Coarse

The coarsening of our society is a direct response to our well-financed and heavily advertised pursuit of unmerited thrills. Modern Man sees far more murders splayed out across his hundred-inch plasma screen than ever Medieval Man saw across his mudded fields or even battlements. And these are murders full of action, story, horror, surprise--but not of blood spilled across our own shoes and mixed with our own morning air. These are murders meant to thrill; meant to tease; meant to move the story on and pass us through our convincingly boring lives.








And so we callously become the very crowd that shocks us still: the mob who saunters by the body in the street, the trampled child in our way. We, the un-thrilled masses, unfeeling and unfelt, no mercy tender to our brethren Man: for what money is there in that?













July 2015

Memory (XIII)

The silence of expectance, a paltry tale slowly scrolled across unread banners, chides the parched and uninspired soul: no artist ever was, who lived unforced as their own images portrayed.

Resting as I do at the foot of massive walls and heavy furniture, I hopelessly recall the genius of my youth. In laying prostrate upon my bedroom floor, I held a baseball in my hands and suddenly understood Size--the horrifying, helpless enormity of Earth and our own insignificant molecularity. I shuddered then in terror and now regret I have not since.

And yet I do become aware as well of the parallel design of Time--the slow quickness with which our many years unpromised pass. A child is born who wears his father's smile, and a joy-filled face looks out upon a newborn world as it has not for thirty years; a tree is felled five decades hence and warms the brick-lined fireplace all bitter winter long.

And I remember, too, a time before I knew Poetry, a time of baseballs and the gravity of high-branched trees. I recall, too, she for whom I met dear Poetry, and she for whom I tried to chain her down.

All History, this, I suppose: my darkened, aging eyes weakly piercing fog that's long accrued. And: the smell of Sea, his salted wind in California eucalyptus trees, felt in the cool damp sand of my earliest childhood, a playground by the beach with a young mother I then barely knew--and to History I tender the whispered hope that someday the inheritor of my childhood grin will also carry some similar, morning-cooled memory and scent in his different soul.

July 2015