by Nils Peterson
Thesis: There’s the physical you sitting somewhere reading this, breathing the sweet air of the now you are in. Everything else of the you that is you is memory. Well, as we know, memory is a trickster, wily as Coyote in Native American stories. Notebooks help. Here’s a bit from one of mine and some thoughts about it what it all means.
a lost world
morning bright sun good jazz soprano sax
above smoky piano on the record player happy
wife gone off to do happy things the world
either a flowering of daughters or filled with
daughters flowering I eat some less-fat
mozzarella tasteless but in a good tasting way
drink some spearmint tea too much coffee
already and tidy up the house not much but
enough nothing to write about today nothing
that I want to read quite enough to read
enough to sit here resting my hands on the firm
regular grain of an oak table while sun pours
warm golden honey on my back once in awhile
I stir enough to jot something down
Well, that world was lost till I picked up an old notebook and found it, the poem (well, maybe just jottings) and the world.
We lose a world each day when we go to sleep. No, every hour we lose a hundred – a perfect quantum of a world lasting a micro second until a second quantum pushes it aside. No, not a hundred, not even a million. More. We must lose a galaxy each time we set off in sleep.
But each moment sends out a Voyager, a miniature spacecraft carrying artifacts from the Planet Now to a circling earth of the far-off solar system called Then. But memory is a counter-energy, an Enterprise flying from then to now. And then there are notebooks. Some might think of their co-author as a sly Captain Piccard, or, maybe, Coyote.
Another way – it’s nice to have memories tucked away in the cupboards of your inner house to pull out so you give the past a shake now and again like looking at a snow-globe in summer and trying to remember what cold felt like.
Here’s the next note in the notebook I quoted from above: “I put on Jan Garbarek and the Hilliard Ensemble playing “Parce Mihi Domine” and the smell of incense fills the room. This is not a metaphor. It is what I smell and I need to know why.”
Must I believe that I really smelled incense? I think I must, yet I can see Coyote out of the corner of my eye.
Maybe another way of thinking about my notebooks – again, The Poetry of the Ordinary.
The feet of the young girl running over the grass
in the neighborhood park touch the earth lightly, lightly.
Her young mother, heavy with her next child, looks
at her smiling, and I smile as I walk past in the early
evening of a late August. The girl has hardly rump
enough to give her shorts purchase. Her mother’s breasts,
full and round with the coming of milk, overflow
their halter. She sighs as the daughter skips to the fountain,
sips, then scurries back with one, two, three cartwheels
hurling herself down in a heap of ankles, knees, elbows
by her mother’s side. I am some place beneath thinking,
a walker and a watcher, drifting in the late summer
nowhere to go and going
Coda: The notebook is a score of years old. Now, likely, the girl’s grown and gone, along with her not-yet born brother or sister. The mother may be a grandmother. My bad knee makes walking difficult. It is October in this now, and yet, and yet, then is still then and they are still there in my notebook as am I – walking by.
Local Habitations
Theseus famously says in Midsummer Night’s Dream that the imaginations of the Lunatic, the Lover and the Poet are made of the same stuff. There is truth here. One must be a little mad to face the infinite space of a blank page. One must love the world to want to catch a bit of it, to prevent it from disappearing into the great slough of the past, and one must be madly in love with words to spend hours listening to them sing, hoping they’ll join hands in the dance of a line. He goes on to say that as the poet’s
imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
And so a poem is “a local habitation” of an imagination’s moment. So is a notebook.
Yes, well, poems need new readers or old readers rereading to keep from fading away.
Old notebooks need – their now older reader.
Another memory
Books fail. So I look out of the window through a tracery
of twig, leaf, and the last berries of autumn at a gray morning sky
and think of the negotiations between word and eye.
I know I cannot see without words. Earlier, I read
that the sense impressions of one-celled animals
are not edited for something like a brain, “that only
the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is.”
I read somewhere else that the invention of glass,
something to see through, separates us from the world.
So, I live in a house that eye and word have together built
out of planks made of guesses about immensity.
Coda: Twenty years later I found most of this in a notebook, read it with pleasure finding myself comfortable in this new dwelling looking out of the window into another gray sky. And I see that once again I’ve used the word tracery which I first heard in the spring of 1951 in a short story written by Joan Kennedy for a writing class. I remember loving the word, and now I remember her long, narrow intelligent attractive face and going with her to the Spring Gardenia Dance where we talked much, danced a little.
Coyote gives a little, sly bark.