one quarter winter,
but that’s how the story goes.

What a life this is. Was.
All things are savage here.
Nothing is wasted.

I stand alone
in the full stream of the world.
I take it all on.

Twelfth Night (1599)

He:
When we cease to grieve for what is dead
our memory becomes a raft at sea,
we lose our way in the everyday,
travelers who set out for Arden
we find ourselves in a nightmare
different from those who stayed behind,
altered into a version of ourselves—
a romance turned into a tragedy,
bartering the mythical for the strange,
for everything we have left behind,
the confusion, the not returning
to the places where we came from,
leaving it more or less as we found it,
yielding to the current without trying
to escape, waiting to see what time will bring,
listening as if the silence is about to break into poetry.
And then it’s over. Sober, everything vanishes
without understanding any of it—
the world between the world of fiction
and the one of fact.

She:
The evening has worn on.
Everyone is drunk and
living out their imaginations,
the detailed voyage of the anecdote
more important than its port,
in a war against time
and human forgetfulness.

He:
There will be no awakening from this dream.
It is the task of the song to teach us this,
to build a bridge to what is for all of us
for all time, the eternal that’s behind
what’s apparent, sweetened if we can by music.

But even operas must come to an end.
The death of what is by no means dead today,
as in summer there is an excess of sun,
or a bank of violets is a symbol of spring—
or after harvest the field becomes a pasture of snow.

She:
What is inconstant does not mean it’s less
or shouldn’t encourage us. If one thing breaks
there is another that will hold—

a compact not of flint, but of fire—
the way stars shine overhead
but not the ones on maps.

II.
Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?
—II.iii.114-116

Remember me,
for I am already
forgotten. But

there is a thread—
if you follow it
you will come to

what I wove out of the
bones I was given—a shrine
to a melancholy god,

whose mind is an opal,
a blank that revolves
as the constellations spin.

Nothing that is so is so.
There is no way out. But
how hollow the somewhere else,

the undertow that runs inside the stream.
My house is dark,
I cannot find it.

As a howling after music
what is it if this be so?
Born in one moment

and then almost instantly
at the other end. But what’s
to come is still uncertain.

My mind is hungry as the sea,
beyond what’s true and the improbable
nothing that is so is so.

Well, this is what I made
with the paper and crayons
I was given.

How can this be tolerated,
this howling after music?

Merry Wives of Windsor (1600)

Honi soit qui mal y pense: Evil to him who evil thinks.

Playing with words,
becoming by the end more of a question.

The story beyond the stories
is a Phoenix born of ashes,

the scent of corpse on its wings,
bleached and ragged linens flapping,

the first cry as it rose like the silver cheeks of fish
bursting through the surface of a pond

the way their underwater shadows flit,
as if pursuing what they’re unable to escape.

Troilus and Cressida (1601)

They say all lovers, swear more performance
than they are able, and yet reserve an ability that
they never perform; vowing more than the perfection
of ten, and discharging less than the tenth part of one.
They that have the voice of lions and the act of hares,
are they not monsters?              —III, ii, 84-89

To learn how to continue
to function when you’re broken
is how it goes from here,
to leave behind the promises
of an incomprehensible god.

Troy burned in this kind of silence,
and in the smoky morning after
the victors slaughtered a goat,
not knowing their journey
was not half over yet.

All’s Well That Ends Well (1602)

Love all, trust a few, / Do wrong to none.—I.i.64-65

Everything has a reason
but sometimes it’s ambiguous.

It’s hard to convince with intellect alone—
there must be some exuberance in it.

An idea is a matter of words alone,
a shadow, the name not the thing.

Then more by accident than
on purpose language becomes fact

and behind the story
the real gradually fades away.

I want something tangible and significant—
not the transparent language of fables

or what vanished long ago,
nor what is not yet here–

death with its smoke and shadows
is not that far away.

Life alone is life—
I cannot comprehend the rest.

Knowing I will never understand
should I put what I’ve written in the fire?

It might be best, silence what I was
after, after all.

And “All’s well that ends well yet,
Though time seems so adverse and means unfit.”

Measure for Measure (1604)

This news is old enough, yet it is every day’s news.

A scar is carved by a life that’s lived hard—
a terminus, something that makes sense.

No one knows enough to be certain
in a world where the ordinary

is transformed into the extraordinary
and back again—as in heaven

as on earth, and back again
and always in the midst of some transformation.

Why do I do all of this writing—
like a lion in a cave, cut a little,

I bleed–my verse thunder more than lightning,
sometimes illuminating the dark by accident

if heaven provides, or recovering what has been
if not. Nothing ever goes the way it’s planned

and since it is so, there is some anticipation
to see how it goes—glimpsing for a second

what’s behind it, since it is
heaven everlasting.

For Karen Dalton

Note: The singer Karen Dalton lived in Boulder and the mountains above Boulder between 1960-1962. Bob Dylan wrote of her in Chronicles: “My favorite singer in [New York City in the early Sixties] was Karen Dalton. She was a tall white blues singer and guitar player, funky, lanky, and sultry. I’d actually met her before, run across her the previous summer outside Denver in a mountain pass town in a folk club. Karen had a voice like Billie Holiday’s and played the guitar like Jimmy Reed and went all the way with it.” “All of us in the Bad Seeds are huge Karen Dalton fans,” writes Nick Cave in the 2006 re-issue of “In My Own Time.”

Why do you think you have to sing so loud? If you want to be heard,
you have to sing softer.—Karen Dalton

Fred Neil, Speaking at Her Service

Note the clearing she’s made
so she can move it this way
and then in a different direction
the way you would if you were actually speaking,
until the melody becomes something in the words themselves,
and the music becomes transparent like snow
that lands on a raven, living on the edge
in two states at once, but headed toward dissolution
looking up into the unknown, all candles burnt out,
but in the early morning light the landscape is restored
as more light grows, and the darkness is eclipsed.

When you first see the mountains,
they look small, and then they grow slowly.
She liked that sense of space in her songs as well
and made room for harmonies others would sing.

Her songs were paintings made from life.
She expressed her feelings the way
she wanted her feelings to be expressed.

She would sometimes find herself in situations
where somebody could hear her, but oftentimes
she couldn’t even do that. If she told me she’d written
my songs herself, I would have believed her.

She fled to the mountains for the winters,
taking a turn for the bluish.

When you go out to the edge you might not
make it all the way back. At times I turned off the radio
not wanting to hear her sing at all.

Not being famous was not her fault.
No one seemed to know what she was on about, and then
after years that felt like centuries she took off for oblivion,

with no idea that she would ever be of interest to anyone,
like teenage poetry in the back of a drawer,
one of the beautiful no-ones who ever truly lived.

Ring Composition: First Movement

In Veranasi the eldest son carries his father
on his shoulders, stepping carefully down
the steep and dusty steps, the corpse board
tilted dangerously toward the Ganges,
toward an open granite slab, silver-grey
smoke from the slab beside it, its corpse
ashes now, poked with a stick, gathered
to be thrown into the river, along with all
its pleasures and remorses—its wasted opportunities—
whose end was written before it began.

After sunset it’s like a housefire except the mourners
aren’t hurrying they’re shuffling silhouettes,
hunched away from the smoke, wooden boats
ferrying the damned across the river, the grieving
on the shore like something out of Job, and the chanting
from holy books about God’s mysteriousness
to those of us observing, those who have been left behind,
while a few feet above them two vultures hover.

To live beyond a certain age is to become
a branch with a ring for every winter, then all of it
is thrown into a fire by the eldest son, pouring a
handful of sugar to make the fire burn hotter,
the flames licking the windblown pennants
between us and the vultures and the stars.

Whomever we feel ourselves to be
we are not, and at the same time
we are never false, especially when we’re
falling into ashes.

This impermanence poets turn into a victory
or a song, like Charlie Parker would.

Ring Composition: Interlude

If those who are here no longer could choose
I bet they’d choose a moment of suffering,
knowing it would end, how delicious
to fall fully into grief, knowing exactly
how total the loss really is but that
the loss of loss is the worst loss of all.

Ring Composition: Second Movement: Chiasmus (the halfway point in Ring Composition,
denoting the beginning of the return to the beginning)
I am always in motion between what I am
and what I’m about to be, but I’m more
than what the weather has made of me,

I’m in the absolute behind the thoughts themselves
in the unconventional lines of jazz,
one long breath—

not knowing where I’m going
but seeing the labyrinth for what it is
and the spinning wheels.

What will never be finished
cannot be camouflaged or covered over.
But what doesn’t wreck us perfects us,

beats us into ourselves,
not only what we are but what we were and
what happens from this moment until the end,

seen without pity, none,
no starting over, no remorse,
no making right, no silver lining

made transparent by what we’ve
suffered and survived,
like pointing a camera at the sun.

I have no idea where I’m going
or what I hope to accomplish—
I’m doing what is necessary

to be a victor, a champion,
a troubadour, a clown—
a dying moth, a guided missile,

to shout from inside the tomb
refusing to die,
refusing to be silenced.

Shiva’s Ghats in Kathmandu

The artist is the one who fails most gracefully,
the one who dies undefeated and undecided,
writing his way forward, bewildered by it all.

Part of me knows it can’t be otherwise
and yet it’s not enough for me,
driven forward by fate and luck

one’s as easily subject to unluck.
This is just what happens, they tell me,
everything eventually

wears out, destroyed by weather and time,
everything falling over all around us.
We cannot get away from our own destruction.

So I sail from place to place
for refuge as the story unfolds
in all its imperfections,

following the crowds into the electric lights
through the gates and down the steps
as the sky darkens and the sun dissolves.

Walking Home from an Homage to Stan Brakhage
at the University of Colorado, Boulder, April 5, 2011
I follow paw prints on the path,
as snow falls on these words
and makes them swim.

Italian Restaurant, NYC (for Ira Cohen)

I walk to far end of the restaurant and take a seat facing the front door, across from an elderly couple who are already sitting in the booth next to mine. He leans across the aisle and stage-whispers to me, as if he is telling me a great secret, “Get the pasta special—it’s a good value. It’s probably the best deal in the city. We come here about every two weeks, my wife and I, just for the pasta special. I don’t know if you like pasta?” “Well, we’ll see,” I smile and return to the menu.

Looking it over, it is a good value, and it was what I probably would have ordered anyway, so I order the pasta special. It comes with coffee, salad, and a dessert. When the waiter leaves, I lean over and say to the couple. “Thanks for the tip. I ordered the special.” “Ah, wonderful. What did you choose, if you don’t mind my asking?” “I got the shrimp fettucini.” “Oh, I’ve never heard of that. That sounds good. I get the spaghetti. My wife gets the salad and we share dessert. She gets a Coke, I drink the coffee, and we both eat for under twenty bucks. It’s the deal of the century.”

The coffee arrives cold. The wife is unhappy that I’m not eating the quarter head of lettuce that remains of my salad. She tells me, “You could take that salad home—it’s a whole meal in itself!” When the main course arrives, the elderly man leans across the aisle and asks, “So what kind of pasta did you get, if you don’t mind my asking?”

They’ve just come from a film and they’re trying to decide if they’ve ever seen it before. She doesn’t remember seeing it but he says he swears he remembered certain scenes, just not the details, and he often knew what would happen next.

His wife is trying to catch the waitress’s attention. She’s ready for the check and would like her Coke wrapped to go. When the waitress returns with the check and her Coke transferred to a Styrofoam cup with a lid—she takes it out of its brown bag to show her, warning her to carry it upright–takes several bills from the old man’s hands and counts it out for him, showing him the bill, telling them to wait for her until she returns with their change. After she leaves, they stand up and begin organizing their packages. “I could carry that,” he says, but then he has trouble zipping up his jacket. He holds the zipper in one hand and doesn’t have a clue about what to do next.  “Maybe I can’t carry that. Can you carry part of it?” Then she remembers they haven’t gotten their change and they take off their jackets and sit down again.

The waitress leaves before he can count out the change. His wife yells after her not to forget about her Coke to go. “That’s what you’re holding, sweetie!” she calls over her shoulder, not slowing down and waving goodbye without turning around.  “Oh,” the old woman says, looking at the bag in her lap and recognizing it. He asks his wife, “What did I give her, a five?” 

They stand up together. “I could carry that,” he says, but has trouble zipping up his jacket. He can’t seem to remember how to make the zipper work. “Maybe I can’t carry that. Can you carry part of it?” He sees me watching him. “What did you order, young man, if you don’t mind my asking? The special? That’s what I had too! What kind of pasta? Shrimp fettucini? That sounds interesting. We always get the spaghetti. She gets the salad, and fills up on bread. We come here about every two weeks, don’t we honey? We eat like kings for less than twenty bucks. It’s the best deal in the city. So what kind of pasta did you have, if you don’t mind my asking?”

Journal Entry Paris

This morning a long Metro ride to Ecole Militaire from Reuilly-Diderot for the Rodin Museum. A few stops in, a guy with an electric guitar and an amplifier gets on and stands near the door. At first I groaned inwardly, remembering the accordion player who got on my car two days ago. I was riding from south-east Paris to the Pompideau, sitting for most of the ride across from an old Eastern European woman who was wearing a black wool winter jacket with a caul over her head. She was bent over at the waist, her forehead near her knees. She was holding a rosary and praying almost out loud. She was definitely over-dressed for such a hot and muggy day.

A man of about forty got on with an accordion and he pushed numbers into a Casio beatbox until he got a shuffling samba beat and began a polka on his shiny red tortoise-shell Vox accordion. No one was in the mood for happy accordion music at 7 in the morning, and when everyone turned their backs to him, he slammed the Casio off and walked up and down the crowd with one hand extended and the other continuing to play a polka I didn’t recognize and that didn’t seem distinctive at all—just a bunch of notes on a polka beat. When everyone (including me) ignored him, he stopped playing mid-song and went back to his machine and slammed it off. He crossed his arms over his red Vox accordion and stared us sullenly until we reached the next station.

Anyway, this guitarist had a beatbox too and began by playing “Rawhide,” which I thought was a surprising choice for the Paris Metro. Nothing fancy, but each note clearly and precisely defined, with a nice attack and more or less tremolo added to each note to give it that little bounce or depth.

I was sitting across from him on one of those fold-down seats in the landing of the car beside an elegantly dressed man with a briefcase and a young Japanese woman in a red and white flower print dress.

I didn’t want to look up. I didn’t want to get involved. But I liked what he was playing, and I wanted to see his fingerwork. Plus, who was this guy playing “Rawhide” in the Paris Metro?

He was wearing black hi-top Keds with white laces, black pegged jeans, and a reddish-brown Seattle-plaid shirt, that looked freshly laundered. He was playing a vintage black Stratocaster, I’m guessing pre-64, a thousand-dollar guitar if you can find one. He was playing with a white plastic pick, and he held the guitar close to his body, and swayed back and forth, a little hunched over, gazing at his own reflection on the silver floor.

When he became aware that I was watching his fingerwork, he palmed his pick and began to fingerpick, playing freestyle. His fingers moved from string to string, precisely attacking each note and leaving it reverberating as his fingers went on to the next string.

His fingernails were long on his picking hand, and rounded and short on his left. He didn’t slide, or hunt and peck, he drummed the strings, stretching and striking them against the fretboard the way a piano player touches the keys with deliberate delicacy or force, depending on how much vibrato or clarity they want in each note.

During one intricate passage, the turned to look over his shoulder at the stone tunnel slashing past. He had short blond hair, clean-shaven. A little weathered to be so young, but healthy and bright-eyed.

He was playing a song he was listening to in his own imagination, and it was uncoiling through his fingertips as he listened. He never pushed himself, he didn’t attempt to play outside of what his fingers could actually accomplish. Each note was precise with lots of air and space around them.

I could almost feel the force of his concentration, but his playing seemed effortless and fluid, very much in the air but also taking shape from something deep inside of him. Or perhaps he was gathering it from the air, listening to the notes he was hearing as he was forming new notes and remembering was disappearing replaced by surprise, and then with whatever comes next, replacing that with what comes next,  listening and playing at the same time. And sometimes he’d hit a note that would make us both laugh  and he’d turn to stare at his reflection in the window and wait for some way to re-enter the song.

Then he returned to the basic rhythm of the song and waited for the melody to come around again, resting his right hand on the soundboard, turning his index finger over and grabbing the white pick, darting out a flurry of angular off-kilter endnotes.

As they continued to reverberate, he bent over, adjusted a knob on the Casio, began playing the bright beats of “Samba Pa Ti” and I laughed out loud and he looked up and we shared a laugh, although he couldn’t possibly know what I was laughing at.  Then he rested his right palm on the pick-guard, palmed the pick, and began playing the melody with just his fingertips, brushing the strings firmly. Then his right index finger hammered out a counter melody, and then with the fingers of his left hand he echoed it after a few bars with a triplet melody until he created a fugue out of a samba. And then he took a breath and returned to the melody, but extending and bending the notes and dropping in unexpected and discordant noise, launching short and then longer runs and fills around a steady drone from his right thumb. By now the businessman and the young Japanese girl had also stopped whatever they were doing and were listening as intently as I was.

Then in a gentle way, he began to ascend away from the melody entirely, soaring above it, overlaying a brace of crisp notes in the air, the descending notes guttural, reverberating like stones dropped in a deep well, the upper register bright and glistening, and the third theme played with his left hand coming together in single note that he maintained longer than anyone could possibly imagine, until he raised it and sharpened it higher and higher until he hit a pitch that was like the ice of a thousand windows shattering into gold.

A British Novelist Gets Released by His Publisher 
        Konaki Greek Restaurant, London, England, in Publisher’s Row,
                     a block across from the main entry to the British Museum
 
I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make a joke at your expense. I was only trying to make light of the situation. It just sounded like the set-up and payoff for some classic joke: “How did the editor who fired you get into publishing?” “There was an opening.” But they’re right, it’s easier to make a thousand people laugh in an auditorium than ten in a small room. Maybe people feel less inhibited when they’re in a large group, more anonymous. Maybe in a small room they’re afraid to be the only one laughing, or maybe they’re too self-conscious. But even though I know all that, I still find myself making jokes in the most awkward circumstances. I got a joke once from Isaac Asimov about the relationship between editors and authors that almost always works. I should have gone with that one instead.

I worked for your last editor at one time, early in my career. It’s a shame he retired. Since he’s gone I write for one or two friends. That’s more than enough for me now, but I was lucky that when I was starting out there was a real literary reviewer at “The Times.” You could tell that he’d actually read the book, and he’d thought about it before he began writing, and that he considered it a public service to report on the book and not just tell people if he liked it or not. I don’t think he ever mentioned himself in a single review. He wasn’t the star, he had a job to do, and a responsibility not only to the book, but to literature itself. He chose the books he reviewed, and he’d choose them based on his sense of their importance, not on their popularity. Now books don’t even get the kind of attention that sports gets in the papers.

I know it sounds like I’m complaining, but I had my time. I feel lucky I was writing when I was. I appreciate that I had the chance of having my books thought about and considered. I wouldn’t like to be starting out now.

Recently the BBC rang me up and asked me to write something for “This Is My House.” Have you ever heard of it? Me neither. I didn’t know at the time that it was a series. I wasn’t even sure what they were asking for or why they were asking me. I thought “Why are you ringing me up? It doesn’t sound like you’ve even read my books.” They wanted some stories from the war. I have dozens of stories from the war—the collapse of the shelter at Brighton, the rations, the nightraids, the calmness between the bombings, weeks without a full night’s sleep. The uncertainty, the comradeship one felt for everyone still alive in the morning when you went out to survey the rubble, what had been destroyed, and check on friends and family.  But is that who I am? Is my life more interesting than what I’ve written? Is that what I want to do, tell stories about things that happened sixty-five years ago? They weren’t interested in me as a writer, they were interested in me because of when and where I was born—things I had absolutely no control over. I said no. I didn’t want to start thinking of myself as only interesting because of what I’ve lived through. That’s something I’ve seen in writing over the last half-century—it’s less about the writing than about the writer. But when did I stop being a writer and become a character?

The first thing you need to tell someone who’s achieved a modicum of success is “it’s not going to last.” Except if you’re Shakespeare or Beethoven, and theirs didn’t outlast their lifetime either. It’s all about timing. If you lose the sense of that and think it’s about you and the book, then you’re in for a rough road. But if you can go all the way over into becoming  a newspaper cartoon, there’s a kind of immortality in that too.

Well, I’m luckier than most. I had a few novels published, by prestigious publishers, and was fairly reviewed. I’ve even had one made into a film, although that was less than a satisfying experience. Someone at my publishing house had an idea and they wanted someone to write a thriller and I’d known Ian for ages and we talked about how he wrote those Bond books, and Max was enthusiastic, so I took it as a challenge and had a fair bit of success. But I owe it all to Max’s wife. She read the manuscript and told me to add all that spicy stuff. Later they made it into a film and it was hideous. But they put another story in front of me. I read the treatment and it was awful and I was writing Omnibus at the time so I passed on it and they gave it to someone else. Of course it’s the one that became a huge bestseller, then a franchise. But the writing in that book never cast a shadow. I mean, humor me. For the first book, he deserved all the attention he got. He traveled, he did original research, he really worked on that book. But since I read the original version of this second manuscript, I know who made that book. His editor just poured sugar over the whole thing. My sympathies go out to her.

And they swallowed the whole thing, didn’t they? There’s nothing new about Christ having an affair. This has been talked about for centuries, and not just by Christian mystics and Jewish scholars. If you didn’t know all this stuff it must have come as quite a revelation. I was totally astonished by its success. But mostly it just proves that it’s a matter of luck if a book becomes a bestseller or not—it’s not a matter of blood. It’s all totally unpredictable, but if there’s nothing sensational about it, it just goes under the radar. It’s not about the writing or what it gives you to think about, it’s about what happens, it’s about the story. Well, that’s my excuse, at any rate.

Neither this nor that, she always smelled of lavender,
brown eyes with bits of gold—tiger’s eyes, she called them.

Is there a shadow behind the closed door?
Is it the room or the room reflected in a mirror?

By the beginning of May the cracks in the earth begin to close,
and there’s the clean air of after-the-rain, standing in the ficus shade.

Vultures wait in blackened ruins at the end of the road less traveled too,
but I knew that when I started.

I’m almost used to clouds instead of sun.
I give my pen a shake.

I dreamed this into existence,
and soon the dream will be over.

Already, only shadowy figures
floating across the landscape,

and soon the God of Memory
Mneme, will entirely disappear.

A shadow that’s wandered into the valley even though the sun is at its zenith.

It’s colder at the bottom of the lake. And for whatever reason I was a conscious part of it.

But soon will be no more, and that will have to be enough whether I am pleased with it or not.

Until then, am I driving or am I driven?

The days are shorter now. Restlessness and impatience have returned. The bright water of the icecaps returns rocks from the tallest mountains back into the sea, but I cannot walk from where I am to where I want to be.

Who knows what’s going on in anybody’s head? We are on different journeys and mostly we have walked alone, but each is happy to see each other miles from the last human being–we smile, and continue moving, but for a moment slowing down, realizing one is not all alone even in the farthest wilderness. Not sure what anything means.

Once everyone is settled, there will be a five-minute prayer service. There are no photographs, no recordings, and no cell phones allowed. At the end of the service, the doors will be opened and we will be asked to leave quickly, because the next group will be waiting to enter. There will be no wandering around the temple on our own. The maximum amount of time allowed in the Temple is fifteen minutes.

Young women walk the aisles inside the temple, directing people wordlessly where to sit, encouraging them to take their seats quickly, to turn off their cameras and cell phones, to remain silent. The young women keep their hands clasped at their chests at all times, facing the crowds with their backs to the three speakers who wait their turn to address the crowd, scanning the crowd for anything unusual. When someone looks the hostesses in the eye and acknowledges them, they smile and raise their fingertips to their lips and whisper Namaste (“I acknowledge the divinity in you as the same divinity in me.”).

Families of bluebirds fly overhead through the silence to nest among the concrete rafters.

An elder cantor sings a prayer from the Koran.
A young Palestinian reads a passage from Jewish scripture.
A young Islamic woman sings a Christian song of praise,
and the mandatory five-minute prayer session is over.

A thousand years before the Tibetan Buddhists made first contact with westerners, they created Maitreya, the future Buddha—the name the Buddhists gave to the 10^th incarnation of Visnu. This Buddha is the only one portrayed sitting in a chair as opposed to the lotus posture, and this Buddha, unlike anyone in Tibet at the time, was blue-eyed.

The skies have turned white.
Something never seen yet long desired
is about to happen.

It’s as if a dream has come to life
just before blindness has taken over—
or the reverse, a night that becomes a chunk of light

that becomes a forest fire that is spreading toward my house.
I know this is the moment
I’ve been waiting for.

This is the moment I decide
if I’m going to stay or if I leave.
Other than this, everything’s just biding time.

Far below me in the valley
a burst of orange-red jumps the black lake
and surrounds my cabin with pink light.

In the morning I can’t read what I have written—the fire is
played out, the silence is broken and the morning sun too bright,
watching myself dreaming. Then I sleep some more,

just as in the morning the sun pushes away the night,
but in the evening itself is pushed away
by an even greater darkness.