Sunbird from M is for Magic

I come from a family of people who like to eat, and who remember vacations by what we had to eat when we were there. The smell of fresh pineapple and Coca-cola brings memories of our last trip to Hawaii, and one of the things we remember about going to England was the completely fried breakfast we were served at a B&B in the Cotswolds--fried egg, fried bacon, fried tomato and...fried toast. Our most memorable meal in France was in the shadow of Chartres, at a sidewalk cafe where we ordered meals in French and so weren't sure what we were actually asking for (I got four tiny little birds, which were delicious).

So the story about The Sunbird is one I was primed to like as we return from our summer vacation. It's about an Epicurean Club whose members were always looking for something new to eat. At the outset, they think they "have eaten everything that can be eaten," including "several long-extinct species." So one of them says "I fear we must hang it up for there is nothing left that we, or our predecessors in the club, have not eaten." Then one of them suggests the "Sunbird."

The reaction to his suggestion is that he's making it up. One member says it's imaginary, but another responds that "unicorns are imaginary...but gosh, that unicorn flank tartare was tasty." So they decide to travel to Egypt to capture and cook a Sunbird. They find one, admire it, bow to it before it dies, and then they cook it. "It tastes like heaven," one of them says. Another says "It tastes like love and fine music. It tastes like truth." As they continue eating they say "It tastes like my youth. It tastes like forever." And then they all burst into flames. They have achieved their end.

It's a small idea for a story, but the idea stays with me. You go on a quest for your heart's desire, and then what you do when you find it--you eat it! I guess that's why we sometimes stand in front of the refrigerator when we don't know what we really want. As Stephen Dobyns says in "How to Like It," we stand there looking "as if into the place where the answers are kept." Do you ever find your heart's desire when you look in the refrigerator?

The Noise the Hairless Make

Last night I went to a rehearsal for the "Good Friday Project, an arts event focusing on the human realities of suffering and death." It put me in a mood, especially the piece about a wife who had trouble forgiving her husband for being in the hospital and taking all her care for granted. It made me want to slap her, and the somber cello piece following did nothing to dispel my mood. I had to go home and read some poems from one of my favorite volumes of poetry, Cemetery Nights by Stephen Dobyns.

"The Noise the Hairless Make" is the poem that did the most to restore my equilibrium:

How difficult to be an angel.
In order to forgive, they have no memory.
In order to be good, they're always forgetting.
How else could heaven by run? Still,
it needs to be full of teachers and textbooks
imported from God's own basement, since only
in hell is memory exact. In one classroom,
a dozen angels scratch their heads as their teacher
displays the cross-section of a human skull,
saying, Here is the sadness, here
the anger, here's where laughter is kept.
And the angels think, How strange and take notes
and would temper their forgiveness if it weren't
all forgotten by the afternoon. Sometimes
a bunch fly down to earth with their teacher,
who wants them to study a living example, and
this evening they find a man lying in a doorway
in an alley in Detroit. They stand around
chewing their pencils as their teacher says,
This is the stick he uses to beat his wife,
this is the bottle he drinks from when he
wants to forget, this is the Detroit Tigers
T-shirt he wears whenever he's sad, this is
the electric kazoo he plays in order to weep.
And the angels think, How peculiar, and wonder
whether to temper their forgiveness or just
let it ride, which really doesn't matter since
they forget the question as soon as it's asked.
But their muttering wakes the man in the doorway,
who looks to see a flock of doves departing
over the trash cans. And because he dreamed
of betrayal and pursuit, of defeat in battle,
the death of friends, he heaves a bottle at them
and it breaks under a streetlight so the light
reflects on its hundred broken pieces with such
a multicolored twinkling that the man laughs.
From their place on a brick wall, the angels
watch and one asks, What good are they? Then
others take up the cry, What good are they,
what good are they? But as fast as they articulate
the question it's forgotten and their teacher,
a minor demon, returns with them to heaven.
But the man, still chuckling, sits in his doorway,
and the rats in their dumpsters hear this sound
like stones rattling or metal banging together,
and they see how the man is by himself without
food or companions, without work or family
or a real bed for his body. They creep back
to their holes and practice little laughs
that sound like coughing or a dog throwing up
as once more they uselessly try to imitate
the noise the hairless make when defeated.

As the man from mars says in Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, laughter is a kind of bravery. I've had times in my life when I wasn't brave enough to be able to laugh, but I'm not proud of them, and I don't see the sense in dragging them out for display once they're past. It seems a morbid fascination to me. I think it's nearly impossible to properly compose your thoughts to deal with the paradox of Good Friday while wallowing in other peoples' suffering. Because "only in hell is memory exact."

Where you are most dangerous and stubborn

I still have more animal poems, and I've been thinking about this one in light of my recent progress in becoming less underemployed. Thinking I had nothing to lose, I sent the head of my department a link to my whiny post about the last day of teaching a freshman-level class, and he not only made sure that I got two sophomore-level classes for next fall, he also found me a sophomore-level class for this spring, when he had thought there was nothing for me to teach. And the sophomore-level class, "Relationships and Dialogues" is my favorite one, especially in the spring "when a young man's fancy turns to love." So I can say that my writing actually made something happen! And it was because I felt cornered and desperate, like the bull in Querencia, by Stephen Dobyns:

In the children's story of Ferdinand the Bull,
the bull gets off. He sits down, won't fight.
He manages to walk out of the ring without that
sharp poke of steel being shoved through
his back and deep into his heart. He returns
to the ranch and the sniffing of flowers.
But in real life, once the bull enters the ring,
then it's a certainty he will leave ignominiously,
dragged out by two mules while the attention of
the crowd rivets on the matador, who, if he's good,
holds up an ear, taken from the bull, and struts
around the ring, since it is his business to strut
as it is the bull's business to be dragged away.

It is the original eagerness of the bull which
take's one's breath. Suddenly he is there, hurtling
at the barrier, searching for something soft and
human to flick over his shoulder, trying to hook
his horn smack into the glittering belly
of the matador foolish enough to be there.
But there is a moment after the initial teasing
when the bull realizes that ridding the ring
of these butterfly creatures is not what
the afternoon is about. Sometimes it comes with
the first wrench of his back when the matador
turns him too quickly. Sometimes it comes
when the picador is driving his lance into
the bull's crest--the thick muscle between
the shoulder blades. Sometimes it comes when
the banderillos place their darts into that same
muscle and the bull shakes himself, trying to
free himself of that bright light in his brain.
Or it may come even later, when the matador
is trying to turn the bull again and again,
trying to wrench that same muscle which he uses
to hold up his head, to charge, to toss a horse.
It is the moment the bull stops and almost thinks,
when the eagerness disappears and the bull
realizes these butterflies can cause him pain,
when he turns to hunt out his querencia.

It sounds like care: querencia--and it means
affection or fondness, coming from querer,
to want or desire or love, but also to accept
a challenge as in a game, but it also means
a place chosen by a man or animal--querencia--
the place one cares most about, where one is
most secure, protected, where one feels safest.
In the ring, it may be a spot near the gate
or the place he was first hurt or where
the sand is wet or where there's a little blood,
his querencia, even though it looks like any
other part of the ring, except this is the spot
the bull picks as his home, the place he will
defend and keep returning to, the place where
he again decides to fight and lifts his head
despite the injured muscle, the place the matador
tries to keep him away from, where the bull,
sensing defeat, is most dangerous and stubborn.

The passage through adulthood is the journey
through bravado, awareness, and resignation
which the bull duplicates in his fifteen minutes
in the ring. As for the querencia, we all have
a place where we feel safest, even if it is only
the idea of a place, maybe an idea by itself,
the place that all our being radiates out from,
like an ideal of friendship or justice or perhaps
something simpler like the memory of a back porch
where we laughed a lot and how the setting sun
through the pine trees shone on the green chairs,
flickered off the ice cubes in our glasses.
We all have some spot in our mind which we
go back to from hospital bed, or fight with
husband or wife, or the wreckage of a life.
So the bull's decision is only the degree
to which he decides to fight, since the outcome
is already clear, since the mules are already
harnessed to drag his body across the sand.
Will he behave bravely and with dignity or
will he be fearful with his thick tongue lolling
from his mouth and the blood making his black
coat shiny and smooth? And the audience, no matter
how much it admires the matador, watches the bull
and tries to catch a glimpse of its own future.

At the end, each has a knowledge which is just
of inevitability, so the only true decision
is how to behave, like anyone supposedly--
the matador who tries to earn the admiration
of the crowd by displaying grace and bravery
in the face of peril, the bull who can't
be said to decide but who obeys his nature.
Probably, he has no real knowledge and,
like any of us, it's pain that teaches him
to be wary, so his only desire in defeat
is to return to that spot of sand, and even
when dying he will stagger toward his querencia
as if he might feel better there, could
recover there, take back his strength, win
the fight, stick that glittering creature to the wall,
while the matador tries to weaken that one muscle--
the animal all earnestness, the man all deceit--
until they come to that instant when the matador
decides the bull is ready and the bull appears
to submit by lowering his head, where the one
offers his neck and the other offers his belly,
and the matador's one hope is for a clean kill,
that the awful blade of the horn won't suddenly
rear up into the white softness of his groin.

One October in Barcelona I remember watching
a boy, an apprentice, lunge forward for the kill
and miss and miss again, how the bull would fling
the sword out of his back and across the ring,
and again stagger to his feet and shake himself,
and how the boy would try again and miss again,
until his assistant took a dagger and stabbed
repeatedly at the spinal cord as the bull tried
to drag himself forward to that place in the sand,
that querencia, as the crowd jeered and threw
their cushions and the matador stood back ashamed.
It was cold and the sun had gone down. The brightly
harnessed mules were already in the ring, and everyone
wanted to forget it and go home. How humiliating
it seemed and how hard the bull fought at the end
to drag himself to that one spot of safety, as if
that word could have any meaning in such a world.

This morning the newspaper's top headline is "44,400 jobs gone" and one of my best friends tells me she is being "outsourced." We're all going out to do the things we must, even though here the roads are snow-covered over ice and with every step, I'm afraid of the split second that could land me in the hospital. Sometimes what you've got to do does seem humiliating, until you consider the alternatives: Not going out. Not even trying. Giving in to what other people think. Accepting predictions as inevitable. Lying in bed like Gene Wilder's character in Young Frankenstein, screaming "Destiny! Destiny! No Escaping That For Me!"

Missed Chances

My dissertation adviser is coming to the local college to give a talk in a few weeks, and I'm looking forward to seeing him again, but feel a little apprehensive, like you do anytime someone you admire comes around with that how-did-your-life-turn-out question trembling at the back of his mind.

To a career academic, my life may not look like a happily ever after story. I didn't end up with the big prize, a tenure-track teaching job. Now even one of my closest friends, an academic, has taken to lecturing me about various subjects, perhaps because I often venture opinions bluntly, rather than couching them carefully in academese. So what do I say, to anyone who has chosen what I think of as the sell-your-soul-to-your-job path in life? That there are other paths to intellectual fulfillment? Will whatever I say come out as defensive--or worse, patronizing?

I think it's easy to assume that the other guy has gone down the wrong road, if he's not on the road you're on. What we all want is to consign everyone who did not make the choices we made to the city of missed chances, like in the Stephen Dobyns poem "Missed Chances."

In the city of missed chances, the streetlights
always flicker, the second hand clothing shops
stay open all night and used furniture stores
employ famous greeters. This is where you
are sent after that moment of hesitation.
You were too slow to act, too afraid to jump,
too shy or uncertain to speak up. Do you recall
the moment? Your finger was raised, your mouth
open, and then, strangely, silence. Now you walk
past men and women wrapped in the memory
of the speeches they should have uttered--
Over my dead body. Sure, I'd be happy with
ten thousand. If you walk out, don't come back--
past dogs practicing faster bites, cowboys
with faster draws, where even the cockroach
knows that next time he'll jump to the left.
You were simply going to say, Don't go, or words
to that effect--Don't go, don't leave, don't walk
out of my life. Nothing fancy, nothing to stutter
about. Now you're shouting it every ten seconds.

In the city of missed chances, it is always just past
sunset and the freeways are jammed with people
driving to homes they regret ever choosing,
where wives or helpmates have burned the dinner,
where the TV's blown a fuse and even the dog,
tied to a post in the backyard, feels confused
uncertain, and makes tentative barks at the moon.
How easy to say it--Don't go, don't leave, don't
disappear. Now you've said it a million times.
You even stroll over to the Never-Too-Late
Tattoo Parlor and have it burned into the back
of your hand, right after the guy who had
Don't shoot, Madge, printed big on his forehead.
Then you go down to the park, where you discover
a crowd of losers, your partners in hesitation,
standing nose to nose with the bronze statues
repeating the phrases engraved on their hearts--
Let me kiss you. Don't hit me. I love you--
while the moon pretends to take it all in.
Let's get this straight once and for all:
is that a face up there or is it a rabbit, and if
it's a face, then why does it hold itself back,
why doesn't it take control and say, Who made
this mess, who's responsible? But this is no time
for rebellion, you must line up with the others,
then really start to holler, Don't go, don't go--
like a hammer sinking chains into concrete,
like doors slamming and locking one after another,
like a heart beats when it's scared half to death.

Maybe we can't get it all straight once and for all. Maybe all I can do is overcome my pride enough to say some of what I think, and a little of what I feel. Maybe this is one of the many tests of adulthood, and as Indiana Jones says in The Last Crusade, "only the penitent shall pass."

How to Like It

If I can make it through today, February will be over. I'm struggling to keep any kind of positive attitude, especially since it's snowing again. The schools finally got tired of delaying or canceling and have decided to ignore the weather today. I can't go anywhere when the roads are bad, so I'm rereading one of my favorite poems by Stephen Dobyns. It's about the restless feeling that I get this time of year--the urge to go somewhere new, especially somewhere with new weather. It's a spring break road trip longing.

How To Like It

These are the first days of fall. The wind
at evening smells of roads still to be traveled,
while the sound of leaves blowing across the lawns
is like an unsettled feeling in the blood,
the desire to get in a car and just keep driving.
A man and a dog descend their front steps.
The dog says, Let's go downtown and get crazy drunk.
Let's tip over all the trash cans we can find.
This is how dogs deal with the prospect of change.
But in his sense of the season, the man is struck
by the oppressiveness of his past, how his memories
which were shifting and fluid have grown more solid
until it seems he can see remembered faces
caught up among the dark places in the trees.
The dog says, Let's pick up some girls and just
rip off their clothes. Let's dig holes everywhere.
Above his house, the man notices wisps of cloud
crossing the face of the moon. Lke in a movie,
he says to himself, a movie about a person
leaving on a journey. He looks down the street
to the hills outside of town and finds the cut
where the road heads north. He thinks of driving
on that road and the dusty smell of the car
heater, which hasn't been used since last winter.
The dog says, Let's go down to the diner and sniff
people's legs. Let's stuff ourselves on burgers.
In the man's mind, the road is empty and dark.
Pine trees press down to the edge of the shoulder,
where the eyes of animals, fixed in his headlights,
shine like small cautions against the night.
Sometimes a passing truck makes his whole car shake.
The dog says, Let's go to sleep. Let's lie down
by the fire and put our tails over our noses.
But the man wants to drive all night crossing
one state line after another, and never stop
until the sun creeps into his rearview mirror.
Then he'll pull over and rest awhile before
starting again, and at dusk he'll crest a hill
and there, filling a valley, will be the lights
of a city entirely new to him.
But the dog says, Let's just go back inside.
Let's not do anything tonight. So they
walk back up the sidewalk to the front steps.
How is it possible to want so many things
and still want nothing? The man wants to sleep
and wants to hit his head again and again
against a wall. Why is it all so difficult?
But the dog says, Let's go make a sandwich.
Let's make the tallest sandwich anyone's ever seen.
And that's what they do and that's where the man's
wife finds him, staring into the refrigerator
as if into the place where the answers are kept--
the ones telling why you get up in the morning
and how it is possible to sleep at night,
answers to what comes next and how to like it.